Eudely Ruiz gestured toward his 135 neighbors living in the Palm Trailer Park. “A lot of people here do not have alternatives,” he said.

Some are young and poor, full-time workers with families to support. Others are senior citizens, dependent on Social Security or disability payments. All struggle to make ends meet and all face eviction by March 10.

Ruiz and his neighbors live on a real estate gold mine, located at Northeast 16th Avenue in North Miami off of U.S. 1, only a few blocks from San Souci’s million-dollar waterfront mansions, and just across the Broad Causeway from Saks Fifth Avenue and ultra-affluent Bal Harbour. The Palm Trailer Park — which sits on 3.7 acres of land that could be worth much more than the $10.2 million the new owner paid for it seven months ago — is one of 47 mobile home parks sitting on prime Miami-Dade County real estate, ripe for developers to construct million-dollar condos, homes and offices for wealthier people.

Palm Trailer Park Homeowners Association President Eudely Ruiz stands in front of the home he is supposed to leave by March 10. Photo by Cynthia Archbold

Ruiz, a 36-year-old former Marine, scraped together $6,000 of his savings to form the Palm Trailer Park Homeowners Association, of which he is president, and fight the eviction. “They are disabled either language-wise, age-wise, physical-wise,” he said. “They’re doing the best they can.”

Ruiz supports his wife and kids as a full-time social worker at the Village, an addiction treatment center, while studying to complete his Bachelor of Science degree in social work at Barry University. He’s paying tuition for his 18-year-old son Carlos to study criminology at Barry; his wife is studying psychology at Miami Dade College. He and his family are earning college degrees to get better jobs, but they don’t yet have the money to pay Miami’s skyrocketing rental fees or buy a condo.

Ruiz pays $275 to rent the ground underneath his mobile home. “Where can I find this much space for that money?” he asks, pointing to his two-bedroom trailer, which is all paid for and includes a living room, bath and utility room. He thought he’d live here forever, and it suits his family just fine, he said. The median rent in Miami is $759 per month, according to 2005 U.S. Census data.

For the past year, Palm residents have been bombarded with anonymous notices stuffed in their mailboxes telling them to move, Ruiz said. The flyers were followed by an official eviction notice sent to them by certified mail March 5 announcing that Alta Mira Apartments, a Georgia-based real estate development company, bought the park and would close it in March 2008.

Alta Mira Director Jay Jacobsen, who signed the Palm eviction notices, said it’s necessary to close the park because it has become dilapidated. “The park is beyond its useful life and there are various code violations we are attempting to fix,” he said. Jacobsen hired property management company The Urban Group to help relocate mobile home owners and find other parks where they could move their homes. The trouble is, most of the trailers are too old to be moved, and most Miami-Dade County apartments are too expensive for the residents to rent. Public housing agencies, meanwhile, are struggling with two- to three-year waiting lists of 40,000-plus applicants.

“I have no place to go,” said Palm resident Silbana Silla, a young mother who paid $15,000, her life savings, to buy a trailer. The eviction notice crushed her and her neighbor, 70-year-old Maximo Santa Orella, who also bought his trailer for $15,000. Their investments now worthless, they could be left penniless and homeless. The state is only giving them $1,375 in compensation for their homes. “That’s nothing — it doesn’t even cover the deposit and rent,” Silla said. She, Ruiz and Santa Orella are among thousands of low-income Miami-Dade residents being kicked out of their homes as trailer parks fall like dominos to developers and exacerbate Miami’s affordable housing crisis.

The pressure to sell the parks is immense. For example, residential developer Sergio Pino, head of Century Partners Group, offered $95 million for Lil Abner Mobile Home Park, 100 acres located at 11239 N.W. Fourth St., according to a purchase and sale proposal signed by Pino on May 17, 2006. But Lil Abner’s owners, Nidia and Raul Rodriguez, have refused to sell. “For an owner not to sell is very unusual,” said Alyce Gowdy Wright, executive director of Jobs With Justice, an affordable housing advocacy group that’s fighting for the rights of mobile home park residents. The parks are the last existing affordable housing stock available to the working poor, Wright said, and they are disappearing fast. Up to 100,000 people face imminent homelessness.

Hundreds of trailer owners already have been kicked out on the street. That’s what happened at Blue Lake Mobile Home Park on West Flagler Street in Doral, where 270 residences were raided and trailer owners were threatened, intimidated and harassed by the county building department, according to the lawsuit filed on behalf of the trailer park residents by attorney John DeLeon.

He calls what happened at Blue Lake a case study of the illegal tactics developers use to throw out mobile home residents all over the county. On March 24, 2006, DeLeon said, Miami-Dade County Building Department code enforcement staff swooped down on the park as police conducted SWAT exercises in riot gear. The county officials raided homes, issued building code violations to 270 residents and ordered them to pay $500 to $1,500 in fines.

“The most offensive thing is that in one day they should give code violation notices to each and every one of those residents in the trailer park,” said DeLeon, who also is vice president of the Jobs With Justice board of directors. “That trailer park had been around for 40 years, and then all of a sudden they realized that there were code violations? Highly unlikely.”

In the lawsuit, DeLeon said the code inspectors and police “created a sense of panic in the park … with the intention of frightening them.” The trailer owners said the code inspectors “did not leave anything in writing informing plaintiffs what the specific violations were, even though many plaintiffs asked. No plaintiff was provided a list of alleged violations. No plaintiff was provided a meaningful schedule to correct any alleged violations if they could correctly ascertain what they were.”

Some of the residents met with building department Director Charles Danger to ask what they needed to fix. According to the lawsuit, Danger didn’t know and neither did his staff.

Instead, the county ordered FPL to shut off electricity to the entire park, making the homes unlivable and forcing trailer owners to leave.

DeLeon filed a class action lawsuit to protect residents and obtained a preliminary injunction against Miami-Dade County and Danger, which got the power back on to some trailers so residents could make repairs and stay in their homes — at least for a while. He said the county violated state law, which requires that trailer park residents receive six months’ notice before eviction. He said cutting off residents’ electricity was the same as evicting them.

Blue Lake lies in District 10, represented by Commissioner Javier D. Souto, who issued several written press statements in 2006 defending the county’s actions. Meanwhile, many residents were forced to leave the park because their homes were made uninhabitable.

“We are very concerned about the plight that these residents find themselves in,” Souto said in an October 2006 statement. “However, the serious building code violations that have been verified by Miami-Dade inspectors create hazardous conditions that may imperil the safety and lives of these individuals. These serious concerns simply cannot be ignored.”

Souto said drug dealing was rampant in the park. “The first time I was taken to the Blue Lake Trailer Park was by of the Miami-Dade Police Department, following a raid of a couple of trailers that were operating as drug houses within a few hundred feet from a county park and an elementary school…. The police showed me how the criminals who were out on bail were already selling drugs once again the very next day. They explained how there were close to 2,000 individuals crammed into a trailer park authorized for habitation by 200 families,” Souto said.

But, DeLeon said, whatever the comings and goings of outsiders, Blue Lake trailer owners aren’t drug dealers, just elderly and poor. He said the shock of eviction and the power cutoffs took a toll on them. After the raid there was a rash of heart attacks, and two elderly female residents died. Others, having a choice between their stifling hot trailers and the great outdoors, learned how to live outside for months until the park closed. “I never want to see an 80-plus [year-old] woman forced to sleep outside her trailer again,” DeLeon told county commissioners during an Oct. 16 hearing on the trailer park crisis. “She had to live outside under a tree because she had nowhere to go.”

DeLeon settled his case against the county, winning an undisclosed amount to compensate the evicted residents. Despite this victory, the park closed in August and 150 residents are still living in their cars or shelters. According to Wright of Jobs With Justice, not one resident seeking help from the county found alternative housing, although Commissioner Souto claims county staff found other housing for many residents. “Dozens and dozens of dedicated county employees worked day and night and weekends to meet with each and every tenant to assess their needs,” he said in a July 11 statement.

DeLeon won his second battle against the county at the Oct. 16 meeting, when commissioners finally agreed to take action to halt temporarily the eviction epidemic. Commissioners, with a 12-1 vote, issued a four-month construction ban to stop building permits and zoning changes on mobile home parks to discourage sales of the properties. The idea is that if developers can’t build and make money on the land, the park owners won’t be able to sell.

The vote to impose a building and zoning moratorium marked the first time, according to DeLeon, that the commission publicly acknowledged the plight of trailer park residents and tried to do something about it.

“These mobile home owners cannot afford to give up what they have invested years of savings in,” Miami-Dade County Commissioner Barbara Jordan, the moratorium’s co-sponsor, said during the meeting. “My concern with what’s happening is that these mobile home owners are so vulnerable that developers are seeking out mobile home parks to buy.”

DeLeon said developers have been victimizing trailer owners because they have no legal rights or political clout and wouldn’t be able to fight back. “The moratorium is a significant victory,” he said. “Frankly, I’m shocked by the sensitivity some of the commissioners showed during that public hearing. It’s the first time somebody actually stood up for trailer park residents in the county.”

But the ban wouldn’t have happened without the lawsuit, he said.

In addition, the commission ordered county staff to come back in February with a study of how widespread the mobile home crisis is, exactly how many residents face eviction right now and what options exist to relocate them.

But, DeLeon said, four months is not long enough for them to achieve that and create a comprehensive policy to address these and affordable housing issues. So now he’s planning to request a year-long extension to the moratorium so people like Eudely Ruiz won’t be forced out on the street.

And that would be illegal, he said. Verbatim, state law says “no agency of municipal, local, county or state government shall approve any application for rezoning or take any other official action which would result in the removal or relocation of mobile home owners residing in a mobile home park without first determining that adequate mobile home parks or other suitable facilities exist for the relocation of mobile home owners.”

DeLeon said he may represent the 46 other trailer parks in the county facing development and rezoning, as he has Palm Trailer Park. He said more lawsuits are on the horizon to protect trailer owners and force mobile home park owners to maintain the grounds, keep them sanitary so they don’t fall into ruin and become hazardous.

The eviction epidemic is unnecessary, said Jobs With Justice’s Wright: “The crisis is the result of a convergence between the development boom and the completely ridiculous negligence of the county in controlling this stuff. The owners are deliberately allowing the parks to fall into disrepair and then developers are getting indignant about it and complaining.”

Wright said the county needs to stop prioritizing code enforcement complaints from developers who demand that code enforcement shut down the parks so they can buy the land.

In the meantime, Jobs With Justice is organizing mobile home park homeowners associations all over town, giving residents legal rights to fight eviction. This is welcome news at Lil Abner, where some residents don’t know what would happen to them if the owners finally caved in to that $95 million Pino dangled before them.

Said Wright, “By state law, the county cannot shut down mobile home parks without providing replacement housing for people who are kicked out.”