Joel Carraseo spent many years turning his family’s trailer into a home.
He built solid stairs up to the front door, laid a stone patio, built an awning to cover it, and then added a little picket fence to make sure the family dog, Max, doesn’t run into the street.
“I tried to make it feel like home,” the construction worker said, smiling at the pink rosebush he planted in front of the fence.
Now, he’s not sure what will happen to any of it.
Earlier this month, Carraseo and his neighbors at Carlton Mobile Home Park received potentially devastating news: the park is being sold.
“Everybody got surprised by it,” Carraseo told Charlottesville Tomorrow last week. “Nobody was ready for that.”
A letter from the owners, dated June 7, let Carlton Mobile Home Park residents know that the owners had received a $7 million offer for the property, and that they are poised to accept it.
It’s unclear who made the offer — that information is not yet public. Charlottesville Tomorrow contacted a William Bolton, who is listed on the letter as a representative for the current owners — Sunshine Court LLC and Hogwaller Holdings LLC, both based in Virginia, and ABB3 Holdings, based in Maryland. A reporter asked who the current owners are, who the prospective buyer is, and what their plans for the park may be.
Bolton said, “as per the referenced letter, we received an offer.” When pressed, he added, “I’m sorry that I am not at liberty to disclose the party which made the offer. I am not their spokesperson so I can’t speak to their plans.”
Bolton did not acknowledge a reporter’s request to speak with the current owners.
So it’s unclear what will happen to the park, or to the homes on it. But, if this is anything like other mobile home park sales in the last decade, it could turn park residents’ lives upside-down.
When a mobile home park is sold, residents are usually displaced one way or another, say attorneys familiar with Virginia’s Mobile Home Lot Rental Act who spoke with Charlottesville Tomorrow. Either the new owner raises the lot rent beyond what the current resident can afford, or decides to use the land for something else.
“I have more pressure now, because we don’t know what the new owner is going to do. We don’t know where we are. We’re just waiting,” said Carraseo.
The Carlton Mobile Home Park, located on Carlton Avenue, has been around since at least the mid-1970s, according to city records. The same family has owned it for many years, according to the city’s GIS system. Currently three different companies own it jointly, and park residents told Charlottesville Tomorrow that’s because there are three siblings in the family.
The six-acre property is located in Charlottesville’s Belmont neighborhood, right on the Charlottesville side of the Albemarle County line. Currently, more than 60 families call it home.
It is one of just two mobile home parks remaining in the city. The other is Mountain View Mobile Home Park on 6th Street SE. Built in 1965, Mountain View has 44 lots to Carlton’s 66.
Its sale is part of a national trend: Mobile home parks are disappearing across the country — fast. Statistics on this are difficult to find, but there are reports around the country of parks being sold, demolished and redeveloped. The Associated Press reported on the trend last year, as did Forbes Magazine and Time Magazine. As housing prices and land values rise dramatically, developers are buying up the parks, forcing residents out, tearing down the trailers, and building more traditional housing in their place.
Just last month, residents of a park in Caroline County, Virginia, were served eviction notices from an owner who took over in 2021, according to a report by WTVR News in Richmond.
As the parks disappear, so does the low-cost housing they provide. Mobile and manufactured homes are the largest source of non-subsidized affordable housing in the United States, according to the U.S. Office of Housing and Urban Development.
Though there is no official count, Charlottesville Tomorrow has identified four local parks that have been sold and redeveloped in the last 15 or so years, and that’s likely an undercount.
There have been some attempts to curb this trend, including a 2020 amendment to the Virginia Manufactured Home Lot Rental Act requiring mobile home park owners to give tenants an opportunity to purchase the park.
In its June 7 letter informing residents of its intent to sell (which can be viewed on the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development website), the owners of Carlton Mobile Home Park did just that. They let tenants know that they had 60 days to make an offer.
But the letter is essentially a legal formality. By the time owners send these types of letters, the deal is all but done, said Laura Dobbs, director of policy for Housing Opportunities Made Equal Virginia, a nonprofit that enforces and advocates for fair housing laws.
“We have not seen any success of residents themselves purchasing a park,” she said. “So many of these mobile home park sales are closed-door deals and unsolicited offers, oftentimes from out-of-state investment companies. The notice is supposed to afford residents the opportunity to access the financing so that they can put a legitimate offer in themselves. And the law says that the seller, the most current owner, is supposed to consider the residents’ offer. But there are some challenges there.”
One of those challenges is that, by the time the owner sends that letter to residents and to the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, as required by law, there’s usually a pre-purchase agreement already in place, said Dobbs. And those contracts often contain some sort of penalty clause, which can require the seller to pay the prospective buyer some amount of money if the seller backs out of the sale. It’s meant to prevent the seller from going with another offer, said Dobbs.
Dobbs saw a case in Alexandria where residents organized and got some assistance from Fairfax County and a nonprofit organization to put in an offer on their park, called Harmony Place. Their offer was more than the prospective buyer’s, Dobbs said. But the seller went with the original buyer anyway. She suspects this was because of a penalty clause. (Read more about that sale in this Mount Vernon Gazette report.)
Dobbs has also seen cases of nonprofits buying parks on behalf of residents. Commonwealth Catholic Charities bought a park in Northern Virginia. And in 2007, Habitat for Humanity purchased Southwood Mobile Home Park in Albemarle County, but it’s a somewhat unique case, because Habitat is working with residents not to keep it as a mobile home park, but to redevelop it into more traditional housing.
Habitat for Humanity staff told Charlottesville Tomorrow that they’ve fielded some calls from Carlton Mobile Home Park residents asking if Habitat is the buyer.
(In 2009, Habitat bought the mobile home park next to Carlton, the 16-unit Sunrise Trailer Court, and turned it into a mixed-income neighborhood of site-built houses for about 60 families.)
Habitat is aware of the pending purchase, but hasn’t made an offer, said Angela Guzman, a spokesperson for the organization.
“However, given the uncertain future of the residents of the park, we believe we have an ethical obligation to investigate all options,” she wrote in an email to Charlottesville Tomorrow.
During the 2024 legislative session, the Virginia General Assembly created a $10,000,000 revolving loan fund to help residents of mobile home parks with this very thing. But it’s not available yet. That program is currently in development, said Alexis Mehretab, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, which will administer the loan program.
“We look forward to sharing more detailed information later this year,” she added.
Carlton resident Billy Marshall said that his aunt is going to try to get residents together to do something about it, maybe something similar to what’s happening at Southwood.
But without help from a nonprofit or from the state, that could prove to be difficult.
“Often residents, even collectively, aren’t going to qualify for the financing that is necessary to purchase the park, unfortunately,” said Dobbs.
And the reality is, not all of them want to try, she added.
“You think if I have $7 million I’m going to be living here?” Carraseo said, laughing in the shade of his covered patio at Carlton Mobile Home Park.
“I’d be somewhere else! With more privacy, maybe.”
If the sale to the private owner goes through, a few different things could happen, said Brenda Castañeda, Dobbs’ colleague and deputy director of advocacy at HOME Virginia.
One is that the new owner decides to redevelop the property into something other than a mobile home park, and gives tenants 180 days’ notice to leave. In that scenario, the new owner would be required to pay each resident who owns their own trailer $5,000 to help with moving expenses.
That might seem like a nice chunk of money, but it might not cover the moving of a trailer — if the trailer can be moved at all.
“Folks really invest in their trailers,” said Castañeda. “Sometimes they put tens of thousands of dollars into making their trailers really nice, because they can’t access other forms of housing but they own the trailer.”
That’s the boat Carraseo is in. He owns his trailer and has spent many hours making it into the home he and his family are proud of.
Because of that, trailers are “pretty impossible to move,” said Castañeda. “They’re not actually mobile. Most of the time, it costs many thousands of dollars to move one, and there’s no guarantee that it will survive the move. It becomes a big investment for people.”
And if a trailer can in fact be moved, its owner has to figure out where to put it. Disappearing mobile home parks don’t exactly have a lot of open spots.
“I have no place to take it with me,” said Carraseo.
It’s possible that the new owner of Carlton Mobile Home Park, whoever it is, will keep operating it as a mobile home park.
That’s what longtime resident Randolph Coffey thinks is going to happen. Coffey said he trusts the current owners to sell it to someone who will keep it as a park.
Not everyone is so sure.
“What we see a lot is private equity buying up these parks and just trying to suck the value out of them,” said Castañeda. In her experience, most of those firms don’t invest in upkeep and maintenance on the parks, which have decades-old infrastructure that is rarely cost-effective to replace.
And when companies do invest in that infrastructure, they usually raise lot rents, said Castañeda.
“And because people are sort of land-bound with those trailers, they can’t move them and they’re stuck paying higher and higher lot rents,” she said. “It’s this captive audience that, in theory, in a free market, they could go move their manufactured home somewhere else with a cheaper rent, but in reality, they can’t. It’s easy to exploit that.”
(That’s what seems to be happening at Crozet Mobile Home Community, according to a recent report in the Crozet Gazette. An individual sold it to a company, Roseland Communities about two years ago. According to residents who spoke with the paper, Roseland has raised the lot rent from $250 to $400. Residents also told the paper that the new owner separated out sewer and water charges, which used to be included in lot rent, into a separate, additional payment. Roseland Communities did not immediately return a call and email from Charlottesville Tomorrow.)
Marshall, the Carlton Mobile Home Park resident who shares a trailer with his aunt, thought the Carlton owners would never sell. “This right here is a profit,” he said, pausing to do some quick math. His aunt’s lot rent is $400 per month. Multiply that by 66 lots, that’s $26,400 per month, $316,800 per year.
“That’s a lot of money,” said Marshall.
It might not be enough to please a private equity firm, though, if that is indeed who is trying to buy the park, say the housing advocacy attorneys.
Factor in taxes and upkeep costs, and it would take the owners at least 22 years to make the $7 million they’ve been offered by the new buyer.
“I would not be surprised if they redeveloped it,” Dobbs said based on those calculations. “At that price, they’d basically have to redevelop it to make it worthwhile for them.”
Oddly enough, redevelopment is how Carraseo makes his living, and he shakes his head at the irony of his situation. For the past 14 or so years, he’s worked construction in the city, building a litany of structures, including housing. Now, he might lose his.
And he doesn’t have the ability to take out a loan for a piece of land and the materials to build his own.
Marshall, whose aunt wants to organize their neighbors to buy the park, is worried about having to move. He’s not sure where he and his aunt will go.
When Marshall spoke with Charlottesville Tomorrow about the park sale, he’d just come from a longtime friend’s funeral, so he was already feeling a bit morose.
“The way the letter read, it’s already gone,” he said of his longtime home. “It’s only a matter of time now before everybody’s gonna have to leave.
“We’re just taking it one day at a time, see what we can find.”
