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Mobile home owner protection comes too late for Warrenton families

April 15, 2004
By: Lindsay Shively
State Capital Bureau

One mid-missouri lawmaker wants to give mobile home owners more time before being evicted. As Lindsay Shively reports, this comes too late for some families in Warrenton, Missouri.

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Actuality:tina5lks
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Contents: There were no "for sale" signs, nothing. We knew nothing until we saw it on the front page of the paper.

That's how Tina Rowe says she and her neighbors at Warrenton's Mobile Inn mobile home park found out they would have to leave their homes . . . a newspaper article describing new construction planned for the place her family had lived for more than two years.

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Contents: They just kept talking about this one-acre tract of land and we're going "Ok?". And then they continued describing the location and we said "Wait, that's us. They are going to build a cinema where we're sitting now."

Rowe says about three weeks later, residents were told they had 90 days to move. The law only requires sixty days notice before an eviction.

But Warrenton Representative Mike Sutherland is trying to change that. Sutherland is sponsoring a bill to extend the required notice to 120 days.

He says the bill comes too late to help the residents of Mobile Inn, but it would help other people who face the same problem in the future.

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Contents: While 120 days is still maybe a short amount of time, I think by doubling the amount of time, hopefully we've made a significant move for the quality of life for those people so they aren't backed into a corner when they're put in that situation.

Many older mobile homes can't be moved at all ... and Rowe says moving her mobile home cost her thousands of dollars.

Actuality:tina3lks
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Contents: Between moving the trailer and having to have the air conditioning and everything hooked back up and the U-Hauls that we had to rent and the hotel rooms we had to stay in I would say probably all in all it was close to 4000 dollars to move.

She says her family got help from local charities to pay for the move ... but some residents weren't so lucky ... and some of those families had to abandon their homes.

Ronald Gargus, another Mobile Inn resident, says one of his neighbors sold his trailer for one dollar because he couldn't afford to move it.

Gargus says more notice would give people the time they need to get the money to move their homes.

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Contents: The middle class doesn't have that kind of money to be throwing this way and that way. I think the eviction notice should be longer because there are a lot of people who have lost their trailers because the eviction notice wasn't that long.

Sutherland says the extra sixty days takes some of the desperation off while residents try to put together money to move, But Rowe says that for some, time is no help.

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Contents: For some people, it's not going to matter how much time they have, they aren't going to be able to get the funds together to move.

The bill sponsored by Sutherland faces no opposition ... but it needs final approval in the House ... and with the end of the legislative session only weeks away, the bill may not get a final vote this year.

From the State Capitol, I'm Lindsay Shively.