Trailer park pulled out from under its dwellers

WOODLAND PARK - Karen Simons has lived in Woodland Village Mobile Home Park for 11 years and wanted to stay many more.

Thomas Carley has lived in the cramped old trailer park — he calls it “a mudhole” — 20 years and intended to stay.

Harriet Hinman and her husband bought their trailer four years ago for retirement.

Now, those folks and two dozen other residents of the park are scared as they face eviction, possibly in a year.

Many have trailers too old or decrepit to move, little money to relocate and few options in a region with little affordable housing for low or fixed incomes. And they doubt a developer’s vow to help.

“At the time I moved in, it was the only affordable thing available in Woodland Park,” said Simons, 60, who works in a grocery store bakery. “It still is. There is nothing for low-income people here. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Carley, 66, is angry that residents of the trailer park are being forced out.

“I wanted to keep this trailer for my retirement,” he said. “Now, a developer has bought the place and we all have to move. I guess I’ll just have to walk away from my trailer.”

Hinman has similar fears.

“Our trailer is 20 years old. We could never move it. We’d be picking up the pieces down the road,” she said. “There’s nowhere to take it, anyway.”

Carley and other longtimers can scarcely believe how the world around the trailer park has changed. For decades, it’s been squeezed between Fountain Creek and U.S. Highway 24 next to sewage lagoons on the outskirts of town.

It was home to about 50 families who needed inexpensive homes and didn’t complain about highway noise or sewage smell.

Things started changing 20 years ago when the town closed the lagoons after the stench became intolerable for passing motorists. In 1998, a shopping center anchored by a Safeway supermarket opened just north of the old lagoons, and folks started talking about a riverwalk and other development.

Now, a Wal-Mart Supercenter is under construction just south of the trailer park. Suddenly, everyone is interested in the land in between — the 23-acre lagoon site and the 7.8-acre Woodland Village. Real estate experts suggest the site is perfect for a big-box retailer or home-improvement store.

They want the land, but not the trailers or their owners.

Denrick LLC, an investment group led by Woodland Park developer Richard Brown, recently paid $3.28 million for the Village. Village tenants were told they could stay only until the property is redeveloped.

“I told them it would probably be a full year before they would have to move,” said Gene Buttermann, who manages the Village for Denrick. “And they would get a minimum of six months notice.”

He also said his company would consider relocation packages for about 20 tenants whose homes are too old to be moved — by law, no trailers built before 1976 can be taken on the road.

Carley was the first to call. But Buttermann rejected his request for $5,000 for his 20-year-old trailer.

“I was only interested in buying his trailer if I could rent it,” he said. “I don’t want an empty space sitting there. Space is money. Unfortunately, his trailer is useless to me.”

So Carley said he will be walking away from his home.

“Call it progress,” he said bitterly.

Buttermann said Denrick is not a villain for refusing to buy trailers it deems worthless.

“Let’s talk about the reality of life,” he said. “Most of the trailers we’re talking about should be condemned. You wouldn’t live in them. The reality is their circumstances changed. This is about reality that they don’t want to face.”

No one else has called Buttermann to seek help since hearing of Carley’s experience.

“This is not about abuse,” Buttermann said. “I am concerned about these people. What am I supposed to do? Go down and hand each one a $10,000 check and say ‘Don’t worry about moving’? I’m sure they’d be happy. But it doesn’t strike me as a fair and equitable solution to a life circumstance.”