To Karen Melnick, the Gulfstream Trailer Park here is a tidy community of narrow streets and close ties, where she pays less than US$500 a month rent and neighbors gather at a tiki hut to watch the sun set over the bay.
To developers in this Florida Keys city, where land is scarce, the park is a potential platform for 83 luxury apartments worth US$300,000 to US$1 million each.
So begins the battle for Gulfstream Trailer Park, as do fights for many older mobile home parks on prime real estate throughout the state.
There are 849,000 mobile homes in Florida, the 2000 census reported, or 12 percent of the state's housing units. As the price of real estate has shot up, and suburban sprawl has reached its limits in some areas, many developers are looking at the ground beneath trailer parks as an underused resource.
That trend has Melnick and her neighbors fighting for their homes.
In February, she said, the park's owners announced that they had accepted an offer to sell the property. "They're telling us, when the developers take over, you have to go away," said Melnick, 53, who sells advertising space for three local radio stations. "This is where I thought I'd live the rest of my life. Where can you go for US$425 plus utilities? We've got nowhere to go."
Trailer parks containing a total of 3,000 homes closed in the last three years, said Don Hazelton, president of the Federation of Manufactured Home Owners of Florida, a tenants' group that has 56,000 members. In Hazelton's own hometown, Largo, the residents of 12 parks are facing eviction, he said.
To live in a trailer park like Gulfstream, one of more than 2,600 in Florida, is to occupy a precarious niche in the housing system. Residents at Gulfstream own their homes, which cost US$10,000 to US$40,000, but rent the land. Most homes are mobile in name only, too old or anchored to survive a move. As the value of real estate skyrocketed through the 1990s, park owners found they could make more redeveloping the land for houses or condominiums or selling to redevelopers.
"I can sympathize with the park owners," said Robert Cintron, a lawyer representing the tenants of Gulfstream. "They're getting below-market rent."
At the same time, said Joshua Mothner, a commercial loan officer in Marathon, without trailer parks the Keys' essential work force -- the teachers and police officers, hotel workers and bank tellers -- could not afford to live there. The price of houses in the area begins at around US$300,000, apartment rentals at about US$1,000 a month.
"I grew up on Shelter Island and saw this happen in the Hamptons," Mothner said, referring to the Long Island communities. "You lose whole strata of the population." Some workers already have two-hour bus rides to the area, often to jobs paying US$7 an hour, said Jeff Pinkus, a Marathon councilman.
Recently, Cintron stood on an empty lot on Route 1, the highway running the length of the Keys. Until last summer, the lot had been a 45-unit mobile home park called Coral Isle. Now an attractive sign at one end advertises "Key West's Newest Gated Community," with two- and three-bedroom apartments selling for just over US$300,000 to US$450,000. When the park owners sold the property to a redeveloper, only two of the homes could be moved; the others were left like litter.
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