Ultra-Low Cost Housing

Blog: What Demonstrating Ultra-Low Cost Housing Can Mean, Part I

Brenda Barnes, February 4, 2008

For the last 16 years, my husband Peter and I have been getting closer and closer to demonstrating how people can build really nice, big, comfortable, beautiful houses for less than $20,000. For the last three, we have been remodeling a $7,500 mobile home we bought in December 2004 in Desert Hot Springs, California, five miles north of Palm Springs. I’ve found it interesting—though sad–this has showed us many forces do not want people to produce their own low-cost housing.

The mobile home is in a park. I now know that is enough for anyone who knows what goes on in America—and maybe more of the world, but all I know well is America—to know the landlord would object to our not having expensive, new housing. I had no idea. One would think after 20 years of dealing with landlords in all kinds of ways I would have had some idea they would want tenants to all live in white, new houses, but honestly, I had no idea.

The first thing that happened, when we had been here only two months, was a Sunday afternoon the owner and son came to our door and said we had to get rid of our dog or leave the park. Amazing. I had called before I even came to look here, to be sure there was no restriction about dogs, since ours weighs about 70 pounds and is a purebred American bulldog. (That’s another thing I didn’t know. I thought our dog was a mutt we had rescued. A breeder saw him in my car soon after we moved here and offered me $1,500 cash for him, even without papers. We love him, though. He’s not for sale.)

Anyway, our application had disclosed our dog, so we just ignored them and never heard another word about that. Then, however, we noticed we’d come home from work about once a week and find things changed in our yards: trees pruned, plants removed, things moved around, the soil raked. I had had two whackos in a row try to evict me (Peter too the second time), and although they both ended up paying us well for it—I am, after all, a retired real estate lawyer who graduated in the top 10% from a Top Ten law school, and what they did to us was so illegal—I didn’t want to go through it again. I remembered the lease we signed, which we never got a copy of, said one must get approval to remodel a house. I turned in a many-paged request to change our house, in part by building fences, enclosing porch and carport, and putting in gardens with arbors. I thought the drawings and details might hide that we were trying to keep him out of here without confronting him directly.

He returned my plans in about a week and said we could do whatever we wanted as long as we got any permits we needed from the County. Peter has a master’s degree in urban planning from Cambridge, and is a member of the American Planning Association, so he knew we did not need permits to do any of that work except the last parts, years away. He asked a friend—how nice! the head planner for the County!–who agreed. I checked with the planning department at every step.

However, from Day 1 we have had nothing but trouble, although we did exactly what the owner had said was OK. Over and over we get notices we are supposedly violating rules of the park and laws.

The latest one said we had an unregistered car parked here, definitely against the rules of any park. My car was 25 days overdue but it goes about 15 miles an hour now, so we hadn’t been driving it and had forgotten. Besides getting the registration that day, I went out and took pictures of seven cars with 2005 registrations parked here, one 2007, and the MANAGER’S car registered in Kentucky, when he works in California, so that’s illegal. Funny. I’m sure only we got a notice. Wonder why?

I’m afraid the truth is if you try to show people can live well and cheaply, some people hate you.

(home)

This post was first published on Home Grown Food Network’s website
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