Tearing down a home, a history

I’d jump the bridge, but too many friends live underneath it. I’m sure many of you who have gone through foreclosure, or lost your home in any other way that wasn’t of your making, may be feeling the same way.  Maybe many of your neighbors have lost their homes to whoever their lender was. The difference is there is new legislature almost every other day to protect people in their homes, whether they be renters or owners, unless you live in a mobile/manufactured home.

As I wrote in my last post in June (I really have been away too long), the City Council of Capitola had come to an agreement with the owner, Ron Reed, of the Surf and Sand Mobile Home Park in order to get rid of a couple of lawsuits Mr. Reed had filed against the City. You can see the post “Real Estate And Politics” here.

Since that took effect I have one neighbor who is all but bedridden with depression and worry. I have four neighbors on my street or the cross-street who have just given up their homes.  And a week from yesterday, my own mobile home will go to auction for “storage fees”.  In 9 months of paying rent here, the park owner has never given me the right of tenancy, and as soon as the City Council did their thing with the new ordinance, he raised my rent by triple-plus what is was originally. What’s funny is I would pay his raised rent, but then he still would not give me tenancy, so what good would it do?

It’s sad enough when it’s a matter of the economy. Yes there are so many people that say “well they shouldn’t have bought a home they couldn’t afford” when it comes to foreclosure. Has anyone else noticed that it’s people with super credit that are also losing their homes  now? No matter how good they were about paying bills in the past, that now without a job, they can’t be A+ anymore?

And for Capitola, it’s even more sad when a town of only 10,000 people have hired a “goon squad” for a City Council. What’s really sad is some of us did it to ourselves. We voted for these people. Why? Because they all said they were interested in fighting for the same causes we were. Now, not even a year later, they have hidden their tails between their legs, and turned on us.

Across the nation lawyers are getting rich and mobile/manufactured home park owners are getting richer. In our own park the landowner supposedly made $420,000. last year even with rents under rent control, and never put a dime back into the park.  People have had to tear down and rebuild here because the infrastructure won’t take the 50 amps of a new manufactured home, it can only sustain 30 amps because the infrastructure has never been kept up to date.  So people have to amp down their homes in order to live here.

I cry as I write this morning, not just for myself, but for all the people everywhere who are losing their homes to greed. Most of these park owners don’t live in their parks like the old “mom and pop” owners did. Many are bought up by corporations strictly to see how much more money they can make. They are accomplishing it by bringing cities to their knees in lawsuits and paperwork.

Most people bought their homes here because they planned to retire here. They wanted something they were sure they could afford. Now the Capitola City Council is running from different lawsuits and is planning on repealing rent control completely.

You ever wonder how the politicians ever got so bad that we have in Washington? They got trained in hometowns across America.

The hole that's left