What happens when the last rung of the housing ladder is sawed off? In Miami-Dade County, the disappearance of mobile home parks amounts to more than the erasure of an affordable housing option it is the dismantling of whole communities, leaving thousands scrambling for shelter in one of the nation’s most rent-burdened regions.
Less than a year ago, Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater was home to nearly 900 families, many of them immigrants, retirees, and low-income workers. Today, its streets are silent, its trailers marked with red crosses and eviction notices. The land’s owner, Consolidated Real Estate Investments (CREI), is redeveloping the site into a mixed-use project touted as “affordable and workforce housing.” Yet the new rents-more than $2,000 for a one-bedroom-well exceed the grasp of residents who once paid $700 to $1,200 a month for their lot space. If I live as a retiree with $1,200 and the rent is $2,000 or $3,000, that’s not affordable, said Mario Leiva, a former resident.
The loss of Li’l Abner is part of a larger trend. Since 2011, Florida has lost 183 mobile home parks that have been redeveloped, taking thousands of units that once served as entry-level homeownership for working-class families off the market. Mobile homes, despite their name, are seldom movable; many are anchored in place, making relocation prohibitively expensive or structurally impossible. When relocation is possible, costs can reach $15,000, well beyond the state-mandated relocation stipends of $3,000 for single-wide and $6,000 for double-wide homes.
For decades, parks like Li’l Abner offered more than shelter; they provided stability, safety, and a close-knit social fabric. Residents described leaving doors unlocked, sharing meals, and raising children in an environment largely free of crime. “Everybody knew this trailer park was one of the best if not the best in all of South Florida,” said Enrique Zelaya, a Nicaraguan immigrant who bought his home just months before receiving an eviction notice. He had been assured in writing that zoning would not change. That promise dissolved when redevelopment plans were announced.
Florida’s Mobile Home Act provides for partial legal protections to mobile home owners, limiting eviction causes and requiring residents be provided with an opportunity to buy the land, should it be sold for development prior to displacement. Li’l Abner’s attorney, David Winker, said this was not done. Winker has filed litigation contesting both the evictions and the rezoning, invoking statutes that forbid municipalities from greenlighting redevelopment in advance of determining adequate relocation opportunities. We’re going to displace them and us taxpayers are going to have to pay for all that goes with that, Winker said, calling the process “government-induced gentrification.”
The psychological toll of such displacement is profound. In immigrant communities, mobile home parks often represent a bridge between the homeland and the new country-a place of “temporary permanence” where families invest in both their dwellings and their neighborhood ties. When that bridge collapses, the rupture is both material and emotional. Residents of other parks, like Palm Lakes, have spoken of children asking, “Mommy, where are we going to go?” and of losing neighbors who functioned as extended family. In Li’l Abner, Zelaya recounted at least six deaths linked to eviction stress, including heart attacks and strokes.
The disconnect between redevelopment rhetoric and reality is stark. While CREI touts its future complex as serving “teachers, nurses, first responders, hospitality workers, veterans, and other essential workers,” the advertised rents are well out of range for many in those professions. Meanwhile, projects like The HueHub include their landmark agreement with Miami-Dade unions, locking in rents for a decade at rates starting around $1,300 for studios and $1,900 for two-bedrooms-figures far closer to attainable for the intended workforce.
The stakes go far beyond Sweetwater. Florida’s mobile home parks are home to nearly three million people nationwide, many of them on fixed incomes or earning wages from service, construction, and hospitality jobs. Yet while eviction rates in parks are lower than for traditional renters, the research shows closures and redevelopment can trigger mass displacement, eroding the supply of affordable housing faster than new units can be built. In the months after the sale of a park, filings rise 40%, suggesting that pressures toward redevelopment often come well before closure.
The choices for displaced residents are bleak: walk away from the home, sell at a deep loss, or try an expensive relocation to another park-if one will take an older unit. As median rents in Miami creep toward $3,000 for a two-bedroom, the erasure of mobile home parks erases one of the last bulwarks against homelessness for poor families. The consequence is a wider circle of people living in cars, couch-surfing, or entering shelters, while the land they once called home gets redeveloped into housing they cannot afford.
As Ligia Siles, a former resident who lost the home she had built in 35 years, put it, In this country, if a cat falls in a drain, Miami stops to get it out and four heroes appear. But 900-odd families are left on the street. For those families, the fight over Li’l Abner is not only about property rights-it is about the right to remain part of a community they helped build, in a city that increasingly prices them out of existence.
