Outrage and fear in Sweetwater as thousands fight an order to vacate their mobile homes
Earlier this month, less than 24 hours after aging into double digits, Jacobo Cardozo Yate found himself standing on the side of West Flagler Street, near the start of the six-lane divided highway that bisects Miami-Dade County’s urban core.
The day before was his 10th birthday. Jacobo admitted the occasion had been “a bit sad” because “everyone is nervous.” Ultimately, he didn’t get what he wanted.
But Christmas was around the corner, he reminded himself in a tone of obligatory optimism.
His wish: that his 11-person family won’t have to leave their shared home, a trailer in Sweetwater’s Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park.
To that end, Jacobo and roughly three dozen of his neighbors gathered on Dec. 21 outside their community, a 900-home trailer park, to protest its imminent closure. The park’s owner, CREI Holdings, informed residents last month that they had until May 19 to vacate their homes, continuing a statewide trend of trailer parks shuttering to make way for development.
The land will be redeveloped into “affordable and workforce housing,” according to the Urban Group, the development management company that’s overseeing the park’s conversion.
Class-action suit
Facing a May deadline to vacate, many residents are incensed by the terms of their displacement. They’ve begun to fight back. First with regular protests and now with a class action lawsuit, they hope to buy themselves two key resources: money and time. But those actions have brought the community into conflict with the park’s ownership, as well as the local government — particularly the police, who have so far arrested two protesting residents.
In what has largely become a fight to protect their personal assets, Li’l Abner homeowners are working to change the terms of their compensation packages. CREI Holdings has offered homeowners who leave by the end of January a $14,000 payout. Those who leave by April or May can get $7,000 and $3,000, respectively.
Those offerings are insufficient, said Leonarda Soza, who purchased her trailer two years ago for upward of $75,000.
Soza’s daughter, Indra Palma, who shares the trailer with her mother, agreed. “All of our money is invested in the house, and now it’s all lost,” she said, a common grievance held by the park’s mobile home owners whose homes, cemented into the ground, aren’t particularly mobile.
In response to their pending displacement, Soza and 185 of her fellow homeowners have filed a class-action lawsuit against CREI Holdings, the city of Sweetwater and Miami-Dade County.
“We know we have to go,” said Palma, “but we need more time and more money.” Palma estimates that two years is a fair amount of time to give the park’s residents, who need to pack up their lives and find other housing options. Financially, the legal complaint seeks $50,000 in damages, plus lawyer fees, for each mobile home owner, as well as an injunction stopping the order to vacate.
The lawsuit alleges that the park’s ownership violated Florida’s laws governing mobile home evictions, including by raising rents within 90 days of issuing the notice to vacate and by not offering the homeowners’ association the first right of refusal to purchase the land. In a previous statement issued to the Miami Herald, the Urban Group confirmed that rents had been raised “approximately two months” before the notice to leavewas issued.
David Winker and Erik Wesoloski, lawyers representing the class, further contend that CREI Holdings deliberately misled home buyers.
The attorneys say the company told homeowners that it had no imminent plans to develop the park. Hence, buyers continued to purchase mobile homes up until weeks before the vacancy notice was given — homes that would soon become worthless. All the while, the lawyers assert, CREI was making procedural moves to develop the land.
The park’s owner declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Many of those homeowners, including Soza, now say they have no idea where they’ll go. In an increasingly expensive Miami-Dade, finding housing for roughly what he was able to afford at Li’l Abner — $1,200 per month — will be challenging, predicted Bernabe Rivadeneira, another Li’l Abner plaintiff.
Upset with Sweetwater
That’s the basis for another of the plaintiffs’ charges. Miami-Dade County and the city of Sweetwater, the class’ attorneys argue, violated state law by approving CREI’s applications for processes related to rezoning without ensuring that homeowners could reasonably find another place to live.
Per Florida law, municipalities cannot take actions that would result in the removal of mobile home owners without first determining that viable alternative housing options exist.
Sweetwater declined to comment because the lawsuit is ongoing. The county said it doesn’t have land-use jurisdiction over the park, and that that’s Sweetwater’s prerogative.
The situationhas brought residents into conflict with their local government. While Sweetwater Mayor Jose “Pepe” Diaz maintains that the city knew nothing about the impending order to vacate, residents of the park, who constitute at least 15% of Sweetwater’s population, nevertheless voiced their frustration at what they perceived to be government indifference toward — or even complicity in causing — their present situation.
While residents had been protesting the order to vacate since it was issued in November, the tenor of their demonstrations, and the rhetoric surrounding the government’s response, took on a darker, more indignant tone in early December, following the arrest of Vivian Hernandez.
On the afternoon of Dec. 4, the 61-year-old Li’l Abner resident of 16 years went to the park’s office to pay her rent. A verbal dispute ensued over the park’s closure and the ownership’s treatment of Li’l Abner’s residents. Hernandez was asked to leave, and she refused.
A Sweetwater police officer, who had been stationed at the office, was summoned to intervene. Hernandez rejected the officer’s order to leave and remained seated in a chair. In the bodycam footage, the officer can be seen responding by lifting her to her feet and attempting to drag her out of the building. The two stumbled backward toward the door, at which point Hernandez tried to “pull away,” according to the arrest report. The officer then threw her to the ground.
The incident was caught on video, making waves online and on local TV news, and provoked an outcry from fellow residents.
In a statement issued to the Herald, the Sweetwater Police Department noted that an internal investigation determined that the officer hadn’t violated any of the department’s protocals.
Hernandez is suing the department for police brutality.
As she limped to a plush chair in her living room on a recent Saturday afternoon, Hernandez asked those present — two Herald journalists and two of her friends — to speak softly.
Her head hurt. It had since the arrest, and even more since the stroke she suffered two weeks later. She said her doctors attributed both the head pain and the subsequent stroke to the impact of her head hitting the floor during the arrest.
Hernandez is the second Li’l Abner resident to have been detained since the order to vacate was given. The first, a 26-year-old man named Johan Mason, was arrested during a protest in November, when he was charged with obstructing traffic and, like Hernandez, resisting arrest.
Miguel Herrera, Hernandez’s neighbor, who has been helping her with household tasks following her injury, said that she hasn’t been the same since the arrest, that “she has trouble focusing, trouble communicating, in a way that she never did before.”
Hernandez wiped tears from her eyes. “They treated me like a criminal,” she said, her voice breaking as she spoke.
“I feel impotent,” said Hernandez. “I can’t tell you how much fear I feel.”
Such is the prevailing mood at the park.
Back on West Flagler, Jacobo, the newly minted 10-year-old, watched as his neighbors chanted, blew horns and beat drums at the Dec. 21 protest.
He, too, was scared. His best friend’s family had already left the park, and Jacobo worried that his other friends would soon follow suit.
All of that hung like a cloud over Christmas, which Jacobo was not feeling good about because his family was “unhappy, nervous and sad.”
Jacobo squinted into the clear noon sky as he spoke, watching as a helicopter flew overhead.
Leaning out of it was Diaz.
Dressed in a Santa suit, the Sweetwater mayor waved to his constituents below.
This story was produced with financial support from supporters including The Green Family Foundation Trust and Ken O’Keefe, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.
This story was originally published December 30, 2024 at 12:16 PM.
