Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Some previous posts on Paradise Park may be found in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5]
 

[B]y misfortune, one says that God is always for the big battalions. – Voltaire.

 

We lost our right to buy

 

On television, justice is swift; in life, anything but, as revealed by the ongoing mini-saga of Paradise Park.  Nearly three years after it began, the mobile home owner-residents’ have been under an ongoing economic siege by the park’s land owner and abutter. 

 

Defend your homes until the court rules!

 

Although initially denying any plans to convert the property, the owner’s subsequent course of action leads to no other conclusion than that, contrary to his various public statements, he was dissembling, and had all along a strategy to evict them and turn the property into a marina.

 

Conversion potential, you think?  Marina in front, mobile homes

 

While being so besieged, the residents have fought their way up through the court system and now gained a hearing in yet another forum: the New Jersey Court of Appeals. 

 

 

All the while, however, the owner is systematically changing the facts on the ground, so that by the time they win – if they win – there may be few residents left to exercise their hard-won legal rights.  As the residents’ association president, Lori Dibble, wrote me a few weeks back:

 

We had one person commit suicide the morning after a town meeting on the proposed zoning. It was so sad and broke my heart that she was so worried and depressed about the loss of her home. This wasn’t the only reason she took her life. However, she had just prepared testimony to the planning board about how much her home and garden had meant to her and how therapeutic the community and having her home was for her depression. The landlord forced Anne’s brothers and sisters to sell her home to him, she had an outstanding chattel loan of $12,000 and the family could not afford to pay the rent and the loan, plus the value of the home had disappeared.

 

Inability to accumulate residual value is one of the most deceptively destructive aspects of the disjunction of land (owned by a park owner, and subject to a rent) and property (a metal can or box, and largely exoskeletal).

 

The holder of the note on the home settled for a couple of thousand dollars to clear the title of the home. Now it is rented to a friend of the resident manager who cut down Anne’s garden.

 

How we got here (abridged version)

[If you're fully conversant with Paradise Park, skip to The Latest Twists below.]

 

In May, 2006, intrigued by a story in USA Today, I first posted about Paradise Park in Home sweet what?  A waterfront mobile home community in Highlands, New Jersey, Paradise Park is well named, wonderfully situated near Sandy Hook in northern New Jersey near New York City.  In late 2005, James Bollerman of Navesink Capital Partners, LLC, bought the park’s land and the adjacent marina. 

 

Virtually immediately, he started actions that could serve no plausible purpose unless he wanted to convert to another use.

 

Loretta Dibble stands outside her mobile home in Highlands, N.J. She says residents want to challenge the park’s sale to a developer and buy and run the park themselves.

 

As I wrote then:

 

Uprooted? Don’t they own their homes?

 

It is a scene that’s being played out across the country. Like those in Paradise Park, many mobile home residents own their trailers but rent the land beneath them, leaving them vulnerable to developers who are increasingly converting parks into condominiums and malls.

 

The residents were and are vulnerable because the faint whiff of abutter condescension hangs over the typical mobile home park:

 

[Mobile homes] are the ‘dark matter’ of American affordable housing’s universe, a huge ecomass whose presence is barely noticed, and then often with disdain.

 

No mobile homes in my litter box, please

 

Unfortunately, because mobile homes are in a legal and economic netherworld – not considered real estate, and denied the most basic real estate protections! – they are an economically dysfunctional form of tenure, offering the illusion of security but not the economics.

 

The first level is the mobile home park operators

 

In urban property, economics, law, and politics often intersect.  If you bought your property based on a current zoning, and a successor land purchaser seeks a rezoning, you can be expected vociferously to object.

 

Jim Bollerman, who bought the park and marina, says he has no plans for the park.

 

He doesn’t need to.  Zoning is destiny.

 

“Our focus at this point is on the marina,” Bollerman says. “Any consideration with regard to the mobile home park will take place after the improvements to the marina.”

 

The people of Paradise Park worry the stage is being set for their ouster.  [So would I! — Ed.]

 

Barely a month later, more surfaced.  As I posted in Mobile loopholes, the park’s site was rezoned as incompatible with Highlands‘ newly adopted Master Plan:

 

Did the homeowners have the chance to speak up? They are on record as opposing the rezoning when it was first proposed six months ago. Additionally, the master plan to which the mayor alluded may not have highlighted this change until the very end:

 

It was only in September, 2004, just two months before the adoption of the plan, that there is any evidence in any file about the proposed MXD [mixed use — Ed.] zone which would not permit mobile homes on the park property. “Where did this come from, anyway?” asked [residents' attorney Eaton]. “It was never mentioned in 2002, in the December, 2003 Master Plan draft, the April, 2004 interim report, or in the June, 2004 public hearing.”

 

It’s difficult not to conclude that the residents were being quietly sold out in favor of future higher-value development, like high-end condos.

 

Tiptoeing out with a zoning change

 

Whatever its legalities, estoppel resulting from acquiescence inferred from silence seems to me flimsy public policy justification, for it is so hard to prove knowing indifference.

 

“You never objected until you saw the train coming!”

 

The mixed use (MXD) zone first surfaces in the borough records with the testimony of Mr. Bollerman, then the contract purchaser of the park, who asked for rezoning of the property for townhouse and condominium use.  As the owner of the Sandy Hook Marina, Mr. Bollerman was identified by the borough’s licensed professional planner, Paul Ricci, as a stakeholder worthy of a personal invitation to participate in the planning process. Paradise Park residents were never identified as stakeholders.

 

I came on the issue only a month ago, so I have no back story whatsoever, but with Ms. Dibble’s help, I tracked down the Master Plan, including its Land Use Element (link in .pdf), dated October 2004. It states the following (pages 12-13):

 

The existing Mobile Home (MH) district permits mobile homes as the only permitted use within the MH district. This Plan acknowledges the trend for mobile home parks to evolve into uses that are more consistent with surrounding land use patterns.

 

Just how does a property evolve, anyhow?

 

Not like a human, that’s for sure

 

Beware the euphemism, for it disguises its purpose.  For ‘evolution,’ read ‘extinction’:

 

To permit the evolution of mobile home parks in the Borough, this Plan recommends expanding the types of permitted uses in the MH district to include townhouses and single-family residential homes.

 

Evolution … sounds friendly and progressive, doesn’t it?  Far less intimidating than the harsh nasty ‘eviction’.

 

Pity about the mobile home residents, wasn’t it?

 

Another clue came to light a bit later – because of a loophole in the law, successful rezoning does an end-run around a powerful resident protection: the New Jersey Mobile Home Park: Private Residential Leasehold Communities Law (the “MHP Law”), NJSA 46:8C-2 through 46:8C-21. 

 

Aside from protecting residents from deceptive, arbitrary, or exploitive practices (including price gouging), it gives them relocation benefits upon a change of use, and a right-to-match sales to condo converters.  But, as I posted back then:

 

A variance from existing zoning requires a finding of relocation; a rezoning does not. Said metaphorically, drilling a hole through a fence invokes compensation, whereas dissolving the fence does not.

 

That, dear readers, is a loophole.

 

My posts brought notice from Ms. Dibble, who has since continued to supply me with the residents’ side of the story (Mr. Bollerman has been completely close-mouthed).

 

Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies

 

In a March, 2007 update, I speculated on a possible resident buyout, in Ending happy?

 

None of the foregoing justifies simply rolling over those residents.

 

We’ll be darned if you’ll steamroller us!

 

Indeed, the dissenting minority in Kelo v. New London very specifically concerned itself with protecting the minority’s rights against the majority, fearing that the majority would see a town as a purely economic proposition and follow the money, not the appropriate long-term policy.

 

Lest you think this an isolated case, consider this:

 

Currently there are six MH communities in New Jersey that are in various stages of the closure process. One in Pleasantville, one in Linden, two in Highlands, one in Eatontown, and one in North Bergen. Many more are under threat as zoning changes and municipal master plans are setting the stage for development in at least a dozen municipalities.

 

The Latest Twists

 

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Ms. Dibble that began:

 

I am not sure if you are up to speed with what happened last summer (2007). Bollerman told the four homeowners closest to the water on the Marina side that “for their own safety” they were being move to a different part of the park – in the back with no water view.  The four people being asked to move were active members of the Homeowners Association, three of which are board members and officers.

 

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

 

 

We refused.  Mr. Bollerman then filed eviction notices saying that we refused to honor the terms of our leases that say that you can be moved within the park for certain reasons. We said and believe that this was retaliation and covered under NJ anti-eviction act.

 

The landlord/tenant judge honored our request to kick the case up to the higher court but it is stayed until the outcome of the appeals case.

 

 

The photo with the stickers on the window is of the stop work order that the town gave us to prevent Bollerman from disconnecting utilities, etc. in preparation for a move that they had no permits for.

 

Why the pressure?  What are the residents suing for?

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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