Posted February 9, 20238:00 pm
The following is coverage from Crain's Cleveland Business about the potential displacement of Euclid Beach Mobile Home Park residents. Click here to read the Legal Aid statement prepared for the February 13 news conference.
By Michelle Jarboe
The Euclid Beach Mobile Home Community on Cleveland's East Side is far too costly to maintain and should be closed to make way for a united Euclid Creek Reservation — a lakefront green space that will rival Edgewater Park in size.
That's the conclusion of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, which purchased the 28.5-acre mobile home park in December 2021 to prevent a private developer from swooping in. Representatives from the land conservancy and OHM Advisors, a planning firm, presented their findings at a public meeting late Thursday, Feb. 9, at the Collinwood Recreation Center.
The decision provides clarity to park residents, who have been living in limbo for more than a year. It also enables neighboring landowners, including the Cleveland Metroparks and the Cleveland Public Library, to start planning for the future of their properties.
But closing a mobile home park isn't a simple, or swift, process. The land conservancy expects to spend several months developing a transition plan for residents, who will then have at least a year to move, said Matt Zone, the nonprofit's senior vice president and director of its urban initiatives. That's well over the 180-day notice window required by state law.
The decision wasn't an easy one, Zone said. But the land conservancy is losing money on the park, which is only 51% occupied. Most of the trailers are mobile in name only. They're too old to be moved. And the community needs more than $4 million worth of utility upgrades and other infrastructure improvements to stop frequent water leaks, backups and flooding.
"We knew that at the conclusion of our planning process there is going to be an impact for people," Zone said in an interview. "It's not just land conservation."
The mobile home community, tucked between Euclid Beach, Villa Angela and Wildwood parks north of Lakeshore Boulevard, has been a subject of debate for decades.
It once served as seasonal housing for workers at Euclid Beach Park, a popular lakefront amusement park that closed in 1969. The Humphrey family, which owned and operated Euclid Beach Park, sold the property to local investors in 1983, public records show.
At the time, the state considered buying the site for a lakefront park. But that deal never happened. An out-of-state investment group purchased the mobile home park in 1988 and held onto it for more than 30 years.
The land conservancy acquired the property for $5.8 million from that longtime owner, an affiliate of Moore Enterprises of Texas. The sale ended two years of on-and-off negotiations, spurred by landlord-tenant fights over soaring water bills and Councilman Mike Polensek's fears that Moore would sell the property to a developer for apartments or another large project.
"I'm going to be very blunt about it. They walked into a mess," Polensek said of the land conservancy. "There were major issues there that they were not aware of."
Zone and Arthur Schmidt, a project manager at OHM Advisors, said they explored the possibility of maintaining the park and shrinking its footprint. There are 271 trailer pads on the property and only 167 mobile homes — more than two dozen of them vacant and abandoned.
But consolidating those homes closer to Lakeshore wasn't feasible. All but 36 of them were built before 1980, making the homes very difficult, if not impossible, to shift on the site.
And a smaller mobile home park still would require extensive infrastructure upgrades, costs that the land conservancy would have to pass along to tenants. Most park residents own their homes and lease lots from the conservancy, at a rate of $390 a month. Many of them are elderly people or low-income households, unable to shoulder dramatic rent increases.
Since purchasing the park, the conservancy has spent more than $200,000 on everything from new water submeters to dead-tree removal to the relocation of dozens of feral cats.
"It's clear to me that we have come to a very difficult point collectively, as it comes to the Euclid Beach mobile home park," Polensek said. "I've felt for a long time that its days, as it presently is structured, are numbered. I didn't realize it was as bad as this."
Zone said that residents will be compensated for their homes, though he's not ready to talk about payments in detail. The conservancy already has bought homes from a few residents who decided to move out, based on valuations from a manufactured-housing appraisal guide.
Michelle Wymer and her husband sold their mobile home to the conservancy in July for $3,500. The couple had owned the property since early 2021, when they moved from northern California to Cleveland to be close to Wymer's mother. They've since returned to California.
"While we had the means to move, none of my friends there do," she said. "Our next-door neighbor, who became one of our best friends, has lived there for over 20 years."
At this point, the park is a money pit, said Cigornai Sapp, who lived there from 2012 to 2017 and once owned several mobile homes that she operated as rentals. Sapp, who is 37, still lives in the neighborhood, and her mother owns one of the newest units on the property.
Her mother wants to stay. So do many other residents, including elderly homeowners who appreciate having their own spaces, single-story living and easy access to the outdoors.
Sapp hopes the land conservancy, which is working with local housing organizations, will succeed in helping residents find other places to live nearby. She's cautiously enthusiastic about an eventual expansion of the lakefront park that she visits regularly.
"I don't want our neighborhood and our park space here in Collinwood to become a commercialized public play-space like Edgewater," she said. "We already have that. Let's keep Edgewater Edgewater. And on this side, let's try to enhance the natural beauty."
Preliminary images from the land conservancy and OHM show consolidated park space north of Lakeshore, with much less pavement and a single entrance instead of a series of curb cuts. The conceptual images also show most of the Cleveland Public Library's 18-acre Memorial-Nottingham branch property being absorbed into the park.
The library, in the middle of a decade-long effort to renovate or replace its 27 branches, put planning for Memorial-Nottingham's future on hold when the land conservancy bought the mobile home park. Now officials will restart that process, though a new building won't open for at least three to five years, said John Lang, the library's chief operating officer.
The existing Memorial-Nottingham branch, built as a high school, is a 150,000-square-foot complex that also holds book storage, technical services and the Ohio Library for the Blind and Print Disabled. Those operations are set to move to other buildings.
A new neighborhood branch is likely to be an $8 million to $10 million project, spanning 11,000 to 15,000 square feet, Lang said. "We've been looking at ways to leverage the property toward capital construction for the last several years now," he said of the land.
Having a more prominent location on Lakeshore, with an expansive park as a backyard, would be "awesome," added Lang, who sees potential for outdoor programs and collaboration.
Cleveland Metroparks owns Villa Angela Park, a onetime school site to the north, and controls Wildwood and Euclid Beach parks through long-term leases with the city. Together, the parks make up the northern portion of the Euclid Creek Reservation.
"With the possible addition of 28 acres, the park could grow to 152 contiguous acres of programmed and protected spaces," Sean McDermott, chief planning and design officer for the Metroparks, wrote in an email. "Following the addition of the new parcel to the public park, a full community-based planning process will commence."
That process could yield a modern beach house, additional trails and better vehicle and pedestrian access, he wrote. The Metroparks is working to tie the park into a growing regional trail network, including the long-discussed Euclid Creek Greenway that will connect the upper and lower portions of the Euclid Creek Reservation.
The first two phases of the greenway project are scheduled to open in late autumn. And there's federal funding in place for plotting out the final, northernmost section of the trail. That planning should be done by mid-2024, enabling Metroparks to seek construction financing.
The park-unification effort also comes as Cuyahoga County and many partners are trying to realize a bigger vision for public lakefront access, including a connector that will run west from Euclid Beach Park to neighborhoods where erosion is threatening the shoreline. And there are larger conversations happening around reinvestment in North Collinwood, where vacant retail spaces abound and Dave's Markets shuttered its Euclid Beach store on Lakeshore last year.
OHM's recommendations include improved infrastructure for walking and cycling, with much safer north-south pathways across the boulevard.
Planners also identified nearby locations for new housing, land owned by the city, land banks and friendly nonprofits. There are almost 200 such lots within a five-minute drive of Euclid Beach Park, Schmidt said. That's equal to 27 acres, almost the size of the mobile home park.
"We are committed to having no net loss in affordable housing units," said Zone, who acknowledged that new development won't be ready in time to accommodate park residents.
Reimagining the area could take five years, he said. But there are lots of complexities to work through. The conservancy must reckon with abandoned trailers, which aren't simple to foreclose upon and move. There are discussions underway about state legislation to streamline that process. Various partners need to launch planning exercises. And then there's fundraising.
It's worth the effort, Zone said, noting that an expanded park will sit in a majority-Black neighborhood, on land where an amusement park once discriminated against Black patrons by barring them from its roller rink, dance hall and swimming facilities.
"There's not a high-quality, accessible park on the East Side of Cleveland," he said. "This park we're creating is doing some healing."
Tom Berardinelli, who paid $14,000 for his mobile home roughly 20 years ago, occupies what might be the best perch in the park. His porch windows provide an unobstructed view of the lake from a large lot, separated from a waterfront trail and the beach by a chain-link fence.
"I have the cheapest estate on the lake in Northeast Ohio," said Berardinelli, a retired arborist who grew up in the neighborhood.
At 67, he's disappointed that his days at the Euclid Beach Mobile Home Community are numbered. But he supports the conservancy's vision for the area. He expects to leave Cleveland and move west, possibly to Marblehead Peninsula.
"I wanted to die here," he said. "But we all know nothing lasts forever."
Source: Crain's Cleveland Business - Cleveland mobile-home park closure will make way for lakefront park expansion