By Omar Ocampo
The 900 families living at the Li’l Abner mobile home park in Sweetwater, Florida, were taken aback on Tuesday November 12 when The Urban Group, a real estate consulting firm, issued a surprise mass eviction notice. After the initial shock passed, residents got organized and started daily protests.
The letter warned that residents of the park, located twenty minutes outside of Miami, had just six months to leave and search for a new home.
The park’s impending permanent closure demonstrates once again how the housing market fails to provide stability or reasonably priced shelter to the working-class.
“[Li’l Abner] is a community of elderly people,” long-time resident Vivian told Inequality.org in Spanish at Monday’s protest. “And I am receiving phone calls to my personal number from [residents] who are having panic attacks, asking me, ‘what are we going to do?’”
The strategic location of the park has attracted the attention of developers looking to cash in on Miami-Dade’s hot real estate market. For developers and institutional investors, the lack of affordability is not a crisis, but rather a goldmine — an opportunity to receive generous tax credits or earn windfall profits, even if that means 900 vulnerable families who have spent decades living at the mobile home park will be kicked to the curb.
The Urban Group and the park’s owner, CREI Holdings, have attempted to soften the blow by claiming that they will build new affordable and workforce units on the soon-to-be vacated property.
Urban Group President Matt Rosenbaum said in statement to Inequality.org that residents will “have the right of first refusal and the opportunity to secure an apartment in Li’l Abner III, currently under construction, as well as in the future any affordable housing developed for the site including the first month free.”
The park’s management is offering relocation assistance and has put together a financial incentive package of $14,000 to homeowners who vacate the park within the next couple of months. But given the shortage of available affordable housing units in Miami-Dade, residents of Li’l Abner are right in saying that this sum of money is not enough.
Rental prices in Miami-Dade county have increased by a staggering 58 percent over the past five years and, according to Rent.com, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is now $3,418 per month. This is simply out of reach for the residents at Li’l Abner and other working-class tenants in South Florida.
The money offered by management would barely cover four months of rent, and it represents only a fraction of the market value of the mobile homes that residents worked so hard to build and maintain.
“I purchased [my mobile home] here a month and a half ago,” an unidentified resident said to Channel 7 News Miami. “It cost me $145,000. Why didn’t they tell me right then and there [to not buy]?”
Mobile homes are one of the most reliable and important sources of affordable housing. It is illogical for Urban and CREI to say they are abruptly tearing down the park in the name of affordability, and unconscionable to wipe away the investments hundreds have made in this wealth-holding asset.
Members of the Li’l Abner mobile home park community are working to determine their next moves. Some want more time and more money while others are open to seeking legal action to prevent the eviction.
Other potential solutions include putting political pressure on Mayor Jose Díaz and Sweetwater’s City Council to side with their constituents, rather than developers, by issuing an eviction moratorium and providing residents with pro bono legal representation. Residents could organize a rent strike and force the owners to explore a negotiated alternative solution. Or the residents could come together to buy the property and convert the park into a mobile home cooperative.
Alberto, an 80-year-old resident of the Li’l Abner that has spent the last twenty years in the park, joined the protest Monday to urge Urban and CREI to reconsider their eviction plans.
“This mobile home is mine, but now I must leave it,” he said, saddened by the uncertainty that awaits him. “Why don’t they just sell us the land?”
Omar Ocampo is a researcher at the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Previously Published on inequality.org with Creative Commons License
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