We say we care about affordable housing. The saga at Meridian Estates suggests otherwise
Let’s just call it what it is: the affordable housing no one seems to care about.
This week, The News Tribune’s Angelica Relente published a story about the plight of dozens of families who have made a life for themselves at the Meridian Mobile Estates in Puyallup. The gist is straightforward and familiar: a developer with plans to build a 230-unit apartment building purchased the mobile home park last year. Now the families are being forced to move by October. Nearly all of them live there, at least in part, for the cheap rent.
The price of progress, as it were. More than 40 families thrust into housing uncertainty so some day a shiny new building can emerge. Hundreds of presumably fancier, largely market rate units take the place of what was previously a lowly trailer park, never mind the fact that this trailer park was one of the very few places where low-income Pierce County residents can still make a go of it.
The message? Oh, it’s right there, even if it’s never verbalized.
When our elected leaders and progressive visionaries talk about the critical need for affordable housing, they’re not talking about that housing. When they pump millions of dollars into new affordable housing developments — typically the kind of boilerplate mixed-use developments we’ve come to know and love — they’re eager to show up to the ribbon cutting ceremonies and tout the new units created, but silent when confronted with the already affordable housing options disappearing before our eyes.
Those homes, and those people, will just have to figure it out.
Best of luck.
Naturally occurring affordable housing
So who are the people who live in places like mobile home parks? And more importantly, what does it say about the society we’ve built that we care so little for them?
Those are the questions we should really be asking ourselves.
In the case of Meridian Estates, they’re families like Armando Aragon’s, which sought out the mobile home park so they could afford to take care of their adult son Brian, who was severely injured in a car accident seven years ago. The home cost Aragon and his family roughly $15,000, and it costs $710 a month to rent the land. The savings allowed them to have enough left over to make the home ADA accessible for Brian, among other upgrades they’ve made.
They’re also families like Saraim Nieto’s, which previously paid $1,400 a month for an apartment in Fife. After paying $19,000 for the mobile home roughly three years ago, the $700 a month the family now pays in rent at Meridian Estates was supposed to help them save for their son’s college education. So much for that.
Here’s the thing, though: These aren’t sentimental rarities cherry-picked for effect. Over the last decade, Tacoma, Pierce County and the entire state have watched as mobile home parks and other forms of what’s often referred to as “naturally occurring affordable housing” have been swooped up and redeveloped, and that market-driven trend comes with a cost.
According to the Department of Commerce website, more than 300 families across Washington have been displaced from mobile home parks over the last four years alone. This year, seven more are scheduled to close. The figures don’t take into account all the other forms of non-subsidized, organic low-income housing we’ve lost to redevelopment, places like what the Tiki Apartments and Merkle Hotel used to be. (As KNKX’s Will James reported, three years after redevelopment of the Merkle, a number of former tenants had experienced homelessness and at least five had died.)
What these properties have in common is they’re easy targets for opportunistic developers looking to make money in a housing market where prices are booming. They’re rough around the edges. They’re stigmatized. They’re regularly described as eyesores or blight. They’re the down-and-out residential motels, the code violations, and, sometimes, the places of last resort.
They also serve a vulnerable population of people often at the very bottom of the economic rung.
In other words, precisely the kind of people we say we want to help when we talk about Pierce County’s shortage of affordable housing.
That’s where our collective hypocrisy lives.
The truth about Meridian Estates
As Relente’s reporting suggests, it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. There are things the state and local municipalities could do to improve the situation, according to some experts and advocates, including intervening sooner, increasing relocation assistance for those impacted by redevelopment or, perhaps in the case of rural Pierce County, designating public land for use by mobile homes.
Still, even if such policies were enacted tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve the larger problem — that our approach to housing relies so heavily on the private sector, and the private sector will always be driven by profit, people be damned.
Unfortunately, it also wouldn’t erase the nagging, unsightly truth that the saga of Meridian Estates reveals, and what it tells us about ourselves:
Sure, we say we care about affordable housing and the people it serves … but only if it’s the kind of affordable housing we like.
On second thought, perhaps it’s easier to look away.
This story was originally published August 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
