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The residents of Viking Terrace haven't resisted Lakeshore alone. Meet the city and state officials, nonprofit leaders, and Northfield community members who stepped up to support the residents and learn what happened when Lakeshore executives came to Viking Terrace.
Not Mobile is a podcast about people in my hometown (Northfield, Minnesota) and across the state who are fighting to protect their communities and one of the most important forms of affordable housing: manufactured home parks.
Nationally, corporations and private equity firms have bought up manufactured home parks and are squeezing money out of the residents: residents who are often low income, immigrants, working families, or people on fixed income (disability and Social Security).
In April 2022, Lakeshore Management Inc, a company that consistently increases rent while cutting amenities, bought the manufactured home park Viking Terrace in Northfield, Minnesota.
This series highlights the residents, lawyers, community leaders, and local and state officials who are fighting back against Lakeshore and fighting for the right of everyone to have a safe, affordable community to call home.
Intro:
On the night of Tuesday, July 12th, people packed into the Northfield City Council chambers. Residents of the manufactured home park, Viking Terrace, and their supporters, were there to participate in the meeting’s public comment period. It was one week after Viking Terrace elected its Resident Association Board and the first public opportunity for the board to establish legitimacy as a voice for residents.
Six residents spoke from prepared statements to tell their city government how they had suffered since Lakeshore Management bought their park in April. To their credit, city officials, including Mayor Rhonda Pownell, had attended resident meetings since the beginning of the crisis. For residents and organizers though, speaking at a city council meeting was an important step. Meetings are public, live streamed, and recorded for transparency. And that night, Pam Thompson of the Northfield News, me and News Director Rich Larson of KYMN Radio, and Erin Adler of the Star Tribune, the largest newspaper in Minnesota, were there as witnesses and as messengers for what the residents had to say.
Some residents spoke through the City of Northfield’s full time translator, Claudia Garcia.
Resident Rosa Perez spoke about how Lakeshore wanted all personal items removed from people’s lawns, including bicycles, trampolines, and children’s toys.
Rosa Perez: 15:28 “Buenas tardes. Yo soy Rosa Perez. Vivo en Viking Terrace por 22 años y estoy preocupada por lo que está pasando.”
Claudia Garcia translating: “So hello, my name is Rosa Perez and I’ve lived in Viking Terrace for 22 years and I’m very worried of what’s going on.”
Rosa Perez: “Porque estas personas llegaron muy agresivas: quitándoles juegos a los niños. No quieren juguetes, no quieren trampolines, no quieren nada para ellos.”
Claudia Garcia translating: “The new management company came in very aggressive. They started taking away the toys, games, anything for the children to entertain themselves: trampolines, etcetera. They don’t want the kids to have anything to play with.”
Another resident, Glenda Orrego, gave a powerful statement that I think summed up how many Viking Terrace residents were feeling.
Glenda: “Good evening Mayor Rhonda Pownell and council members. My name is Glenda Orrego and I live in Viking Terrace. I’m an advocate for the Community Action Center and a member of the Human Rights Commission… I am a mother of four. Three of my girls have graduated from Northfield High School and have attended college or will this fall. A lot of my neighbors and I are immigrants, strong families, and hard workers. Some of us don’t speak, write, or read English. For many years we have been living in shadows. But for the first time we are getting organized as neighbors which is important because our home is in danger.”
Glenda used to live in Northfield Estates, an apartment building with many health and safety issues highlighted in the previous episode. Buying a home in Viking Terrace got her and her family out of terrible living conditions.
“My home is not the newest, but it is something I can afford. A lot of people have the idea that Viking Terrace is the worst place to live, but for me, it’s my home and it gives me and my family security, happiness, and dignity. Today I am here in front of the council to tell you we need help. The city asked us to get organized: here we are. We need to know what the city can do for us. Lakeshore Management makes us feel threatened with the new contract and rules. For the first time we are here saying to the council, ‘we are Northfield residents. These are our homes, our neighbors and that’s everything we have.’ Thank you.”
{insert clapping}
Resident Association members Nathaly Hernandez and Danielle Gates, Board President Jorge Zuccolotto and resident advocates Mar Valdecantos, Gina Washburn, and Teresa Garcia Delcompare spoke in support of Viking Terrace. Five other Northfield community members also spoke in support of the residents including two teachers from the school closest to Viking Terrace.
Anne Larson: 12:18 “My name is Anne Larson. I am a recently retired teacher from Greenvale Park Elementary School. And I am here to support my students and of course their families. They are being bullied. They are being intimidated by an outside company that has come in... We cannot allow this to happen to members of our communities, our neighbors, our friends, our students, our children.”
In a rare move the city council and mayor asked City Administrator Ben Martig to prepare a response to the public comments detailing how Northfield was addressing resident concerns.
Ben Martig: 00:41 “First we are very concerned about what we are hearing. The city is committed to healthy, safe, and affordable housing for all in our community. We are also committed to do whatever we can to ensure that management treats people respectfully, fairly, and has reasonable standards and rules.
Ben Martig explained that he, other city officials and the city attorney had been in communication with the organizations supporting Viking Terrace residents including Rice County Neighbors United, The Northfield Community Action Center, The Housing Justice Center, and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. He said the city was looking into both policy and ordinance changes as well as how best to use soft power to support the residents.
Mayor Rhonda Pownell also asked City Councilor George Zuccolotto to speak. George is 27 years old and the only councilor of color. He ran for office in 2020 on a platform of preserving and expanding Northfield’s affordable housing. He was appointed by the mayor as the non-voting City Council Liaison to the Housing and Redevelopment Authority, or HRA. He lives with his family in Viking Terrace and his father, Jorge Zuccolotto, is the Resident Association president.
George Zuccolotto: “I’m very hopeful for the future. It’s gonna be a fight, but I love this community. I have every intention to stay here. I’m here with you guys and if they kick us out I’m with you.”
For me, this meeting was an example of how I want Northfield to be: a transparent, welcoming community that takes care of its own no matter how much money residents make or what they look like. This is an ideal Northfield does not always live up to. But in this episode, you’ll meet the city officials, community leaders, and non-profit advocates who work to make Northfield a safe, affordable city while supporting Viking Terrace residents in this time of crisis. And you’ll see how Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison stepped in on behalf of the residents.
Episode 2: Good Neighbors
Throughout my research I’ve noticed that residents in manufactured home communities can often feel isolated from the cities they live in. This isn’t surprising, because traditionally, city governments across the country have relegated manufactured home parks to the outskirts of town, sometimes requiring parks to be separated from surrounding neighborhoods by a literal fence. Residents in manufactured home parks can also face stigma and prejudice. And when park residents have problems with their utilities or disagreements with park owners, it can feel like they have no one to turn to.
So for me, some big questions were: how can those who don’t live in manufactured housing be better neighbors to those who do? What kind of city and state infrastructure is necessary to protect the rights of manufactured home park residents? And why is it important for all of us that the manufactured home parks in our cities thrive?
In the case of Viking Terrace, there was pre-existing political and social infrastructure to rely on in this time of crisis. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been challenging for the Viking Terrace residents to resist Lakeshore and it doesn’t mean Northfield has always done enough to support Viking Terrace and other marginalized groups in our community. But it does mean there were already strong relationships between community activists, non-profit groups, city officials, and other community leaders that could be called upon when Viking Terrace needed help.
But before we go into detail about how city and state resources were leveraged on behalf of Viking Terrace, we need context about why manufactured housing is so important, both in Northfield, and across the country.
We are in the middle of a national housing crisis. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that’s “dedicated to ending America’s affordable housing crisis,” there is no state in the country where someone making minimum wage can afford a two bedroom apartment. Minnesota is suffering an extreme housing shortage, with the Twin Cities area experiencing one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, according to census data.
And for those who do have housing, 32% of Americans and 26% of Minnesotans were “cost burdened” by their housing in 2021. When a renter or homeowner is “cost burdened” it means they are spending more than 30% of their income on their housing. This could include paying utilities, rent, and mortgages.
In 2021, Northfield completed a comprehensive study of the city’s housing needs,which can be found on the city’s website. The report found that 20% of Northfield homeowners, and a staggering 45% of renters, were cost-burdened by their housing.
Though not everyone agrees on solutions to the problem, Northfield city officials and housing advocates are very aware of the need for additional housing, especially affordable housing and are working to modernize city laws to better support those in existing housing.
Assistant City Attorney Alissa Harrington summarized for me how Northfield updated its rental ordinance this spring, right before Lakeshore bought Viking Terrace.
Alissa: 3:36 “It was actually a massive project. The old rental housing ordinance really was set in this mindset of renters being bad keepers of their property. Again, ideas that, uh, we no longer adhere to and no longer want to have in the code. And so the idea was to really start from a place of needs. We went through a comprehensive process.
There were interviews with current and past staff who worked with the rental housing program, and then we actually went to the community and had sessions with different groups who were going to be affected by it. We had a specific session with landlords, a specific session with tenants, a specific session with people who were active in the policy side and activist side of those issues.”
11:13 “One of the things that we did was make sure that there were processes in place that would allow city inspectors to go in and provide an advisory opinion to homeowners or to people who are living in rental housing in general. And the purpose of these was really to make sure that no one's hiding the ball.”
The new rental ordinance wasn’t meant to create more housing, but city officials hoped to level the playing field between renters and homeowners and generally make Northfield more hospitable to renters.
Melissa Hanson is the Housing Coordinator for the City of Northfield and serves as staff liaison to Northfield’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority, or HRA. She spoke with me this summer about what the city has been doing to address its housing challenges and she gave me a thick three ring binder full of housing policies and programs that I could take home.
Big obstacles to new units are a lack of available land in Northfield and high construction costs. So instead, the city has focused on preserving existing housing to keep families in their homes.
Melissa: 2:08 “Right now we're really trying to support the naturally occurring affordable housing. The older homes. Those that also have still older families or couples still living in those homes.”
Melissa highlighted Northfield’s aging-in-place grant program, which provides up to $20,000 to families earning extremely low incomes, and the city’s rehab program which helps preserve older homes.
3:53 “ I was not aware of how many older homes don't even have sidewalks that go to their homes, right? So we're finding a lot of, um, sidewalks, ramps, ramps are very important cuz you can't do anything if you can't get in and outta your home, and grab bars. Those seem to be the, uh, two biggest ones. And then the third would be bathroom modifications. People are taking out their tubs because it's dangerous for them to step in and step out. That’s where most of the falls and injuries occur.”
The 2022 funds for these programs ran out quickly because of high demand. The city awarded seven aging in place grants and eleven home rehabilitation loans this year.
Renters in Northfield face challenges that I hadn’t been aware of. Melissa said in Rice County there are 300 Section 8 Voucher-holders, who receive rent assistance through the federal government, but as of this summer, only 13 were housed in Northfield. Why? Because most rental units are full and some landlords won’t accept Section 8 Vouchers. Furthermore, some Northfield neighborhoods are zoned to only allow up to 20% of homes in a single block to be granted rental licenses. Melissa reported that some Northfielders have gotten rental licenses with no intention of using them in order to prevent there being renters on their block.
Beyond preserving existing housing in Northfield, Melissa said the city encourages new housing projects and several new developments are underway. However, builders and city officials often cite the cost of building new housing units as a barrier and during the pandemic, demand for more affordable housing rose as people lost their jobs and had to care for themselves or sick loved ones, while construction costs also rose because of supply chain issues. The cost of existing housing also skyrocketed as families with means bought homes in less urban areas with more space.
A CNBC article from May 2021 titled, “Home construction sees biggest drop since pandemic hit. Here’s why” summed up the crisis in the first line, “Despite a historic shortage of homes for sale, homebuilders are actually slowing production, handcuffed by skyrocketing commodity prices and shortages of land and skilled labor.”
So the national housing crisis, made worse by Covid-19, has not left Northfield unscathed. But manufactured housing, a type of affordable housing that cities have traditionally disdained, might be part of the solution to this crisis nationally and in Northfield.
Manufactured home parks, a more accurate term to use instead of mobile home parks or trailer parks, are often stereotyped as trashy, crime-ridden, temporary housing. In fact, studies show no significant increase in crime in manufactured home parks compared to income-similar residential areas. And, since the 1970s, manufactured home parks are meant to be permanent housing.
In September, I interviewed Esther Sullivan, author of the book “Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place.”
Esther 00:11 “I'm Esther Sullivan. I'm an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver. I'm a professor of sociology and I study housing. Particularly, I've studied manufactured housing in manufactured housing communities over the last 13 years.”
Esther’s research on manufactured home communities helps fill a shocking gap in the academic literature and she has become a national expert on the topic.
Esther told me the stereotype of manufactured housing parks being transitory communities is a damaging misconception perpetuated by municipal housing and zoning policies.
Esther 19:30 “The stigmas surrounding manufactured housing are just numerous, right? And they're deep, deeply ingrained in American culture and our iconography: our images of manufactured housing. But one of them is this long standing notion that these homes and then the people that live in them are somehow transitory.
Now, this dates back all the way to the Great Depression years when the original trailers really were used as transitory or mobile housing by people who could trail their house behind them and move in search of work. But since those days, manufactured housing has only become more and more affixed to place and permanent.
HUD, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, recognized this and created standards for mobile home construction in 1976 meant to ensure mobile homes were safe, permanent places to live. HUD also officially changed the term “mobile home” to “manufactured home.” Today, manufactured homes are designed to be permanent; they are not built to survive a move after they are installed in a lot. And, just like conventional homeowners, families buy manufactured homes as long-term investments.
And in fact, manufactured home residents are actually less likely to move than residents of site-built housing when their parks stay open. Um, so when parks remain open, the average period of ownership is more than 10 years for manufactured home owners. Now that includes those in parks and those on pieces of land. And for site homeowners, it's six years, right? So 10 years compared to six years, and even manufactured housing renters are also less likely to move than their counterparts that are renting apartments. So annual turnover within manufactured home communities is only about 5% compared to 60% for renters in apartments. So really these communities are designed as and used for permanent affordable housing, but the stigma really remains.”
22:17 “So these social perceptions that we have that manufactured housing is, is mobile, that the residents in manufactured housing are transient, they're reproduced and supported by the treatment of manufactured housing in local planning and zoning policies. We have over a hundred years of planning policies that have treated manufactured housing as something altogether different from conventional housing, so across the nation many zoning ordinances will require that manufactured housing be segregated from site built housing. And then also it clusters them into manufactured housing communities, so into parks. And many local planning policies or zoning codes will require that manufactured housing be located exclusively within parks if it's located within, like, a city jurisdiction. So that's why we see that these homes are clustered together in parks, and then those parks are oftentimes kind of shuffled away. It’s why if you start looking around you at where your local manufactured home communities are, you'll see them along the side of the highway or in a commercial zone on, like a major thoroughfare or something.”
In Northfield, manufactured homes don’t have to be located in parks as long as they adhere to zoning requirements. And Viking Terrace has become centrally located as the city has expanded since 1976. But Viking Terrace is hidden; it’s not easily visible from any main roads in the city and you wouldn’t pass by it on the way to main attractions. It’s hard to walk downtown from Viking Terrace because you have to cross Highway 3, which bisects the town. A plan to make Highway 3 safer and easier to cross and to reconnect the two halves of the town was vetoed by the city council in 2014 over cost concerns. Viking Terrace isn’t hidden by a fence, but you could still live in Northfield without realizing exactly where it is.
Though cities traditionally isolate and ignore manufactured home parks, parks can provide many benefits to families besides being affordable.
For example, they can allow extended families to live near each other. In Viking Terrace, many residents are actually from the same small city in Veracruz, Mexico, called Maltrata. Viking Terrace has provided an affordable way to keep families together and build a tight-knit community. Viking Terrace is a multi racial, multi-generational community that stands in stark contrast to the harmful stereotype of “trailer trash.”
Manufactured housing is also a lot cheaper to build than site-built homes. A 2021 report from the Manufactured Housing Institute found that on average the cost per square foot of building a manufactured home was $57 which is less than half the $119 it costs to build a site-built home.
Mar Valdecantos has emphasized that Viking Terrace was sold to Lakeshore Management for $5 million and if you divided 5 million by 180, which is roughly the number of homes in the park, then that’s about $28,000 per home. Right now, the average cost of a single family home in Minnesota is more than $300,000. Now to be fair, the homes in Viking Terrace are old and some are not in good condition. The average age of a home in Viking Terrace is almost 40 years old. But Mar’s point is that 180 families in Northfield are homeowners living in stable, permanent housing for a fraction of the cost of other types of housing. As long as lot rents stay reasonable, manufactured homes can be a great option for families and retirees.
In Minnesota, around 180,000 people, or 5% of households, live in manufactured homes, though only one third of those people live in manufactured home parks. There are over 900 manufactured home parks in Minnesota. Minnesota has more units of affordable housing in manufactured home parks than government-subsidized affordable housing units.
However, on average, between 2002 and 2018, 2.5 parks closed a year in Minnesota according to data from All Parks Alliance for Change, a Minnesota non-profit led by manufactured home park residents. New parks are just not being built and existing parks are transferring hands from local mom and pop owners to big corporations and private equity firms whose business models threaten park affordability.
In contrast to those state trends, Melissa Hanson readily acknowledges how important manufactured housing is as a form of affordable housing in Northfield. Just as the city has programs to maintain site-built homes, for the past few years it has also had a rehabilitation fund for manufactured homes in Northfield. There are two manufactured home parks, Viking Terrace, and a much smaller one called Riverside, which can benefit from this fund. But maintaining a manufactured home, especially an older model, has its own unique challenges.
Melissa said residents got permission from previous park owners to do home additions and repairs, but the park owners didn’t usually send residents to the city to get proper permits. A lot of work wasn’t done by licensed contractors, partly because many contractors don’t want to work on manufactured homes. That’s a problem the city faces now as they try to connect residents to contractors and fund that work through their Mobile Home Rehabilitation Fund.
Jake Reilly, Northfield’s new Community Development Director, has been working closely with Melissa Hanson and Viking Terrace residents and organizers to determine how the city can best support the residents.
He told me in August that the city was working on several fronts to support the residents. One issue was that Lakeshore claimed residents had to maintain park trees, which is contrary to Minnesota law. Jake said the city had informed Lakeshore they were, in fact, responsible for the trees; if Lakeshore didn’t maintain them properly, the city could trim and remove damaged trees and charge Lakeshore. Lakeshore has since trimmed and removed some, though not all, damaged trees in the park.
But something happened at the end of July that changed the trajectory of the fight against Lakeshore in Northfield and changed what kind of support the residents needed from the city.
On July 27th, Viking Terrace residents received a letter from Lakeshore, in English and Spanish this time, that said in part, “Lakeshore has received feedback from some Viking Terrace residents and we understand the concern over the recently delivered Lease, Rules and Regulations and Homesite Inspection notices. Based on these concerns, we are reviewing all documents with our local attorney and City of Northfield officials. At this time, we are canceling the Rules and Regulations that were sent to you on May 23rd, 2022.”
However, this letter did not come just because of resident complaints to Lakeshore. It came because of complaints to the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.
Shortly after the leases with the 35 pages of strict rules were sent out to residents, Mar Valdecantos began lodging complaints with the Attorney General’s Office on behalf of the residents. What began as individual complaints from her and some residents, grew into a full-fledged letter writing campaign conducted through local churches.
As responsive as Northfield’s government has been, Northfield’s community relationships and social infrastructure have been especially activated by Viking Terrace residents and organizers.
For example, retired attorney Gina Washburn, who has worked alongside Mar to support the Viking Terrace residents since April, toured local churches with Mar, teaching Northfielders how to send effective and accurate complaints to the Attorney General.
Gina Washburn: 14:30 “I would have to say, Rachel, uh, Morey, the Methodist minister who came up with the idea of hosting, uh, an ‘attorney general complaint party.’
15:05 “Mar and I put together a sample complaint form, a completed form, and, I prepared a list of issues that individuals could cut and paste into their complaints so that people felt confident of what, what would be the appropriate things to say. And so that took off. We did, uh, we did a presentation at the Methodist Church and several other churches then requested Mar and I come and speak to their congregations.”
Local churches have stepped in to educate and activate Northfielders as good neighbors and allies in support of Viking Terrace residents. Gina is the chair of the Immigrant Welcoming Ministry at the United Church of Christ, or UCC, in Northfield and has connected her faith to her work fighting for social justice issues. Since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin in May of 2020, Gina has seen an important shift in how local churches prioritize racial justice and social justice.
17:30: “There is a bit of a network in our community among houses of faith. In particular what we work with at first UCC is how do we walk with Christ? How do we live our faith? And so that's, that's a message and a challenge that we have amongst our members. And I really feel strongly that other houses of faith in this community are really critically examining that question. And so this, this, uh, situation with Viking really was a present example of that, uh, opportunity really for many individuals to step in.”
The number of complaints, as well as the number of families affected by Lakeshore’s likely illegal actions, caught the attention of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. After Mar delivered more evidence and documents, the Attorney General’s Office sent a letter to Lakeshore outlining how their lease, rules, and violation letters were incompatible with Minnesota law. A similar letter had been written by the Housing Justice Center and hand-delivered to the Viking Terrace Community Manager by Mar and Gina weeks earlier, with no result. After the letter from the Attorney General’s Office however, Lakeshore rescinded the Viking Terrace lease and rules and fired their Community Manager.
I spoke with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Assistant Attorney General Katherine Kelly, who leads the Special Outreach and Protection Unit, which spearheaded the effort to gain compliance from Lakeshore.
First I asked Attorney General Ellison to explain what his office does and why manufactured home parks residents experiencing challenges with their park owners may need to reach out to his office, instead of the police or local officials.
Keith Ellison: “Attorneys general are in every state and the territories and the federal government, they're not all the same everywhere, but their basic job is the same. If you take for example, the United States Attorney General, that, uh, person is essentially the top law enforcement officer of the state and has authority over civil matters and they're appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate. In Minnesota, and in about 43 other states, the Attorney General runs for office, is not accountable to the governor, but is accountable to the people who elect the Attorney General, which is a big difference, uh, because you have to have an agenda. You have a constituency to cultivate.”
In Minnesota, the attorney general sits on various boards and commissions and serves as criminal prosecutor of last resort. For example, Ellison prosecuted Derek Chauvin at the behest of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. But, he said, the office’s most outward-facing work is consumer protection.
“The attorney general has the authority to sue on behalf of the people of the state of Minnesota whenever there's unfairness or discrimination or something in the area of business commerce or trade.”
Ellison’s Special Outreach and Protection Unit tries to proactively engage with communities who may not know they could reach out to his office for help. Ellison said he believes the program is innovative and unique in the country. Katherine Kelly leads the program and worked directly with Mar Valdecantos and The Housing Justice Center to see whether and how the Attorney General’s Office could intervene in Northfield.
Katherine Kelly: 4:52 “I, um, have the privilege of being part of Attorney General Ellison's new Special Outreach and Protection Unit, and that is a subunit in our consumer protection work that has a very specific mission of going out in the community and bringing our traditional consumer protection tools to protect people in underrepresented communities.”
She explained that immigrant, multilingual communities and low-income communities are especially vulnerable to consumer frauds and also face the most barriers in reporting abuses to the Attorney General’s Office.
Lakeshore’s compliance and withdrawal of the lease was a big win for the Attorney General’s Office.
Katherine Kelly: 15:42 “We believe that compliance, this is Attorney General Ellison's thing that I've adopted, but compliance is way better than lawsuits, right? It's quicker, it achieves better outcomes, it's more resource efficient for the state and for our office. So we just want, we seek compliance right away. Contacted the company. We, um, put a lot of effort into making a very persuasive case to them, uh, not like a lawsuit. But, the message is if you don't do the right thing, a lawsuit is coming because that is our authority. But they did see the severity of what was happening. And… they agreed to come into compliance.”
Ellison has worked to protect the rights of manufactured home residents since he was in the US Congress and he sees corporate park owners as a potentially serious threat to the rights of residents and to the preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing.
Keith Ellison: “Look, if you go into quality manufactured housing, you know that you're walking into quality housing. But if you let it run down and you know, if it's looked upon as just a cash cow for some distant, uh, you know, business person who doesn't really care about the people who live there. It can be pretty bad, it can be pretty bad.”
He sees his role as attorney general as a critical part of making sure Minnesotans have quality housing they can afford.
8:37 “I just believe that in the richest country in the world and one of the most prosperous states in this country, that everybody should have a chance at prosperity. Uh, and what I mean by prosperity is enough to eat, safe place to live. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to be the attorney general, because you can write all the laws you want to, but if you don't have anybody to enforce them, it's like they're just words on a page.
Attorney General Ellison and his team visited Viking Terrace and held an event at Emmaus Church on August 26th, one month after the lease and rules were rescinded by Lakeshore. The event was a Q & A for residents and the Northfield community about the situation with Lakeshore co-hosted by Ellison and the Viking Terrace Resident Association Board.
I asked Attorney General Ellison after the event what his biggest takeaway was.
“People care a lot. The community is united with the Viking Terrace residents. And I just think it’s important for everyone to know that nobody’s gonna push this community around; they have a lot of friends.”
July 27th, the day the lease and rules were rescinded, was a huge victory for Viking Terrace. But it also put the community in limbo, waiting for a new community manager to be hired and new rules to be written. And in the meantime, lot rent could continue to go up twice a year according to Minnesota law.
On August 2nd, six days after the lease was rescinded, six Lakeshore managers and executives met with the Viking Terrace Resident Association Board. Mar Valdecantos, Gina Washburn, Teresa Garcia Delcompare, Margaret Kaplan, Pastor Abe Johnson of Emmaus Church, Pastor Rachel Morey of United Methodist Church, and Jake Reilly also attended the meeting.
Dawn Rumpf, Senior Vice President of Operations at Lakeshore, attended through Zoom but Shawn Halladay, Director of Operations, flew in from Florida for the meeting. Also in attendance were Regional Manager Teresa Compton, Engagement Advisor Amy Gustafsson, a Community Manager from a Lakeshore park in Florida, and Becky Miller, the Community Manager at another Minnesota Lakeshore park who you will hear more about in the next episode. Becky Miller trained Monique, the Viking Terrace Community Manager, and filled in when Monique was let go. Becky Miller and other Lakeshore meeting attendees did not respond to requests for comment.
Gina Washburn spoke with me the day after the meeting to summarize how it went.
Gina: 1:48 “Lakeshore’s Senior Vice President of Operations Dawn Rumpf offered repeated apologies for having gotten off to the wrong start with the residents in Viking Terrace and reiterated the company's intention was to make Viking Terrace, a safe, clean, and well maintained mobile home community.”
Gina and Mar said a recurring theme of the meeting was how the Lakeshore executives scape-goated their Viking Terrace Community Manager, Monique. Residents had simply misinterpreted Lakeshore’s intentions because of Monique’s rudeness.
3:48 “The meeting, uh, really did involve very lengthy representation of issues that the residents have faced and really sad stories by individuals as to how they were mistreated and disrespected by the individual that was, uh, the community manager there. Lakeshore kept, uh, bringing the conversation back to their good intentions and would address many of the issues around their concern for safety. So an example that I thought was interesting was residents talked about how their child would ride the bike home from school and lean the bike up against the trailer and go into the house to have a snack.”
“Well, the way in which Lakeshore looks at that situation is that that's a safety issue for them. They want the bike put away because they don't want anyone tripping over the bike. And it's just a stricture and a restriction on a lifestyle that Lakeshore in its zeal to promote this aesthetic just doesn't appreciate.”
Gina reported that the Lakeshore executives committed to looking into issues like the dank and dirty storm shelters, inadequate street lighting, permission from previous owners for porches and accessibility ramps, and potential grandfathering in of family pets who do not meet Lakeshore’s size and breed requirements. From Gina’s perspective there was a complete disconnect between how the Lakeshore representatives presented themselves and their company and how their rules and actions were interpreted and felt by residents.
10:53 “A lot of the issues that the individuals were concerned about, like the curfew, you know, there's a rule that there's no quote loitering, uh, after 10:00 PM. Um, and Lakeshore's response to that is, ‘Well, that's not like an absolute... We're really concerned about safety issues and strangers in the park,’ kind of a thing, but that's not at all how it was communicated to the residents.”
“One of the observations that was made around that was from Teresa Garcia Delcompare from the Housing Justice Center. She said, people in their homes in Northfield are not under a curfew. So why is it that the residents of this mobile home park have to have a 10:00 PM curfew? It doesn't make any sense. And they didn't have a really strong answer to that.”
The Viking Terrace residents also asked for a bilingual manager, fluent in English and Spanish. Northfield Community Development Director Jake Reilly even provided Lakeshore with resources to find qualified bilingual applicants in Minnesota. Lakeshore said they’d try to hire someone bilingual, but couldn’t only consider bilingual applicants because of hiring discrimination laws. Mar felt the executives downplayed the importance of a bilingual manager, saying residents in other parks figure out ways to communicate, like using their children as translators. In the end, Lakeshore did not hire a bilingual manager.
Overall, Gina thought the meeting was, at the very least, an important opportunity for the Resident Association Board to lay out exactly how Lakeshore had harmed their community in a way that, at least for the two and a half hours the meeting lasted, couldn’t be ignored.
24:25 “It was an opportunity for the residents to vent and to hopefully put faces to the trauma. But whether this will really move the needle in terms of how Lakeshore operates, we really can't predict that because they have their business model and they're going to work that model, uh, for economic gain. That's, you know, that's why they're in the business.”
Mar said she told the executives bluntly that she and the residents do not trust Lakeshore and believe Lakeshore is purely motivated by squeezing as much money out of Viking Terrace as possible.
Mar: 46:23 “Do you think that we don't know what you're doing everywhere and, and what you still want to do here? I mean, you are just about getting money from people and that won't change. And, even though they were saying all the issues stem from a bad manager, it's like, no, the manager was applying your rules.”
Resident Association President Jorge Zuccolotto, who facilitated the meeting, thought it went as well as could be expected. In November I asked him to think back to how he thought that meeting went in August, but also where things stand with Lakeshore today.
Jorge Zuccolotto: 00:10 “I think it went well enough. Um, I think they were already kind of predisposed because, by this time, the AG’s office had got to them already. So when we talked to them it was kind of easy for us because they already knew they were dropping their rules.”
I asked Jorge if the issue of the 15% lot rent increase came up in the meeting.
Cait: And did they give any reason for why they raised the rent?
Jorge: No, nothing. They just say, oh, they say because of the, the, market, blah, blah. That was the point of raising the rent.
Cait: Like the market value.
Jorge: Market value, yeah.
Since the meeting, Jorge has stayed in contact with the Regional Manager, Teresa Compton, to resolve smaller park issues. But, he said, the Resident Association is focusing on developing itself and on helping residents in their day-to-day concerns no matter what Lakeshore does.
9:41 “Uh, we have nothing to discuss with them right now other than the trees. And we talked with them about the street lights. That's on hold for next year because they don't have enough vendors to do that.”
In the meantime, the Resident Association has created bylaws, a logo, an email account and a Facebook page and has been establishing themselves as an organization. They’ve built legitimacy by holding events for residents and other Northfielders in Viking Terrace. And at a November board meeting I attended, a sociology class from Carleton College, one of the two colleges in town, interviewed the board about Viking Terrace.
I spoke with Carleton College Professor Daniel Williams about why he pivoted his curriculum to include Viking Terrace.
Daniel Williams: 00:08 “I'm Daniel Williams. I'm, uh, a visiting associate professor in Africana Studies and sociology and anthropology, at Carleton College.”
He told me once he heard about what was happening in Viking Terrace, he adjusted his plan to teach about more traditional American home ownership to instead focus on manufactured housing. He taught from Esther Sullivan’s book “Manufactured Insecurity” and the course culminated in an ethnographic group interview with the Resident Association Board and student research projects about manufactured housing.
Daniel Williams: 8:23 “We invited, um, Jorge to come to our class and Mar to tell us the background about Viking Terrace and also to essentially identify what the areas were where they thought information was needed. So from that conversation, we distilled it down to four topics that then students broke into groups to do research about. Um, one was history. So the history of mobile home parks in the United States. A second was, um, ownership. What are the trends in ownership? Who owns these mobile home parks? A third was, um, laws and regulations. So what are the rights? And also, you know, how has that changed over time in terms of residents rights? That group looked a lot at eviction. And then the fourth group looked at environmental impacts of mobile home parks.”
After the class finished, the next step was to create a brochure or FAQ that can be translated and shared with manufactured home residents. I asked Professor Williams what he hoped his students took away from the class.
15:14 “ I think that my hope is that they feel motivated by the relevance of what they're doing, that what they're doing matters. That the research is not just an academic exercise, but it is, is speaking to a very real, um, place and a very real set of issues.”
Including college students in the community organizing and community building was another way Viking Terrace residents and organizers have tapped into local resources and relationships. Northfield is a town of 20,000 people, but one quarter of the population is made up of students from St. Olaf College and Carleton College. Northfield is unique in that it’s a double-college town, but the possibilities for awareness and support that nearby colleges can offer are something manufactured home park residents in many communities can consider.
Another thing taking up a lot of the fledgling Resident Association’s time is working with Northfield’s Community Action Center and Brian Kopack, the Mobile Home Rehabilitation Coordinator for the nonprofit Healthy Community Initiative.
I’ve shared how the City of Northfield and individuals in Northfield have worked to support the residents of Viking Terrace this year. But there are also several nonprofits, in addition to Mar’s organization Neighbors United, that have been mobilized in this time of crisis.
When Lakeshore sent out its strict rules and leases there was a lot of fear that many Viking Terrace residents could face eviction. Letters threatened eviction if “rule violations” were not fixed in illegally short amounts of time. In response, the Community Action Center, or CAC, a nonprofit operating in Northfield and the neighboring city of Faribault, created the Mobile Home Community Fund to raise money to prevent evictions in manufactured housing in Rice County, but especially in Viking Terrace. Though their immediate eviction concerns in Viking Terrace abated when the lease was nullified, the CAC is still raising money for this fund and is taking a broad view of preventing eviction.
The CAC runs food shelves in Northfield and Faribault and a clothing store where clothes can be bought with vouchers, they connect individuals with rental assistance, run emergency shelters, manage several funds, and are currently building a new nationally recognized, energy efficient affordable housing project in Northfield. The CAC serves about 9,000 residents of Northfield and Faribault and has long worked with Viking Terrace residents. Several Viking Terrace residents work for the CAC as well.
Scott Wopata, Executive Director of the Community Action Center, said the CAC had early conversations with Viking Terrace residents and Neighbors United about what a fund to support the residents would look like. But as the CAC discussed how best to put together that fund, it became clear to them that they needed to support Viking Terrace while lifting all boats.
Scott Wopata: 17:34 “We asked our participants, and some of our participants live at Viking, some of them live in other mobile home parks: should we create a specific fund for this property or should we create a fund for the community of mobile home park tenants? It was very clear that if you pose that question, especially to non Viking Terrace mobile home park residents, it was ‘why would you only support one community if you're saying the need is systemic’ was like really thrown back in our face.”
18:38 “In terms of the challenges of affording repairs, the challenge of finding contractors to do repairs, the need for rental assistance, the need to help with finances in times of crisis were a shared identity across all mobile homes. And so it was loud and clear that the most just response was to make this a mobile home specific target, but not isolated to one property or one community.”
Another non-profit that works closely with the CAC is Healthy Community Initiative, or HCI. One of their programs, Growing Up Healthy, works with Rice County Latino and immigrant children and families to connect them with educational, social, and health resources and services.
This past spring, Growing Up Healthy hired Brian Kopack as the Mobile Home Rehabilitation Coordinator. Brian has a home inspection company and has worked on manufactured home weatherization initiatives in Northfield and Faribault. Now, he faces the gargantuan task of coordinating support for residents in all the manufactured home parks in Northfield and Faribault. His job has only gotten more complicated since the crisis with Lakeshore erupted.
Adding even more complexity, Brian is also involved in helping distribute funds from the new CAC Mobile Home Community Fund.
I asked Brian what his work day looks like as Mobile Home Rehabilitation Coordinator.
Brian Kopack: 16:06 “Um, my ideal day is to get to a home at eight o'clock in the morning and fix the repairs that need to be done by 10 o'clock in the morning. That's not how most of my days go. Typically my day looks like I go and I do a home assessment and I find five or six glaring issues that need to get addressed. They should have been addressed several years ago and haven't been. If I can get one or two of them taken care of right then and there, I will.”
Brian is still figuring out how to stay organized while dealing with the sheer volume of requests for help. He also coordinates translation assistance and juggles the fact that most people work during the hours he needs to be at their homes. Pandemic supply chain issues also impact his job. Brian does a lot of work himself because it’s difficult to find other qualified contractors.
20:34 “Working underneath a mobile home is challenging . It's tight spaces, it's dirty. There's animals and insects and who knows what down there. A lot of the electricians and plumbers are very, very busy already with new home building and, um, large scale manufacturing jobs.”
I asked Brian if there are any misconceptions about manufactured housing or his work that he wanted to address.
27:48 “The stigma around the mobile home community and the thought process people have is, well, if the homes are in such rough repair and they're old and they don't work anymore, why don't the residents just find another place to live? And the answer there is that they don't have the option of another place to live…. This is their home. Pulling up roots and moving their whole family isn't an option for them… The kids are enrolled in school. They have jobs in the community. We wanna help them live the best they can.”
“Anytime I'm able to help a family seal up a roof, get a water heater working again, stop a leaking kitchen sink that's been causing issues in their home for a couple years. It, it just, empowers the family. My hope is that we can do that for more people and get them happier than what their current conditions offer.”
It has not always been easy or comfortable for residents, organizers, local officials, community activists and Northfield nonprofits to work together to support Viking Terrace. There have been miscommunications and differing opinions about whether it's more realistic to focus on Viking Terrace or if it’s necessary to support all local manufactured home residents.
But there are a lot of people, a lot more than I could introduce you to in these first two episodes, who have been working tirelessly both inside and outside Viking Terrace for years to make the whole Northfield community stronger and more accessible to everyone. I want to finish this episode by introducing Vicki Dilley, who has been doing a lot to support Viking Terrace, but who is also one of the kindest people I know. This episode is about how people outside of manufactured home parks can be good neighbors to everyone in their communities in all types of housing. And it’s about how being a good neighbor is an active quality; it requires self-reexamination, collaboration, and continuous work. Vicki Dilley has dedicated her life to examining and embodying what it means to be a good neighbor. She uses an expansive, even international definition of the word “neighbor,” and spoke to me about how her work through Rotary International and Emmaus Church translated into support for Viking Terrace this year.
Vicki Dilley: 00:11 “I'm Vicky Dilly. I live in Northfield, Minnesota. And really I'd like to be known as a community volunteer. I have been very involved in Rotary Youth Exchange making, uh, it possible for some amazing young people to be able to have international and cross-cultural experiences. But with Rotary also it's a service organization. And so there's lots and lots of different ways that we serve locally and internationally.
And this has always been my interest. My formative years when I was a young person out of college, was my involvement as a Peace Corps volunteer and living in community, certainly learning a great deal about community, about who our neighbor is and what a community can do collectively together. And the other piece is asking who is my neighbor?”
1:56 “I belong to Emmaus Church in Northfield, and it is the church closest to Viking Terrace. And as the years have gone by, maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 years, we have been a bit more intentional in knowing our proximity to our neighbors.”
Vicki co-chairs the Emmaus Justice Initiative, which was formed after the murder of George Floyd. Through the Justice Initiative, Vicki has helped coordinate events with residents and organizers, including a meeting that gathered community leaders to sign up for action committees to support the residents. One committee is a group of volunteers who committed to supporting Brian Kopack.
For Vicki, the idea of a family’s home being threatened is personal. And I want to end this episode with a little bit of her story because she articulated beautifully what being an empathetic, welcoming, good neighbor means.
Vicki Dilley: “I grew up in Wyoming and Montana and I grew up in poverty myself. I had some housing situations where, um, well there was circumstances within the family that created a lot of insecurity for what I could call home as a child. And so there was times that our family were evicted from homes and, um, the sense of instability and, and how scary that was and where was our next place to be? Um, I've lived that experience, so, um, that draws me into this even a little bit more probably. Home is really important to me, and feeling secure is really important and thinking that somebody that I live just a few blocks away from would have that same insecurity on a day to day basis, and their children can't play in the yard like my children were able to, they weren't able to visit with their neighbors or gather for a barbecue or all the privileges that I live with that somebody else wouldn't have that.
Besides the idea that they might be out on the street at any moment, even though they own the structure that they're living in.”
Cait Kelley: “Is there anything else that you wanted to share that I didn't ask about?”
“Well, I think the only thing is that I, you know, I think I keep learning, and that's exciting for me is to just keep learning and thinking about how to live together and be enlightened. And perhaps I've been complacent over too many years about the situation with my neighbors too. So, um, I, I'm glad that we have an awakening happening here.”
On the next episode of “Not Mobile” we’ll get to know the other Lakeshore parks in Minnesota and meet other residents who are fighting back.