Preview:
Four months ago, Hamilton Dos Santos liquidated his life savings, including his 401(k), to purchase a home — a four-bedroom, two-bathroom trailer in Sweetwater’s Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park, for which he paid $160,000. He found a notice in his mailbox last Tuesday. His home, in effect, was no longer his.
Last week, the park’s owner, CREI Holdings, notified Dos Santos, along with the other 900-plus mobile homeowners, that the park will permanently close on May 19. Residents have until then to vacate the premises, with or without their houses.
According to The Urban Group, a development management company that’s overseeing the property’s...
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The Urban Group did confirm that tenants of the park will have priority access to apartments in Li’l Abner III, the adjacent building that’s currently under construction, as well as any future affordable housing built on the park, “including the first month free,” the company added. Li’l Abner’s closure comes as mobile home parks throughout Miami-Dade are being shuttered. They generally occupy large pieces of land and are relatively cheap to buy out, making them sought-after targets for developers looking to build denser, multi-family units or commercial projects.
This is the same article as above (there were no less than 9 similar articles on this same topic) but what’s interesting in this one is that it’s revealed that the Sweetwater park is being torn down to build apartments. I’ve been writing forever that LOW LOT RENTS = REDEVELOPMENT and that’s exactly what’s happening here. What would the lot rent have needed to be to keep the park from being torn down? I’m not sure. But America is going to have to realize that mobile home park land can be used for many other things and that the insanely low lot rents (around $300 per month on average versus $2,000 per month for apartments) means that every park in the U.S. is a potential target for a different use.