Deal to Buy Trailer Park Expected to End 10-year Saga

By Jorge Casuso

In what likely will be one of the largest housing acquisitions in recent Santa Monica history, the City Council Tuesday night is expected to purchase the half-century-old Mountain View Mobile Home Park for $7 million.

Under the proposed purchase agreement, the City would buy the 4.8-acre park at 1930 Stewart Street from the Ring Trading Corporation and operate it at the cost of $200,000 a year. The operating cost will be paid with approximately $300,000 in annual rental revenues.

The deal for one of the city's two remaining mobile home parks could put a successful end to a 10-year effort by tenants to purchase their units in the 141-space mobile home park through the Tenant Ownership Rights Charter Amendment (TORCA), a now defunct City sponsored program. The rent-controlled units are likely the most affordable on the Westside, ranging from $215 to $311 a month.

"This is a fantastic victory for the residents, for affordable housing and for the community at large," said Councilman Michael Feinstein. "We kept our word by helping preserve that mobile home park community for the people who live there. The plan is to keep it a mobile home park.

"That affordability is not found anywhere," Feinstein said. "That segment of the market is hard, if not impossible, to find."

But Paul DiSantis, a real estate attorney who crafted TORCA, questions whether the City shouldn't opt to tear down the ramshackle park tucked between the Freeway and the City's Maintenance Yards, where only 87 of the original 141 trailer pads are occupied.

During the 10-year saga, DiSantis said, the character of the park changed from a community predominantly made up of single retirees, to one made up of families, many of them with children. There also has been little money pumped into upgrading the sagging infrastructure and narrow roads. There is a dearth of parking and many tenants must shower in the laundry room because their coaches don't have bathing facilities, DiSantis said.

As an alternative to TORCA, DiSantis has proposed a plan to build a mixed-income community that includes condominiums, as well as new affordable units for the current tenants.

"They (City officials) will have to make some big decisions," said DiSantis, who has represented the tenants in their efforts to buy their units. "Here's an opportunity for SMRR (Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights) to fulfill its promise" of more affordable housing. "It'll be interesting."

DiSantis said that tenants backed his proposal at a residents association meeting earlier this year, but he acknowledges that there is opposition to the plan from those who have long fought to keep the mobile home park standing.

"It's a shame it took so long," said Phyllis Goff, the founder and current president of the residents association. "We have a decimated park. But we've fought for ten years to preserve this park. We're going to keep this a mobile home park by hook or crook."

Jeff Mathieu, the City's director of resource management, said staff is recommending that Mountain View be preserved as a mobile home park.

"We are not buying the park for the purpose of tearing it down and then building replacement housing," said Mathieu, who brokered the deal. "We want to preserve the park and be able to in-fill where possible the mobile homes that can go on the pads that are vacant and make it a strong, vibrant mobile home community.

"It's preservation, it's not replacement," Mathieu said. "It's not to take it off for something else. There have been a few ideas that brokers and speculators and others have brought forward, but that is not in our recommendation."

Efforts by the tenants to purchase their units began in 1990, when they organized a residents association. Two years later, they successfully lobbied the City for $4 million to finance the proposed acquisition. In July 1996 the residents group filed an application under TORCA to convert the property to tenant ownership.

But one year later, the plan hit a legal snag when the park's owners filed a lawsuit against the City for damages allegedly caused by an adjacent City-owned abandoned landfill. In early 1998, some of the Mountain View residents filed related lawsuits against Ring and the City for damages allegedly resulting from the abandoned landfill, according to a City staff report.

A court dismissed the residents' lawsuits against the City in December 1998, and the Ring lawsuit would be resolved by the proposed Purchase Agreement and a related Settlement Agreement. The residents' lawsuits against Ring are still pending.

The City will continue to operate a landfill gas control system to collect and treat subsurface gases generated from the former landfill, which underlies Stewart Street Park, the City Maintenance yard, as well as a small portion of Mountain View, according to the staff report.

Environmental studies show that the City's landfill gas control system has been successful in both removing landfill gas and mitigating subsurface landfill gas migration, the report concluded.

The City Council is expected to vote to acquire the property Tuesday night, Nov. 14, during its meeting at 7 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall, 1685 Main Street.