- November 27, 2024
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For the last nine months, Ormond Beach resident Jacqueline Dienst Rivers has lived in fear of homelessness.
A paraprofessional for Volusia County Schools and mother of two children with autism, she bought a mobile home at the Granada RV Mobile Home Park at 19 N. Yonge St. in January 2020 with the hope that the low lot rent would help her save up to buy a home. Six months later, the mobile home park was purchased by Sunrise Oasis Villas LLC, of Miami.
Rivers paid her rent and mobile home payments every month. When she paid the latter off completely in March 2021, her rent went down to $490.
And then, on Jan. 27, she received a five-day notice on her front door stating she owed $8,860 for rent. The notice claimed Rivers’ rent was $840.
Rivers said she knew that if she didn’t fight the eviction, she and her children would be homeless. So she looked for a lawyer to take her case on pro bono.
“All I want to do is live comfortably, raise my children and know that we have that security of a roof,” Rivers said.
Sunrise Oasis Villas filed her eviction on April 27, according to court documents. On May 22, after Rivers got a lawyer and filed a lawsuit, the company amended its eviction complaint, stating she owed $2,450 for rent. The company’s lawyers stated the difference was due to “an error in computation,” and that the larger figure had included payments due on the trailer itself — the trailer Rivers states in her lawsuit that she paid off in 2021.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the 2024 fair market rent in the Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach metro area for a two-bedroom housing unit is $1,413. The rent for a three-bedroom unit is $1,865.
With rental prices like that, a mobile home is often one of the last housing options before an individual or family ends up in homelessness, said Max Story, a Jacksonville-based attorney and managing partner of Story Griffin Attorneys.
“Then the conditions and the way they’re treated there is often fairly poor,” Story said. “These are people that, because of the economics of the trailer park, they don’t have access to the legal system or attorneys. ... So they’re especially vulnerable to exploitation and predatory practices.”
Story is Rivers’ lawyer. Normally, he only handles cases in North Florida, but he said that when Rivers called him, after hearing her distress, he couldn’t turn down helping her.
Her eviction was dismissed in June after she paid the $2,940 Sunrise Oasis alleged she owed.
A few weeks later, the company responded to Rivers’ lawsuit. The suit counters Sunrise Oasis’ claim that Rivers agreed to buy the mobile for $14,400, over double the amount in Rivers’ original purchase agreement. (Rivers called the lease “bogus.”) The suit also claims that Sunrise Oasis presented a lease unsigned by Rivers as evidence for Rivers’ filed eviction. The lease that’s missing Rivers’ signature was allegedly signed on the park management side by the park’s previous property manager. But the ex-manager states that her signature was forged, according to the complaint. The ex-property manager was evicted in January.
The company’s lawyers, of Coronado Law Group in New Smyrna Beach, denied those allegations in their response to the filed complaint. The Observer reached out to lawyer Kenneth Bohannon, of Coronado Law Group, but did not receive a response.
In Volusia County, 45% of households do not earn enough to consistently cover basic living expenses, according to United Way, which has coined the term ALICE for these families. The nonprofit’s reports on ALICE — which stands for the “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” population— aim to spotlight working residents and families who are struggling financially.
In Flagler County, 40% of households fall under the ALICE threshold.
Affordable housing is not only a problem in Volusia and Flagler. It’s a countrywide issue, said Lawrence Anderson, community partnerships manager for the Community Foundation and United Way of Volusia-Flagler Counties. Anderson sits on the Coalition for the Homeless Applications committee and is part of a Housing Problem Solving Workgroup trying to increase affordable housing units in both counties.
“One thing that I’ve seen with the development of affordable housing is that, unfortunately, it takes time,” he said. “It takes time for developers to come into the community, identify appropriate parcels of land and get all of the permits and requirements done to actually start building and renting out the apartments.”
Another challenge he’s encountered is ensuring funding is available for communities that are at higher risk of homelessness, such as people with disabilities, and families or individuals escaping domestic violence. People are also being asked to pay high security deposits, on top of first and last months’ worth of rent.
Agencies such as the Neighborhood Center of West Volusia and Halifax Urban Ministries offer help with rehousing assistance, he said, but one of the biggest resources for ALICE families is United Way’s 211 help hotline.
“That is always the best place for individuals in need to start, because all they would need to do is give 211 a call,” Anderson said. “For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a call representative is waiting by the phone to provide resources for a variety of needs — whether it’s finding rental assistance or utility assistance, or finding an agency providing this rehousing assistance.”
He said he’s also noticed that waitlists for housing assistance — such as Section 8 vouchers — have also been declining as nonprofit and for-profit entities increase their human services with help from federal funds.
Florida law states that all mobile home lot rental agreements must consist of at least a one-year lease. Rivers’ lease states she’s on a month-to-month basis.
While Story declined to comment on specifics regarding Rivers’ case due to the ongoing lawsuit, he said that’s one of the things mobile home residents should know — that they’re entitled to a year lease.
Rivers’ case isn’t an outlier. As rental rates continue to rise and average yearly salaries stay stagnant, Story said, he comes across cases like Rivers’ quite often.
“We’re seeing a lot of landlords going from smaller mom-and-pop places to huge corporate entities that are based out of state, and they have New York hedge fund money supporting them,” Story said. “Some of the same people who were behind the foreclosure crisis are now in the rental community.”
That often translates to lease agreements with additional fees for tenants who are at their financial breaking points, he said.
His firm has also been studying what happens to mobile home parks, and found that many are eventually sold for redevelopment into condominiums or apartment complexes.
Rivers worries that will be the end result for her mobile home park, as it’s located within the Ormond Beach downtown district. She also suspected the property managers wished to evict her and her children as they worked to make the mobile home park a 55-and-over community: A trailer listed for rent less than two weeks ago states Granada RV Mobile Home Park is a 55-and-over community.
Rivers said she dreams of having a permanent home for her children.
“Even a manufactured home — I wouldn’t care,” she said. “A permanent home for me and my kids so I don’t have to worry about anyone taking it away from me anymore.”
