Mobile Home Parks

The exhilaration was palpable as Adam and Candy Kessler arrived Wednesday at their freshly built residence in Sylmar's Oakridge Mobile Home Park -- he driving a U-Haul van filled with the couple's furniture and personal belongings, she following in a car. With them they also brought a resolve to help resettle a tight-knit community that was largely destroyed in last autumn's wildfires. "We're very excited," said Candy Kessler as she prepared to enter the yellow manufactured home they ordered to replace the one lost in November's Sayre fire.

High noon in Duroville and nothing moved but a swirl of dust and a lone American flag flapping in the scorching breeze. Wild dogs, stricken by heat and light, could barely lift their heads. Dr. Alberto Manetta squinted hard at the jumble of sagging trailers and dirt roads winding through the 40-acre patch of California desert. In the months ahead, this impoverished mobile home community of up to 4,000 mostly Latino farmworkers would serve as a laboratory for the UC Irvine medical professor and about a dozen student volunteers -- sort of a model Third World village just two hours from campus.

A judge has ruled in favor of five mobile home park residents near Canoga Park who alleged that the park owner failed to make repairs and allowed dangerous conditions to persist for years, including a faulty electrical system that had been cited more than 100 times by state inspectors. Based on an eight-day trial held in April, Judge Gregory C.

Seeking more control over mobile home park conversions, Ventura County supervisors took steps this week to tighten the rules to better protect tenants and prospective buyers. The board Tuesday directed its staff to devise an ordinance modeled after Sonoma County's -- one that recently withstood a court challenge -- to oversee subdivision of mobile home parks. Within the county's jurisdiction are 22 parks, which collectively house more than 2,000 residents.

A federal judge in Riverside said Monday that he was prepared to close a sprawling trailer park in Thermal within two weeks unless its owner presented a detailed plan to repair water, electricity and building code violations at the property that is home to 6,000 tenants. "If I get the feeling that this is not going to happen, I'm going to close the place down. I'll send out federal marshals, and that will be it," said U.S.

A woman accused of setting a fire that destroyed six trailers, rendered eight families homeless and resulted in the evacuation of a notorious mobile home park in Thermal was acquitted on all charges Friday by a jury in Indio. An emotional Guadalupe DeAnda, 52, sobbed uncontrollably as the verdict was read, said her lawyer, public defender David Prendergast. The case went to the jury Thursday.

Having toiled in machine shops during World War II and worked for decades in other manual jobs, 84-year-old Mary Kubancik felt entitled to live out her years in a pleasant mobile home park in Sylmar. Instead, the frail Kubancik is preparing to move out after 19 years. Her $919 monthly Social Security check won't cover her essentials and the $702 that her mobile home space will cost when the latest double-digit increase takes effect in April.

A federal judge took partial control of the Duroville mobile home park Monday, appointing three overseers, including a former diplomat, to investigate conditions, make emergency repairs and temporarily take over all financial operations of the Thermal shantytown. U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson in Riverside could have closed the park but decided instead to give the experts two months to make recommendations. "After 60 days I want to be able to make an intelligent decision," he said.

When Beth Lopez and her husband, Henry, separated two years ago, they decided to sell their three-bedroom, three-bath family home in east Palmdale. Lopez knew she had to downsize. But the search for a new residence led her to a dwelling she had never before considered: a mobile home. "It was not something I had ever thought of," said Lopez, who is 52 and unemployed. "But of course things change in life." As do perceptions.

A mobile home park company controlled by Sam Zell, chief executive of Tribune Co., is locked in a defamation lawsuit against a San Diego County supervisor who accused the company of rent-gouging elderly tenants and lying about making repairs. The dispute began in 2002 when Supervisor Dianne Jacob made comments about the company to tenants and reporters, and to Zell in a letter. The company, Equity LifeStyle Properties Inc.