Sunshine Village Mobile Home Park
2765 10th Ave N Palm Springs, Florida.
The principle danger of renting is that the land owner rightly gets to decide, within zoning laws, what is the most profitable use of their land. Case in point: the residents of the Sunshine Village mobile home park are getting the boot to make room for a Walmart.

As usual, Al Norman covers the story well, but one section leapt out at me:

Wal-Mart targets mobile home parks, because local officials are often anxious to level these ‘eyesores’, and move the residents out of the area. The homeowners, who are stigmatized as “trailer trash,” are marginalized politically, and have no clout in town. One reader of the Palm Beach Post submitted the following comment on Sunshine Village:

We need to get rid of all these low rent trailer parks. They bring in the worst kind of people. A lot of illegals will be living in these rusted out old trailer parks. Palm Beach county should take a vote on closing all trailer parks…Keep the migrants where they belong. Out in the fields picking my tomatoes.

Last August, Wal-Mart displaced 40 families from a mobile home park in Marion, North Carolina. In February of 2009, 15 homeowners lost out to a Wal-Mart supercenter in North Vernon, Indiana. Around Christmas of 2006, 80 residents in a mobile home park in Berlin, Wisconsin saw their homes rezoned from residential to commercial. In January of 2006, 54 families in the Monticello Mobile Home Park in West Asheville, North Carolina, were forced to relocate to make room for a 180,000 square foot Wal-Mart superstore. In 2003, 122 residents in a mobile home park in St. Petersburg, Florida were displaced by Wal-Mart. The world’s largest retailer swallows up trailer parks whole, and spits out the people who live there.

So, a trailer park is an eyesore and a Walmart is a city beautification project?

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 1206 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Citizen Groups, Development, Litigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.