Yet another mobile home park in the greater St. Cloud area is scheduled to be sold and shut down, leaving its residents in a terrible lurch. This one is the Sartell Mobile Home Park, until about two years ago known as Hi-Vue Mobile Home Park, along Second Street South near the Williams Integracare Clinic.
It’s the third such sale in the area — the two others being in St. Cloud and Waite Park.
Currently, many of its residents have formed a board with hopes they can collectively buy the park as a non-profit association. An organization called Northcountry Cooperative Foundation is helping them with the process. We hope those residents succeed because there are 163 mobile homes in that park, each a home to families of various numbers – from senior citizens living alone to young families with children. Some of the residents have lived there for nearly 40 years, and in some cases the children of the first residents, now grown, have children of their own and they live there too, a place they have always known as “home.”
At a recent Sartell City Council meeting, some of the residents spoke to the council. They told a bit about their lives and why they are hoping the ownership process is successful. If it isn’t, they will have to find someplace else to live, and that is not an easy option because it’s unlikely they can afford other forms of housing. In their testimony, it was clear they are economically challenged, but their fortitude, their pride of their homes and their sense of neighborliness came through loud and clear.
There are about 1,000 mobile home parks in Minnesota with about 50,000 living units, all told. Those residents tend to be among the most economically vulnerable of people who just don’t have a lot of money to work with for a number of reasons. It’s such a shame they are susceptible to the fate of their living spaces when mobile home parks, with infrastructural deterioration or other factors, cause the park owners to shut down and sell the land.
We should view these people as our neighbors, we should rally to their cause, and we should press the City of Sartell and other movers-and-shakers in the greater St. Cloud area to do anything in their power to help these people maintain their homes.
We applaud the Twin Cities-based Northcountry for stepping up to the plate to help the residents. That cooperative has helped save other parks and their residents through ownership plans. Let’s pull together to help Northcountry and those residents succeed in this case, too.
This dilemma of the Sartell park residents is – or ought to be – of regional concern. We should remember that old wisdom: “There but for fortune go you or I.”
