This story was originally published by Signal Cleveland. Sign up for their free newsletters at SignalCleveland.org/subscribe.
It was a daunting task to relocate 107 residents from the Euclid Beach Mobile Home park. After more than a year of work, the last few residents recently moved out. What remains is a mostly graveyard of vacant homes, several in the process of being demolished.
Officials from the nonprofit Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), which owns the 28.5-acre mobile home park on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood, announced in 2023 that the park would close this year. The grounds would be converted into green space and turned over to the Cleveland Metroparks as a part of a major redevelopment of adjacent Euclid Beach Park.
At first, many residents mounted a public campaign to keep the mobile home park from closing. When that effort failed, the residents lobbied for relocation packages that would offset the cost of moving into more expensive housing. Most who lived at the park were low-income, working-class or retirees on tight budgets. Finding affordable housing in Greater Cleveland, with its rising rents and increasing home prices, would be a challenge—especially for that many people at once.
The nonprofit wasn’t legally required to offer packages to the residents but it did, generally spending between $50,000 and $70,000 per resident, according to Isaac Robb, WRLC’s vice president of planning, research and urban projects. He is overseeing much of the project.
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It also hired Realty Reimagined, a real estate agency with U.S. Housing and Urban Development-certified counselors. These counselors are trained to help people with needs that many at the mobile home park had, ranging from obtaining housing vouchers to becoming first-time homeowners. More than 40 of the residents purchased homes or condos—many for the first time, according to Robb. More than 25 moved to an apartment or other rental. Nearly 25 moved to other mobile parks, with just about all of them buying new units. The remaining residents made other living arrangements, which included moving in with relatives or relocating to senior housing or assisted living facilities.
Most of the former residents Signal Cleveland interviewed gave high marks to the relocation process and called the packages fair, though a few expressed concerns about how people would fare long-term. Officials from the nonprofit said concerns about how residents would land after having to leave the mobile home park guided the relocation process.
“We found a way to trust and respect one another and ensure that everyone ended up in a much better position than they were living in in this community,” said Stella Dilik, WRLC’s chief development officer. “We believe this is unprecedented in the United States for a nonprofit land trust to do this work.”
WRLC said it tried to meet the needs of Euclid Beach Mobile Home park residents
Several of the mobile home park’s residents had challenges in finding places to live, said Matt Zone, WRLC’s senior vice president and director of the Thriving Communities program.
Some needed senior housing or assisted living placement. Others had disabilities and needed accessible housing or connections to social services. Some needed hard-to-get Section 8 housing vouchers, a federal subsidy that helps low-income tenants pay rent.
“Even though we had told people that they had to vacate the park by Aug. 31, we were very patient with them,” Zone said. “We wanted to find the right housing situation that met their unique needs.”
The park, officially known as Euclid Beach Mobile Home community (EBMHC), had many shortcomings, including a dilapidated infrastructure and mostly 40-plus-year-old units – but it was affordable. Most residents owned their mobile homes and paid monthly lot rents of about $400. Today, that is an nearly impossible price to match for renting an apartment, buying a home or even paying lot rent in another mobile home park. The housing most former residents found is more expensive, but they say the relocation packages are helping to bridge the gap.
The relocation packages were mostly based on providing a resident at least the fair market value of their mobile home, relocation costs and the difference between some of their housing costs at the mobile home park and at their new residence for a few years. WRLC received a $6.2 million grant from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation to pay for the packages.
When WRLC purchased the mobile home park in December 2021, there were roughly 150 occupied units, Robb said. He said there are a few reasons why the total relocation package number is less than this number. Some people owning more than one unit, some residents died before receiving a package and several units WRLC initially counted as being occupied turned out to be abandoned.
Many former Euclid Beach Mobile Home Park residents are happy in new homes
When the real estate agent working with the relocation endeavor took Elisha Beard to look at a new, three-bedroom house in Warrensville Heights she had one question, “Why are you taking me here?”
“I don’t want to fall in love with this house.” said Beard, who owned her mobile home in the park. “I can’t afford a brand new house!”
At first, Beard, a social worker, thought she would end up renting an apartment for the first time in years. There weren’t any mobile home parks in the neighborhoods in which she wanted to live. She just knew that most traditional homes, which she would be interested in buying, would be out of her price range.
But when Beard added up her relocation package and savings from the first-time home buyer programs she was referred to, she saw that she could afford the home. (Beard, like other former residents interviewed for the article, did not want to share the exact amount of their relocation packages.)
Beard said she feels a sense of comfort at no longer being at the whim of a developer.
“I’m here to stay,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Carol McClain was among the residents who were out front in the struggle to first save the mobile home community—and then to be fairly compensated to leave. The double-wide, two-bedroom unit she bought after retiring was supposed to have been her forever home. It sat just 100 feet from the lake, a location she cherished, along with neighboring Euclid Beach Park.
McClain now lives in a slightly larger double-wide unit at Columbia Park, which she purchased with her relocation money. The gated mobile home community for residents 55 and older is in Olmsted Township.
“I absolutely love it,” she said of her new home.
McClain said she misses living on the lake and being near family. But she doesn’t miss living in Euclid Beach Mobile home park, with its failing infrastructure, including a Jimmy-rigged water system. The lot rent is about 80% higher at McClain’s new home.
“But it’s a much nicer place,” she said. “And everything is kept the way it should be kept.”
What happens now at Euclid Beach Mobile Home park?
Anthony Beard used his relocation package to purchase a condo in Shaker Heights. (Elisha Beard and Anthony Beard are former in-laws.) He likes that it is near his son’s school. But he doesn’t like that he has to work extra hours to afford his new housing, which is considerably more expensive.
Anthony Beard was one of the most vocal residents in the fight to save the park and then to get fair relocation packages for his neighbors. He pushed for the future Euclid Beach development plans to include a mobile home park with as few as 50 homes. That would have been the best way to have preserved affordable housing, he said.
Several residents told Signal Cleveland the relocation packages were fair. Still, Anthony Beard doesn’t believe the money will be a long-term solution in closing the affordability gap he says most former residents will eventually face. “It looks all nice and shiny at the beginning,” he said. “But, three months down the line, six months down the line, two years down the line, it’s a different ball game when the money runs out.”
WRLC’s Robb sees it differently. He said residents were “generously compensated,” even though 90 percent of the mobile homes in the park were built in 1980 or earlier, which is considered to be old. Mobile homes age more like vehicles than traditional houses. Most built before 1980 can’t be relocated.
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Robb said WRLC was deliberate about designing relocation packages so that residents could still qualify for income-based programs, such as Section 8. It hired Realty Reimagined because of the agency’s expertise in dealing with the special housing needs many of the former residents have. (Anthony Beard gives high marks to how Realty Reimagined handled the relocation process, saying that Executive Director Sonya Edwards “was a blessing to just about everybody who I spoke to in the park.”)
Robb said there were other ways WRLC accommodated residents. The nonprofit agreed to buy mobile homes from residents, even though the units could have been moved. He became a licensed broker for manufactured homes so that he could sell units to help recoup costs. The nonprofit purchased mobile homes from residents who owed back taxes, in some cases as high as $20,000. WRLC also co-signed interest-free loans for some residents.
The Mandel Foundation grant was intended to cover relocation and converting the land to green space. The money has all been spent, sending WRLC looking for other ways to pay for completing the project, Robb said. For example, he said the nonprofit is working with the Cuyahoga Land Bank on demolishing all units that could not be moved.
Anthony Beard still wonders whether transforming Euclid Beach Park into a public amenity that could rival Edgewater Park was a greater public interest than preserving affordable housing, even if the mobile home park was substandard.
Zone still sees the greater public good in redeveloping the park as a public space capable of regularly drawing thousands of people.
“This is more than just a park project,” Zone said. “We’ve wrapped an unprecedented amount of resources around these residents. We’re helping them to create generational wealth because now, for the first time, many people are homeowners.”
Signal Cleveland is a nonprofit news organization covering local government, education, health, economy, and public safety.
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