
The Boston Redevelopment Authority has committed $500,000 to renovate the Boston Trailer Park in West Roxbury.
Residents of Boston’s only remaining trailer park have been doing battle with their landlord for 14 years.
Purchased by a local car dealership owner, the Boston Trailer Park at 1515 VFW Parkway in West Roxbury fell into disrepair over time.
Roadways were left unpaved, broken water pipes were mended but not fully repaired and empty trailers were abandoned. Residents and city officials say the owner neglected the property because he intended to expand his car dealership, located next to the park, and eventually shut down the mobile home community.
A few weeks ago, residents got some good news: The Boston Redevelopment Authority has committed $500,000 from the agency’s Neighborhood Housing Funds to give the park a much-needed facelift.
Residents, city officials and a nonprofit developer are currently negotiating a deal with the owner, Ernie Clair, that would give tenants control of part of the property.
“This is a beautiful place and it could be real nice if some work was done to it,” said Arthur Tanck, 72, who has lived in the park along the Charles River for 18 years.
City Councilor Maura Hennigan, who has been pushing to save the park and even picketed Clair’s dealership during car sales events, said she and other advocates have unsuccessfully tried to persuade Clair to turn over the West Roxbury land to residents for years. Negotiations usually failed because Clair’s asking price for the land was too high, Hennigan said.
Clair did not return calls seeking comment for this story.
Clair bought the park, which was established in 1946, 15 years ago. Residents own the trailers, but Clair charges rents for the pads on which the trailers sit.
Hennigan was the force behind a measure more than a decade ago to keep the trailers under rent control and she also successfully pushed to rezone the area from commercial to multifamily residential, making it nearly impossible for Clair to expand his business on the property.
Despite this, as trailers became empty, Clair would buy them up and leave them empty, say neighbors. Today, 40 of the 150 trailers on the property are empty.
Two years ago, Clair indicated he would consider giving up a portion of the park to the tenants if in exchange he could expand his dealership on another part of the property.
But Hennigan said the details still need to be worked out. Some residents would have to be relocated, and many of them are elderly and couldn’t handle a move.
Further, The Community Builders – the Boston development agency which has agreed to undertake renovations to the park – is currently finishing a survey to see how the deal would affect boundaries and residents.
Hennigan, however, remains optimistic. The $500,000 that the BRA is providing and the $30,000 that the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development gave to Community Builders to complete the survey can be used as a leveraging tool to get additional funding to save the mobile homes, she said.
Housing Crisis
Saving the park is critical because it provides affordable housing in a community that doesn’t have much of it. Rents at the mobile home community are between $200 and $500 a month, much cheaper than rents at the average West Roxbury home.
Through March 2001, the median single-family home in West Roxbury, a suburban-looking community about eight miles from downtown Boston, is selling for $269,000, while a condominium costs $157,500, according to Warren Information Services, a sister company of Banker & Tradesman.
Recent advertisements on justrentals.com show two-bedroom townhouses with rents anywhere from $1,200 to $1,700 a month.
Solutions to the affordable housing crisis should not only include creating new housing units for low- and moderate-income families, Hennigan said.
“What is equally as important is preserving housing,” Hennigan said.
Hennigan is hoping that The Community Builders will have a chance to do just that – fix up the trailer park once it is controlled by the residents and permanently preserve it as affordable housing.
According to a press release from Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s office, The Community Builders will upgrade utilities, pave the park’s dirt roadway, install a sound barrier to keep out noise from the businesses along the parkways and create an outdoor landscaped community space.
Renovations will take place into two phases, with the first phase involving the relocation of some existing trailers and the disposal of abandoned ones. The project is expected to start later this year, according to the press release.
For Hennigan and Tanck, who is president for the Boston Trailer Park Tenants Association, the repairs are long overdue.
“It’s something all of us have worked on for a very long time,” said Hennigan. “I’m certainly not going to rest until those residents can control their destiny.”