The porch is stacked full of wicker furniture. Inside, boxes with labels like "big fish" and "little fish" fill the living room. A stack of bedding - sheets, blankets, pillow and sleeping bag - is neatly folded on the end of the couch.
Green is in that pre-moving limbo, where the TV and VCR still are plugged in, but the dishwasher isn't.
His move is more uncertain than most. Green lives in a 1970 Champion double-wide trailer - essentially, a worthless home. As of June 20, the optimistically named White Manor Mobile Home Park where he lives will disappear under 33 new condominiums. He can't afford the $12,000 bill to move his old trailer - if another mobile home park even would take it. They probably wouldn't. And the cost of hauling it away is more than the home is worth.
That's the fine print of owning a trailer - something they don't tell you when you buy.
"You only find out about it after you've taken the plunge," Green says.
A critical but maligned segment of the affordable housing market, mobile homes are the scapegoats of city planners, neighborhood councils and economic development executives alike. Blamed for crime, "trailer trash" and bringing down property values, the trailer court is going the way of the silver Gulfstream.
"They're under siege," says Tim Funk, housing director for Crossroads Urban Center.
By July, developers will close three Salt Lake County mobile home parks and another in Heber. They'll be replaced by condominiums, swank homes and strip malls - "progress." In order for those property owners and developers to profit, nearly 300 low-income families - veterans, widows and immigrants among them - will be displaced.
The process takes months and comes in dribbles of bad news: first the sales notice, then arbitrary rent increases and, ultimately, forcible removal.
"You're afraid to look in the mailbox," says Green, a 56-year-old hotel desk clerk.
If this all happened at once, perhaps the result of a natural disaster, the community might rally behind the refugees. But as it happens, Utah's response has been spotty.
Cottonwood Heights Mayor Kelvyn Cullimore, city staff and a few LDS wards were uncommonly human. That community raised more than $900,000 to help relocate 150 families living in the 50-year-old Meadows Mobile Home Park. The new owners, Arbor Development, and the Sorenson Foundation each chipped in $400,000. At the same time, the city walked trailer owners through the complex process of signing contracts with moving companies, and negotiated with banks to resolve their lopsided mobile home mortgages.
Developer Ryan Bailey, on the other hand, started tearing down Pioneer Mobile Home Park in Salt Lake City before all the residents had left, leaving insulation and rusty nails for the children to play in.
And Midvale Mayor JoAnn Seghini blamed White Manor's residents for not looking for another place to live sooner. "They'd known the owner of the property was interested in selling," Seghini said, with icy logic. Tricky, considering that while the former absentee landlord - Robert White from Malad, Idaho - was anticipating his $1.6 million windfall for three acres on 7200 South, he simultaneously signed contracts with new mobile home tenants.
About 36,000 Utahns live in mobile and manufactured homes, most paying $250 to $450 a month to rent a concrete pad. They won't all be evicted at once to make way for a Wal-Mart superstore. "Progress" will come gradually - making development refugees of 100 to 200 families at a time. It's easier to ignore that way.
Periodically, a cockeyed optimist on Capitol Hill attempts to give mobile home owners more rights. But in the realtor and developer-heavy State Legislature, land owners, not trailer owners, are supreme. Holladay Democratic Rep. Phil Riesen's bill to tap state housing funds for mobile home relocation stalled this year.
One of the last holdouts in White Manor, Green is resigned. He'll move into a room in his brother's basement next month. A year ago, the trailer he inherited from his parents was worth $10,000. But this year, his home's taxable value plunged to $5,000. Last week, he sold for $2,000. To the new landlord who is kicking him out - condo developer Brent Shaw.
"It's better than nothing," Green says.
But not much.
walsh@sltrib.com
