Ultra Low Cost Housing: Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made

Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc.

July 6, 2008

Towards a brief history of demonstrating!

I’m writing this blog because I was googling for how to replace an aluminum mobilehome window with a plexiglass door. Someone in Brooklyn had a sliding-glass door and I clicked the box next to the article on “conspicuous consumption.” Don’t know why. Next thing I know, I’m reading the terms of service of blogger.com and picking a user name. I just love the Internet.

The way I got off the subject of the project we’re doing is pretty much how it has gone in the whole first six years of the 501(c)(3) charity my husband Peter and I founded, to demonstrate and educate the public on ultra low cost housing, edible landscaping, and use of renewable energy. We started, we got IRS approval, we donated money to buy land to do it on, and then a million other things got in the way.

The one I’m writing about now is “demonstrating.” When I was a student at Berkeley in 1965 during the Free Speech Movement (not participating), and a teacher in Compton in 1971 during the civil rights movement (just watching demonstrations), and finally a participant in 1972 demonstrations against the Vietnam War, “demonstrating” meant getting out in public and getting publicity for some cause. When we wrote the IRS application for a 501(c)(3) public charity to “demonstrate” ultra low cost housing, edible landscaping, and use of renewable energy, I didn’t think it was a confrontational kind of thing, so there would be no loud rallies and trying to get publicity in my later life as there had been in my young one.

How wrong I was.

Front arbor and gate

I should have had a clue when the IRS sent us back a question before we were approved, asking if we thought our organization would interfere with the construction industry. At the time I couldn’t imagine sixty people being interested in what we were going to do—although I hoped six million would be. So it was easy to answer we were just going to tell a certain segment of the market that was not being reached by the construction industry, how to build their own cheap good housing, and we didn’t think the construction industry wanted to reach those people, since it doesn’t try to, so we did not think we would have any impact on the construction industry.

Obstacles to starting the demonstration

From what has happened to us in the six years since, apparently demonstrating ultra low cost housing is a revolutionary thing to do.

We are involved in the third series of lawsuits in the past ten years related to this, and I am in the process of writing the second complaint for damages and other relief about our ultra low cost housing remodeling project. The landlord of the Park where our house is on rented land is trying to evict us after two years of being unsuccessful in trying to get an injunction against our supposedly violating Park rules by how we are remodeling our house and grounds, using almost all recycled materials and solely our own work.

We were owners in the first lawsuit, as we had been since college. I have made several million investing in real estate since college and lost it investing in other things. Anyway, that first issue was we were trying to set up affordable rental housing on an ultra low cost basis, doing the work ourselves and using recycled materials when possible, but the electric company tripled the rates—we found out later it had something to do with Enron—and since we paid everyone’s electricity in the converted motel and could not afford to put in separate meters, we lost the building to foreclosure. We were all living in units there, so when the former owner took it back, he made up things to evict us.

That was the first case, and it made us “real” tenants for the first time in about 30 years. My husband Peter and I rented a strange house in Morongo Valley, so close to a state highway that no one who visited believed we could live there with the noise. (It’s now being auctioned next week with an opening bid of $49,000.) We liked it though, the weather and the stars were nice, and it was close to our grandchildren in Joshua Tree. We could see how with a noise-barrier fence that we had learned how to build very cheaply out of polypropylene plastic continuous bags filled with a mixture of soil and water and 5% cement, we could take care of the noise problem and the house could be made nice with a reasonable amount of low-cost work.

So right away we made an offer to buy it. The owner accepted our offer and we agreed on a very workable deal where we would lease-option and pay $200 extra per month toward the down payment. In 20 months that would be paid and he would carry the loan for 20 years so our payment would not increase much when we bought.

We went right to work fixing the things we had said we were going to fix, but he did not fix any of the things he said he was going to fix. Then in about six months we got a lump-sum payment on a job and paid off the remainder of the $4,000 down payment all at once. That’s when he came over to see us and said he did not approve of the way we were using recycled materials on the house.

You have to just picture this house, to imagine how astounding that was. Besides what all our friends were saying about it not being livable no matter what because it was so noisy, the house had been added on to really strangely, so you had to walk through one bedroom to get to what they called another one, and there was only one bathroom, which you had to go through to get to what they called another bedroom, which was so small you could reach both sides both ways standing in the middle. The kitchen had metal cabinets and most of the windows in the house were directly in the way of the afternoon sun so it broiled in the summer. Any objection to what we might use to build onto that house was unbelievable.

Still, we could see how it could be fixed, and since we were now ready to buy, we didn’t understand why he cared what we built with. The bank doesn’t come over and check what kind of home improvements you are making, just because they are carrying a mortgage. So we thought we were pretty nice about it when we told him we were changing from tenants to owners, so we were going to have to be let alone to do anything legal we wanted to do, on what would be our house.

He returned our $4,000 and served us with a 30-day notice to move.

That turned into a two-year long dispute about how he had not done necessary improvements if he was a landlord, and how he was retaliating for exercise of our constitutional and statutory rights if we were tenants, but how we had thought we were owners, so if he evicted us he had to pay us for improvements we made to the house. It ended up with us not paying rent for two years, his then paying us more in December 2004 to settle, and his paying his own attorney’s fees, which must have been substantial. We came out ahead financially, but it really wasn’t worth being drained emotionally, spending all that time writing legal papers, and finally being disappointed by being shown we had no freedom if we were tenants, even with a lease option that we fully performed. In fact, I was sick from the whole thing, which is really why we decided to settle.

Why not use a trailer in a trailer park?

So we tried another thing. We bought an old mobilehome (1963 Paramount 12′ wide with two awnings attached the entire 65′ length of both sides), more or less 1200 square feet of living space enclosed, 400 added to the original 800, in a 55 and older Park in Desert Hot Springs. Again, everyone else said we were crazy, to buy such an awful house. This one had been on the market for six months at $7,500 when we found it. We met other residents of the Park at a party the next March, and they said they had all looked at it when it was for sale and called it “The Cave.” It was so long that sunlight from the short north end, the kitchen, lit about as far as the middle of the living room space. The rest of about 45′ was completely dark all the time. To make it worse, the former owner had the small windows everywhere completely covered with blinds and dust-covered curtains.

Of course we didn’t buy the house, even for so little money, because of how it looked at the time. We saw the curtains and blinds and figured with some light the whole place would look a lot better. It did, in one day after we moved in and threw away all those horrible old things. Then we started taking out 1960s style bookcases that blocked more light and made tiny rooms. We turned the whole–still small–living area into work spaces with open shelves between them for Peter and me, and then a living area next to it with the kitchen beyond.

The bedroom in the back was too small for us, but one of the awning spaces had already been enclosed to make a laundry room and a big patio room, so we turned the patio room into our bedroom and the back small former bedroom into a guest-room-dressing-room with holiday decorations storage.

It was nice that winter. That was the winter it rained here like it was Washington, and we thought global warming was going to do that permanently. (We had a quarter-inch TOTAL rain in the two years after that.) It wasn’t cold, but it was wet, and it was a big change for desert dwellers, so since we didn’t experience floods as people in the high-desert did, we were happy.

Do trailer park owners/managers bark and climb fences?

Then in February one Sunday a man we didn’t know came to the door and told us we would have to leave the Park if we didn’t get rid of our pit bull dog. First off, Peter asked him who he was, and he said he was the owner’s son and the man with him was the owner. Some introduction to the owners. Up to then, we had always dealt with the resident manager, and until that day we didn’t even know the owner lived in the house behind our back yard.

Then Peter told them he would check on what we had to do about our dog, who BTW was not a pit bull, but a purebred American bulldog we had rescued when he was about two, some eight or so years ago, and who we had thought was a mutt until just a month or so before that Sunday, when a man had offered us $1,500 for him and told us he was pure American bulldog. We had lived in the Park three months and the owners told Peter they had never seen our dog before, so he obviously wasn’t a big problem. We had put that we had an 85-pound dog on our application, and checked that there were no restrictions on size or number of dogs before we ever looked at the Park. There also was nothing in the lease about pit bulls or any other kind of dog not being allowed. There had been several other large dogs in the RV section where snowbirds had lived all winter.

That was the last we heard about the dog. We still have him and we’re still here. However, we began to notice someone we later learned was the owner was coming in our yard every week while we were gone to work, trimming the trees and bushes, and raking the yard. It was really horrifying to come home one day after all that rain, when the trees had been in full bloom, to find them cut down in the middle of the growing season to nothing but their main trunks.

Fencing for privacy

We were new here, though, and we had just been through almost four years of trouble where we lived, so we decided to fence in the yards so he couldn’t get in, and otherwise let it go. We hadn’t gotten a copy of the rental agreement, but I remembered it said if you wanted to change anything on your house or in your yard you had to get approval. So I drew four pages of really detailed drawings and wrote explanations of changes we wanted to make all over the property, and turned them in to the resident manager.

She looked startled, like no one had ever done that before. I said I remembered the rental agreement said if you wanted to change anything on your house or in your yard you had to get approval. She said oh, OK, she’d give it to the owners. About a week later the older man whose son had told Peter he was the owner drove up to me in a golf cart while I was going from my car to the house, handed me the papers, and said, “You can do whatever you want, as long as you get any permits you need from the County.” Peter told me the owner said the same thing to him later.

Well, permits. Once again, like the house in Morongo Valley, you have to just imagine this place to begin to conceive of how ridiculous that sounded. Other houses in the Park have rooms completely enclosed that could never have gotten a permit. There are carports far more enclosed than the legal amount, and with the most atrocious cheap materials. Remember that yellow plastic corrugated stuff people put up when you were a kid? It’s here, all over, and at our house and the one directly across our side yard eight feet away, the long sides were almost completely covered with that stuff, so faded it may have been done in 1960, and looking like twin white-haired old ladies identically made up in fuchsia lipstick outside their lip lines and styles popular when they were young. The front of the Park is the part for RVs, 42 spaces, and there are only 15 mobile homes around in a U-shape in the back, but about 10 spots in the RV section had permanent tenants living in trailers with foundations. Some of those were pretty awful, and all of them were tiny. I can’t imagine anyone getting an occupancy permit for permanent living in such tiny trailers on minuscule lots.

But permits he said to us, and we wanted him out of our space, so we checked on permits for everything we had said we were going to do. Peter has a master’s degree in urban planning from Cambridge and won a fellowship competition against all economics graduates in the world to advise the government of Norway how to drill for their North Sea oil without destroying villages the way England had. He learned Norwegian and translated their planning code into English in the first two months he was there. The paper he wrote convinced the government not to drill for the oil without a state participation strategy and changed the history of Norway for the better. I am a retired California real estate lawyer. Not hard for us to deal with permits, just strange that we were being asked to, when clearly no one else had been. Stranger and stranger it was getting.

Fence panel made from recycled wine bottles

So it took us awhile, being busy with our work as business consultants and having to figure out how to do what we knew was legal without permits. In fact, we got so busy even though we had figured out how to do it all legally without permits, that a year later all we had actually done was just accumulate recycled building materials and stack them around our porch, carport, and back storage building.

Then we started to get “Just a Reminder” notes from the resident manager asking us to tidy up our “side yards” or “back yard.” There was never anything we could see in our side yards or back yard, but we picked at whatever there was and made it really almost bare, and no one ever told us we hadn’t done what they wanted done. (When I cross-examined her in our lawsuit last year, I learned the manager, who’s Australian, thought a “yard” was an open area with a roof. Peter is Irish and lived in London for 20 years, and when I told him that, he said he remembered that use of the word in both places. He said people called what we call yards, “gardens.” I also remember when I was a child my dad, who was a carpenter, went to look for things at material “yards,” which were roof-covered open storage spaces. But for many years we had not thought of a “yard” as anything but a place open to the sky, so that they meant our covered outdoor spaces in those reminders had never once crossed our minds. Apparently those reminders were about the accumulated building and decorating materials on the porch and other covered spaces. We hadn’t known, so we had done nothing to clean up there.)

Absentee trailer park owners get worse treatment than absentee landlords!

Then we went to Europe for five weeks in February-March of 2006. When we came back, again, as we had been when the trees were cut to nibs the year before, we were horrified. Two large trees that had shaded the south side of our house were gone, a gate had been put in where we didn’t want one at the back of our west side yard, and every fourth or fifth plank of the solid redwood 5′ high fence in between our back yard and the owner’s to the south had been removed. We were completely exposed to the prying eyes of the owner, and to the excruciating (and expensive to cool against) heat of the summer sun here in the Palm Springs area. Worse, what could it mean that he thought it was OK to put up a gate on our property without asking us? It looked like he was trying to take over our back yard by adverse possession or torture by privacy deprivation or something.

That was it. I cut back my hours at my job and began actually to work on securing the house.

Then we really started to get notices and noticed. Peter was working at the 29 Palms Marine Base the day I began work on remodeling the house, Saturday, April 29, 2007. Since I had received all those notices about clutter and the construction did, of course, look cluttered, I put up a temporary curtain to work behind. The manager was on the other side of the curtain in about two seconds, yelling my name and saying, “I have a notice here, you have to take this drape down.” I said I’d be right out to get the notice, but since I was just doing the construction that the owner had approved and trying to hide the clutter while I was doing it, maybe she’d want to have some law on her side before she gave me a notice. She asked what approval. I said those papers with the drawings I gave you over a year ago. She said she didn’t remember what those were and she had just given them to the owners. I said those were plans for doing what I am doing, and the owner approved them. She said she’d discuss this with the owners before she served me the notice.

She never came back, but the next morning, Sunday, I went to talk to her to try to avoid trouble by telling her I was not going to leave that tacky curtain up after the construction was done, and anyway, the owners’ construction yard was messier than mine, so they couldn’t be serious in bothering us about construction clutter. She said she would tell them what I said.

Hand painted mural gate (using recycled Real Estate FOR SALE sign!)

That whole day until it got dark, a parade of cars drove slowly by our house, made immediate u-turns, and drove slowly back. The occupants stared at our house, even while I was standing in the kitchen window looking at them, so I knew they had agreed to do that to try to stop me.

I therefore stayed up all night preparing a pre-complaint questionnaire to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. I included complaints about all the trespasses on our rented property, about 80 by then, once a week since we’d been here. I included notices about clutter when there was no clutter, seemingly to punish us for having a dog the owners learned they could not make us kill or move, after all.

I served a copy on the resident manager for the owners between 9 and 10 that Monday morning, May 1, 2006, and mailed it to DFEH. I guess I thought if they realized I was serious they would leave me alone. I was thinking about the prior owner who had lost so much money fighting with us, and I thought if he had known it was going to turn into that, he would not have done what he did. I thought they both probably thought we were the ordinary poor tenants who couldn’t defend themselves.

Stop complaining won’t you?

I was so wrong. Eleven days later, on May 12, 2006, their lawyer wrote us a letter threatening we would be evicted and have to move our home from the park if we did not immediately stop violating some park rules. It was very unclear, but it was meant to intimidate. I sent it to the State Bar complaining the threats trying to make us spend money as they wanted us to constituted extortion, all the facts in it were untrue, and the law was intentionally misstated to pretend we must spend our money doing what they wanted or be evicted and pay their attorney’s fees, and have to pay their attorney’s fees at several earlier stages as well.

sweet potato vines growing happily to shade south side yard

I quit my work completely and began studying mobilehome law preparing to file a complaint in court against them. It’s a good thing I did because on June 13, 2006, four days after I filed the lawsuit, we were personally served by a process server at night with a seven-day notice from their lawyer, taking out the facts stated in their earlier letter I had shown in my complaint to the State Bar to be untrue, but still concluding we were violating rules as the letter had done, and still saying if we did not stop we were going to be evicted. The threat that we would have to move our home from the Park was taken out too, since I had pointed out the law says even if mobilehome tenants are evicted for violating rules, they can sell their mobilehome on site to a new tenant who will get a new tenancy and a new chance to not violate rules.

In the over two years since then, I have spent full-time and Peter has spent most of his time, working on the remodeling and fighting the damages case we filed against them, an injunction case they filed six months (!) later and didn’t bother to serve until five months after that but still claimed was urgent four months later, an appeal of the judge’s denial of our motion to dismiss that case because it was clearly retaliatory for our remodeling of the house and our complaints to the government about their interfering with that remodeling, and now another case for damages we are filing against different people. Those have continued the pattern of interference with our remodeling and retaliation started by the earlier owner, who has moved away and now lets his son—such a pro from that Sunday in 2005 to the present—manage the Park through a different management company he hired. We got an eviction notice in May, which was good because now, like the owner in Morongo Valley, they cannot collect rent from us, so we have more money to spend on our remodeling. What that means from a legal point of view is there probably will be an eviction case by them and another motion by us about its being retaliatory for our exercise of our constitutional rights to remodel our house whatever legal way we choose and to complain to the government if they interfere with us.

So the thing I have to say about demonstrating ultra low cost housing is, it did not turn out at all as we planned. We thought it would be about building. How you can do it yourself for next to nothing, using recycled building materials and your own work. We thought it would be about fun. How fun it is to figure out how to be creative in reusing materials instead of spending money buying manufactured new stuff. We thought it would be about low cost. How those recycled materials are cheap or free. We thought it would be about how easy it is. How you can live in a house while you make it more comfortable and gracious, bigger, growing all your own food, and cheaper to heat and cool.

How wrong we were. It turned out that “demonstrating” has more in common with what I saw in Berkeley, the civil rights movement, and stopping the Vietnam War than I ever dreamed it would. It’s difficult to get time to build when you are being threatened with eviction every time you turn around. It’s not fun to worry about where you will live if you are evicted and be spied on and have your privacy and even literally your physical safety threatened. It’s not cheap to spend your life fighting lawsuits when you could be making a good income instead. And it’s not easy. If Peter and I had not had exactly the skills and background we have, we would have been evicted long ago.

However, like many other unplanned things, this has turned out to be better than what we planned. We are exactly the people to fight the fight.

A view of the courtyard

Now that what happened to us shows there is one, the fight must be fought for many others who would have been the “white trash” it looked like it would be easy for the owners to claim we were, and claim that was their reason for interfering with us. It is beyond ludicrous to claim people with a master’s degree from Cambridge in URBAN PLANNING and a former real estate lawyer who has made fortunes remodeling and selling houses are remodeling a house in some trashy way and making your TRAILER PARK located in a lower-income city of the U.S. look bad. Our house and gardens become more beautiful and productive, and cheaper to heat and cool, every day. However, “white trash” and all other kinds of people have the same rights we do, and once these owners have to pay us, other park owners will be more likely to leave even “white trash” people alone, as they should and as they are required by law to do. If people are remodeling their houses in legal ways, and not having all-night loud parties or whatever any people really do that they shouldn’t do, they have rights that must not be transgressed.

It’s an interesting life. I’ll be busy in Arizona doing some real estate projects this summer, but I’ll keep you posted here and Peter will be in Desert Hot Springs holding down the fort. Sometimes literally, it turns out.

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