Notice to vacate leaves Maryville mobile home park residents with few options

MARYVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Families who own mobile homes at a park in Maryville have been told their property leases will end in three months on June 30. As a result, they will either move their homes or sell them to the property owner.

The lives of about a dozen Blount County families have been turned upside down by the unexpected notice. These homeowners and others have some tough decisions to make. They live at the Thornhill Mobile Home Community in Maryville.

Ann Wade, 85, moved here when the park was new in the mid-80’s. She and others who own their trailers received this expiration of lease and notice to vacate two weeks ago.

“The day before Easter Sunday and told us to get out,” Janice Moulden said. “Vacate the premises or sell my property. I don’t have nowhere to go.”

“I live here because I’m poor. This was the best I could manage,” said Alice Henke. I still have a mortgage on top of paying him lot rent. So, I am paying almost 900 a month.

A new owner bought the Thornhill community about two years ago. Residents said lot rent was a $150 a month back then. Today, it is 450 dollars a month.

“This is my first home I ever owned,” said David Tate. “And it’s sad. Like everyone else, we can’t afford to move them.

Moulden estimated it would cost about $2,500 to move her mobile home. More than what her monthly check of $840 would allow.

For some homeowners, there are multiple generations living in the park.

“My mom, my sister, my uncle, everybody including me is going to have to move,” said Tommy Pass. “So, I don’t know where I’m going to go, what I’m going to do, at that point in time.”

“The biggest thing that I can see, these trailer parks don’t want these old trailers,” Alma Gorton said. “It is very hard to find a place to put a trailer, if you had the money to do it.”

“It is terrible. There are people dying of cancer here,” said Gorton’s daughter Lisa Graham. “My mother, she can’t walk. This lady can’t walk. She lives on a check. She has nowhere to go.”

Legal Aid attorney Darrell Winfree was asked to represent one of the homeowners. He said since residents were given a 90-day notice, the landlord is in the clear from a legal perspective.

“The law in the state is very landlord centric,” Winfree said. “If they are given appropriate notice and if there is no bad faith conduct that is done by the landlord even in circumstances like this where people are losing out on their homes. There is very little that can be done as far as recourse to stop these evictions.”

Park owner Caleb Hazelbaker did not return requests for comment from WATE. Homeowners offered a direct message to him.

“He needs to change his mind,” Graham said. He needs to have a heart.”

“I wish at least he’d give us more time or give us the option to stay,” Pass said. “I understand everybody has to make money, but why make it off the poor?

A little more than nine percent of Tennessee’s population lives in manufactured homes. Now, private investors are buying up some of the properties.

The independent Lincoln Institute estimates that about one-fifth of manufactured housing communities across the country have been purchased by investors in the previous eight years.

In Tennessee, some of the mom and pop owned communities are being bought out and often residents who own their own homes are being forced out because of new legal lease agreements.

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