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AMAZON’S plans to bulldoze a tiny home village have been thwarted by determined residents in Washington.
The fearless locals banded together to stop becoming homeless – and save their beloved mobile home park from being turned into a giant warehouse.
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Residents living in the park south of Seattle learnt last year that they were facing eviction as the owner wanted to sell the land.
Gadiel Galvez told news agency, the Associated Press, that he and other residents were worried their largely Latino community would be bulldozed to make way for yet another Amazon warehouse.
But rather than backing down, they formed a co-operative and bought their park for $5.25million in Lakewood, Washington.
Galvez, 22, said that since buying the tiny home village last year residents had worked hard to make improvements.
The co-op board member added: “Everybody thought, ‘you know what? … I’m going to make this place the best that I can.
“Some people painted their homes, some people remodeled their interiors and exteriors, and some are working on their roofs.”
ROC
Bob’s and Jamestown is a new Resident-Owned Community (ROC).
In September 2022, homeowners bought the 62-home “manufactured home community” – or mobile home park – located about 10 miles south of Tacoma.
It puts an end to the threat of eviction at a time when private equity firms are increasingly investing in mobile home communities.
The Lincoln Institute has estimated that about one-fifth of manufactured housing communities, or 800,000 mobile park home sites, have already been bought by investors in the past decade.
But residents are later faced with eviction due to unaffordable, rising rents.
“To ward off the trend, mobile park communities across the county have formed cooperatives in order to purchase the properties themselves,” reported Route Fifty.
More than 20million Americans live in mobile home sites, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade association.
The cooperative model has been hailed as a way to protect affordable housing options for people on low incomes and give them a greater voice in managing their own parks.
Paul Bradley, president of ROC USA, a nonprofit that helps manufactured housing communities buy properties, said that hundreds of mobile park sites have been bought by residents.
STOPPING EVICTIONS
“They have set up a business together, and it’s run on a democratic basis,” Bradley said.
Plus, none of the more than 300 in its network have defaulted or closed. Just one has decided to sell back to the county housing authority it originally purchased from.
The push to promote resident ownership comes as mobile home parks have become a favorite target of investment banks, hedge funds and other deep-pocketed investors.
“Homelessness is really what residents are facing” if investors aggressively raise rents, warned Victoria O’Banion, ROC northwest’s marketing and acquisitions specialist.
For example, at Rimrock Court in the central Oregon town of Madras, rent increased from $350 to $495 over five years.
When the owner warned residents he planned to sell, they feared further increases — or worse, that it would be torn down to make way for apartments. So they decided to buy it.
This ROC and others “have a 100 percent track record of success, which tells you that it’s working for the residents,” said George McCarthy, president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, think-tank.
He added: “Resident ownership is an absolute bulwark against the intrusion of institutional capital in the market.”
“SLOW DEATH BY WAREHOUSES”
The fight back against mammoth firms such as Amazon comes after a joint investigation by Consumer Reports and the Guardian found that the rapid expansion of warehousing in communities across the US has disproportionately affected poorer people and people of color.
The paper reported last December that, in southern California for example, “warehouses are taking over like a slow death.”
In one area alone, in Bloomington, California, about 100 homes were razed to make way for a 213-acre industrial complex with three vast warehouses.
An upset local resident, Ana Carlos, told the paper: “That’s like a slow death, huh? Just seeing one block go down at a time, until everything I see here would be just a wall of warehouses.”
