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http://www.npr.org/2016/12/26/50259...owners-can-spoil-an-affordable-american-dream
"
This story is the first in a two-part report on conditions at mobile home parks in the U.S. Today's piece focuses on what happens when corporate park owners fail to take care of their communities. The second story looks at what happens when residents are able to take ownership over their community. Read part two here.
Since she was a teenager, Dawn Tachell has yearned for her own tiny piece of America. She's had a tough life: She ran away from home when she was 16; she squatted for a while in a boxcar; she joined the Navy and did repair work on submarines. And finally, she thought she had made it when she bought a small home in the community of Syringa, Idaho, with spectacular views of the wheat fields and mountains.
"My dream was to own my own home," says Tachell, who runs a greenhouse for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wind chimes hanging from her front porch serenade us as she shows off her rose bushes and lilac and pear trees.
Syringa is barely a five- to 10-minute drive from the college town of Moscow, Idaho, with its supermarkets, shopping malls, football stadium and hospital. Still, deer, moose and flocks of Canada geese parade past Tachell's kitchen windows.
When she bought the home 13 years ago, it cost $11,000.
One of her neighbors, Robert Bonsall, also thought he was living his dream after he purchased a house in Syringa about 30 years ago.
"I could afford to buy it, even though I was a graduate student," he says.
From the outside, Bonsall's home looks much like the others in the neighborhood. But inside, he has a meditation room, complete with a miniature Zen rock garden and tea ceremony set. Since he paid off his mortgage decades ago, Bonsall, now a research administrator at Washington State University, says he has invested money and bought a boat on a lake.
Tachell and Bonsall say living in Syringa has been a blessing — but over the years, it has also become a curse. Since the 1980s, this community of roughly 100 houses has been plagued repeatedly by drinking water problems — including periods with contaminated water or no water at all. Rivers of raw sewage have occasionally gushed out of the ground and formed stinky ponds around homes. One resident has filled a cardboard box with videocassettes that he shot to document some of the incidents. Conditions in the neighborhood have become so bad that some people have abandoned their houses and moved out.
Absentee "lord of the manor"
Residents say there's one main reason why they have had problems for so many years: Syringa is a mobile home park.
The federal government estimates there are more than 8 million "manufactured houses" (which is what the government has called mobile homes built since 1976). Housing specialists say they play an important role in "boosting affordable home ownership opportunities," according to a Ford Foundation report.
But the decades-old saga of Syringa Mobile Home Park and other evidence suggest that the legal and financial ways in which manufactured housing communities are set up often turn the residents into victims.
Carolyn Carter, an attorney and deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center based in Boston, says the heart of the problem with manufactured home communities "is that the residents don't own or control the land beneath their homes."
When you buy a home in a manufactured housing community, you own only the home's structure — the walls, roof and floor. But a private company or investor owns all the land.
Homeowners pay rent to hook up the house there. Typically, the community owner, not the local government, is also responsible for its roads and utilities. The less money the community owner spends maintaining them, the more profit their business can make.
The owner is the "lord of the manor," Carter says, "and basically doesn't have to pay much attention to the folks who are living there."
Of course, there can be water and sewage problems in traditional neighborhoods, too. "But you elect the public officials who oversee them, and so you can hold those officials accountable," Carter says.
The chronic problems at Syringa echo what has been happening at manufactured housing communities across the country.
The director of Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency, Craig Butler, told NPR that the agency is currently fighting the owners of more than 20 manufactured housing parks over drinking water problems in that state alone.
Those owners "are very happy to be able, on a monthly basis, to receive rent checks from all of the folks that live in a manufactured home park, but not continue to think that they have a long-term [obligation] to maintain those assets," Butler says.
The Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry group that represents owners of manufactured housing parks, declined to give NPR an interview, but sent a written statement:
"The overwhelming majority of manufactured housing communities across the country are well maintained and continue to offer many benefits to residents, including affordable home ownership," it states.
"Without water for 90 days"
People who grew up in Syringa talk about the "good old days."
"Thirty years ago, it was a nice place to be," says Latah County Commissioner Dave McGraw, sitting in his office in the county courthouse in Moscow, Idaho. "We'd go out for parties and family gatherings, and we used to go swimming at their indoor swimming pool out there. People wouldn't be ashamed to live out there."
In 1984, attorney Magar Magar bought the park, and McGraw and longtime Syringa residents say the community began falling apart. The streets started crumbling, and now there are potholes everywhere. The swimming pool filled with scum and was shut down. Sewage would gush occasionally from pipes or out of the ground. And one morning, just before Christmas 2013, residents went to their toilets and taps and discovered they had no water.
"We were without water for 90 days," Tachell says. Local officials brought unheated outhouses for residents to use. The temperature dropped one day to minus 10 degrees.
Residents like James Ware, who has filmed some of the sewage leaks, say they had been warning government officials for years that there were chronic problems in Syringa. Ware says he pleaded with them to "get after this." But little changed.
"I cannot tell you how mad I've been at these people," he says."
More at Link
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/26/50259...owners-can-spoil-an-affordable-american-dream
"
This story is the first in a two-part report on conditions at mobile home parks in the U.S. Today's piece focuses on what happens when corporate park owners fail to take care of their communities. The second story looks at what happens when residents are able to take ownership over their community. Read part two here.
Since she was a teenager, Dawn Tachell has yearned for her own tiny piece of America. She's had a tough life: She ran away from home when she was 16; she squatted for a while in a boxcar; she joined the Navy and did repair work on submarines. And finally, she thought she had made it when she bought a small home in the community of Syringa, Idaho, with spectacular views of the wheat fields and mountains.
"My dream was to own my own home," says Tachell, who runs a greenhouse for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wind chimes hanging from her front porch serenade us as she shows off her rose bushes and lilac and pear trees.
Syringa is barely a five- to 10-minute drive from the college town of Moscow, Idaho, with its supermarkets, shopping malls, football stadium and hospital. Still, deer, moose and flocks of Canada geese parade past Tachell's kitchen windows.
When she bought the home 13 years ago, it cost $11,000.
One of her neighbors, Robert Bonsall, also thought he was living his dream after he purchased a house in Syringa about 30 years ago.
"I could afford to buy it, even though I was a graduate student," he says.
From the outside, Bonsall's home looks much like the others in the neighborhood. But inside, he has a meditation room, complete with a miniature Zen rock garden and tea ceremony set. Since he paid off his mortgage decades ago, Bonsall, now a research administrator at Washington State University, says he has invested money and bought a boat on a lake.
Tachell and Bonsall say living in Syringa has been a blessing — but over the years, it has also become a curse. Since the 1980s, this community of roughly 100 houses has been plagued repeatedly by drinking water problems — including periods with contaminated water or no water at all. Rivers of raw sewage have occasionally gushed out of the ground and formed stinky ponds around homes. One resident has filled a cardboard box with videocassettes that he shot to document some of the incidents. Conditions in the neighborhood have become so bad that some people have abandoned their houses and moved out.
Absentee "lord of the manor"
Residents say there's one main reason why they have had problems for so many years: Syringa is a mobile home park.
The federal government estimates there are more than 8 million "manufactured houses" (which is what the government has called mobile homes built since 1976). Housing specialists say they play an important role in "boosting affordable home ownership opportunities," according to a Ford Foundation report.
But the decades-old saga of Syringa Mobile Home Park and other evidence suggest that the legal and financial ways in which manufactured housing communities are set up often turn the residents into victims.
Carolyn Carter, an attorney and deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center based in Boston, says the heart of the problem with manufactured home communities "is that the residents don't own or control the land beneath their homes."
When you buy a home in a manufactured housing community, you own only the home's structure — the walls, roof and floor. But a private company or investor owns all the land.
Homeowners pay rent to hook up the house there. Typically, the community owner, not the local government, is also responsible for its roads and utilities. The less money the community owner spends maintaining them, the more profit their business can make.
The owner is the "lord of the manor," Carter says, "and basically doesn't have to pay much attention to the folks who are living there."
Of course, there can be water and sewage problems in traditional neighborhoods, too. "But you elect the public officials who oversee them, and so you can hold those officials accountable," Carter says.
The chronic problems at Syringa echo what has been happening at manufactured housing communities across the country.
The director of Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency, Craig Butler, told NPR that the agency is currently fighting the owners of more than 20 manufactured housing parks over drinking water problems in that state alone.
Those owners "are very happy to be able, on a monthly basis, to receive rent checks from all of the folks that live in a manufactured home park, but not continue to think that they have a long-term [obligation] to maintain those assets," Butler says.
The Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry group that represents owners of manufactured housing parks, declined to give NPR an interview, but sent a written statement:
"The overwhelming majority of manufactured housing communities across the country are well maintained and continue to offer many benefits to residents, including affordable home ownership," it states.
"Without water for 90 days"
People who grew up in Syringa talk about the "good old days."
"Thirty years ago, it was a nice place to be," says Latah County Commissioner Dave McGraw, sitting in his office in the county courthouse in Moscow, Idaho. "We'd go out for parties and family gatherings, and we used to go swimming at their indoor swimming pool out there. People wouldn't be ashamed to live out there."
In 1984, attorney Magar Magar bought the park, and McGraw and longtime Syringa residents say the community began falling apart. The streets started crumbling, and now there are potholes everywhere. The swimming pool filled with scum and was shut down. Sewage would gush occasionally from pipes or out of the ground. And one morning, just before Christmas 2013, residents went to their toilets and taps and discovered they had no water.
"We were without water for 90 days," Tachell says. Local officials brought unheated outhouses for residents to use. The temperature dropped one day to minus 10 degrees.
Residents like James Ware, who has filmed some of the sewage leaks, say they had been warning government officials for years that there were chronic problems in Syringa. Ware says he pleaded with them to "get after this." But little changed.
"I cannot tell you how mad I've been at these people," he says."
More at Link
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