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Housing Notes
Another Trailer Park Closing
originally published March 21, 2007
Ben Emanuel
Like many of the small mobile home parks still remaining tucked away in unexpected places across Athens-Clarke - especially inside the Loop - the AAA mobile home park is one you may have passed a thousand times without ever knowing it was there. Its residents have been told to move out by May 1.
In September of 2006, Patricia Gomez and her husband and two children made a move. After some years of renting and carefully saving, they found an opportunity to buy a mobile home for $4,000 in the AAA Mobile Home Park on Atlanta Highway near Timothy Road. Just a small one, built in 1979, with two bedrooms and no air conditioning, but it was their own. The park had a fairly long history of stability, they were told, and they thought the move would be a long-term one. A month after they moved in, a run of bad luck began when a storm blew a heavy tree limb through the roof, causing more than $1000 worth of damage. Not long after that, medical expenses dealt another blow to their finances. Then, in February of this year, the owner of the park sent out letters to the residents informing them that it had been sold and asking them to be out by the first of May, 2007.
For a while it seemed that Patricia and her family might at least be able to save their investment by moving the home to another location. Folks from People of Hope had come around when they heard of the closing and made sure all residents knew how to get their homes inspected for approval to move. But Patricia’s home didn’t pass because of a problem deemed irreparable by the inspector. At this point, they’re just hoping they’ll be allowed to abandon the trailer rather than pay another $1000 dollars or so to get it to the landfill. For Patricia, this episode in her life has been sad but familiar. The same exact thing happened to her family when they were evicted from Garden Springs in 2002 and lost a trailer they had only owned for a year.
Patricia and her family are not alone. Since the closing of Garden Springs, seven more mobile home parks in Athens have closed. The options for affordable housing for families like hers - a family of four earning $1800 a month - are narrowing drastically. Many such families see a mobile home, even an old one, as a desirable option because it provides a chance to own their own home and enjoy the privacy not found in high-density apartment living. For families like Patricia’s, home ownership is otherwise a mere fantasy. So what are her housing options now? She would like to find another trailer, but says she’s scared. “This could just happen again and again,” Gomez says. The family would like to be able to buy its own little plot of land that couldn’t be sold out from under them, but they can’t find anything. They don’t want the higher expense and potentially greater instability of renting, but that is what they will probably do.
Oscar Cardenas, director of the nonprofit People of Hope, is concerned about the trend these park closings represent, a trend that further marginalizes low-income families. “It’s a housing choice,” he notes about mobile home living, “and people should be treated with dignity.” When a park closes, he observed, the losses are not limited to homes and lots. “When neighborhoods get disrupted, people lose support systems, the friends who give them a ride to work and watch their kids after school.” People of Hope was organized by former residents after the closing of the Garden Springs mobile home park on North Avenue five years ago, and their mission is to open a resident-owned mobile home park. Through grants and fundraising, the group was able to buy land in 2004 to accommodate 40 lots. They then deeded that land to the Athens Land Trust.
They are anticipating closing on a loan in the near future that will start the work on the infrastructure, which will be owned by People of Hope.
Residents will purchase their own homes to move onto the land, and as residents, they will be voting members of the organization.
Though fulfillment of the vision may still be some way away, Cardenas is optimistic. The resident-controlled park is a model that has been very successful in other parts of the country.
This is the first time it’s been attempted in the state of Georgia, but, he says, “it’s going to take off once people see it can be done.” Until then, unfortunately, Patricia Gomez is looking for a cheap apartment.
Drinkin’ Rules
The Ol’ Go-Slow Approach
originally published March 21, 2007
At their work session Mar. 13, Athens-Clarke County (ACC) Commissioners put the brakes on a proposal by ACC staff to revise the county’s ordinance pertaining to alcohol licenses. The changes, suggested by the ACC Police Department, the county attorney’s office, and the Finance Department (which handles alcohol licenses) aim mainly at ironing out a section of local law that’s seen more than 20 amendments since city-county unification in 1991. There are also cases in which local authorities seek to better match ordinances with state law, which has also seen changes; overall, ACC Manager Alan Reddish told commissioners, the goal is to make local regulations more “user-friendly” for both police (who would benefit from more clarity in enforcing laws) and vendors alike.
But commissioners saw multiple cases in which they felt the proposed revisions might be too harsh, and asked staffers to hold off before taking the proposal to the public and to stakeholders like bar, convenience store and package store owners. Many of the “housekeeping” changes might effectively change little about the way bars and other vendors do business. Others would involve higher fees for alcohol licenses, such as one section that would clear up rules on after-hours foodservice (applicable to eight establishments in Athens) and increase the fee for that type of license to $50 per year from $5. There could also be an increase in the fee for late submittals on annual license renewals, and the Finance Department would like to require full payment of all ACC taxes and fees before licenses are issued (that strategy collected $47,000 in unpaid property taxes last year, Finance Director John Culpepper told commissioners).
But other possible changes raised commissioners’concerns. They were wary of a proposal to require employees to be 21 to serve alcohol or work the door at a bar, when they’d only have to be 18 at restaurants, and just 16 to sell at grocery stores. ACC Police Chief Jack Lumpkin told commissioners, though, “We’ve literally arrested people under 21 working the door, intoxicated themselves and allowing people in.” Lumpkin echoed a refrain that seems to guide the relationship between local law enforcement and bar owners: “We have some quality operators of bars… but we have a certain group that are pushing the envelope.” The majority of bars, he said, do well to follow the law. Downtown bar owner Damon Krebs (a partner in Walker’s Pub and Allgood), who attended the work session, told Flagpole later he tends to agree with that assessment, and looks forward to being included in stakeholder discussions of the issue in order to advocate for the above-board majority of bars downtown.
Commissioners also balked at a rule that, if passed, would require doorpersons to be trained and certified individually, and to be re-certified each time they start a job at a new establishment. Lumpkin, however, explained that the idea had come out of conversations with bar owners themselves, who were having problems with certain people “going from place to place” despite a record of violations.
As for changes to bar ownership, corporate composition, or even a bar’s name, staff suggested requiring a 100-percent change in ownership - with no new license issued to an individual or company for two years after a citation - to keep businesspeople from skating out of trouble when they accrue enough citations for underage service, for example, to be shut down. County Attorney Bill Berryman estimated that maybe three “very serious offenders” have done so in the last few years. District 9 Commissioner Kelly Girtz seemed wary of punishing some partners too heavily.
As county staff made even more suggestions, commissioners became increasingly apprehensive and eventually decided to have a committee review the proposal before letting it move any further. Those ideas included clamping down on pricing promotions in which drink prices change inside a 24-hour period (apparently aimed at super-cheap drink specials, but potentially also nixing happy hour), combining drinks together (as in boilermakers, sake bombs, or any beer with a shot of liquor in it), and even selling more than one drink to one person standing at the bar (who might or might not intend to deliver some to friends at a table, or just drink them all).
Commissioners - appreciative of the effort but caught off guard by some of the ideas - agreed to send the proposal to the Commission’s Legislative Review Committee and bring the topic back to a work session before going public with it at all. Rushing the process “could send the wrong message,” District 10 Commissioner Elton Dodson warned. “Everybody gets burned if you present this as, ’This is what the Mayor and Commission [are] pushing out on the community.’” As points of disagreement between commissioners and staff became clear, Lynn said, “I don’t think this is cooked yet,” and other commissioners agreed.
Krebs told Flagpole he was glad to hear those sentiments from commissioners, and, as a bar owner, he worries about the focus on downtown when officials acknowledge that much underage drinking goes on in homes with cheaper drinks bought at convenience stores. He also noted that an imposition on happy hour - unlikely to happen, given the commission’s response last week - would likely affect their demographic more than it would the college-aged set. “I think they were more upset about happy hour than I was,” Krebs said with a laugh.
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