Martin County Mobile Homes Given Reprieve

Mobile home parks cannot be bulldozed into condominiums in Martin County, at least for now, the county announced Tuesday.

Commissioners unanimously approved a temporary moratorium barring owners of any mobile home parks from applying to change the use of their land or re-zoning it in order to redevelop it.

Mobile home parks provide affordable housing for low-income and retired residents, ones who couldn’t afford Florida mortgages at market rates.

But their affordable housing has come under threat.

Commissioners instituted the moratorium because owners of several mobile home parks have expressed interest in closing and turning them into permanent homes and condos.

“We need low income housing,” said Susan Tower, a resident of the Bloomfield Meadows park in Hobe Sound.

Bloomfield Meadows park owner Art Palma is evicting residents such as Tower because he wants to redevelop the park into condos.

Tower said the moratorium is needed because lower-income residents like her deserve a place to live in the county, part of an increasingly pricey South Florida real estate market.

“People who live in parks are not white trash or poor people,” she said. “I work every day, so I don’t consider myself a poor person.”

Some mobile home parks in the county’s seven community redevelopment areas will not have to follow the moratorium.

Mobile home parks in Rio and Port Salerno have zoning classifications that allow them to redevelop themselves into residential and commercial real estate projects, County Planner David Quigley said.

Redevelopment areas in the county’s old downtown areas are designed to use tax revenue to revitalize the areas.

Commissioner Doug Smith supported the moratorium but said it may not do much to help low-income residents because it does not stop a park owner from evicting residents and closing a park, only to redevelop it.

“This won’t stop an owner from dissolving a park,” Smith said.

Quigley agreed that Palma could continue to evict residents even with a temporary ban but he could not do anything with the park during the moratorium except put mobile homes in it.

The moratorium bars any new applications for at least 15 months, Quigley said, and commissioners will use that time to create ordinances to preserve mobile home parks or create affordable housing in the Florida housing market.

Terry McCarthy, Palma’s attorney, said the developer would go ahead with his plans to evict residents and close the park.

Palma may reopen the park with newer mobile homes or he may wait out the moratorium so he could pursue his original plans to develop condos, he said.

Commissioners have proposed solutions that would require owners who redevelop mobile home parks to build more mobile homes elsewhere.

“In the end hopefully we’ll have some solutions for housing,” said Commissioner Lee Weberman.

Resident Debbie Cooper, reading a letter on behalf of Indiantown mobile home park resident Art Madsen, said elderly residents living in mobile homes deserve to be protected as an “endangered species” just like rare animals.

“Suddenly they have become expendable and the land is getting sold out from under them,” Cooper read from the letter. “They do not have as much protection as a tree frog or a turtle.”

Hopefully, with the cost of Florida mortgage payments what they are, the rights of the fixed-income and lower-income residents will be preserved.

SOURCE: Palm Beach Post