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When Palo Alto teamed up with Santa Clara County in 2017 to buy the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park from the Jisser family and avert the park’s planned closure, residents and elected leaders heralded the deal as a huge victory for the community.
With the city and the county each kicking in $14.5 million for the purchase and Santa Clara County Housing Authority contributing another $24 million through federal funding to pay for necessary repairs, residents who had been bracing for eviction since 2012 could now breathe a sigh of relief. The council, for its part, could take solace for having preserved 117 units of affordable housing and having prevented displacement of more than 300 residents.
Now, Buena Vista is preparing for its next phase. Its new operator, Housing Authority, submitted last month a formal application for redeveloping the park at 3980 El Camino Real. The plan calls for splitting the park into two sections and constructing a three-story, 61-unit apartment building in one section. The other would remain a mobile home park, with with 44 coaches, which could be either mobile homes or recreational vehicles.
If things go as planned, construction would kick off in spring 2025, with the goal of completing the mobile home section by the end of 2025 and to finish the apartment building by 2026.
A key goal is to preserve not just the Buena Vista park but also the Buena Vista community. All current residents will have the option of remaining in Buena Vista, either in a mobile home or in one of the new apartments, Housing Authority staff said at a March 4 public hearing on the project.
“While there’s no perfect plan — a plan that makes everyone happy — we believe we have created a redevelopment program that ensures long-term affordability, preserves home ownership and rental opportunities for all current residents, modernizes the aged infrastructure and utilities and that’s feasible, given site and funding realities and constraints,” Preston Prince, executive director of the Housing Authority, told the council.
“Most significantly, the plan provides an affordable home for all current residents of the park.”
Not all residents, however, are happy with the plan and how it’s being implemented.
Pepe Ramirez, who lives at Buena Vista with his wife and three kids, said that he struggled to get a clear answer from the Housing Authority about his options for remaining at the park. A year ago, he asked whether he would qualify for one of the park’s new three-bedroom dwellings, Ramirez said. An advisor told him that he would only qualify for a two-bedroom unit.
Since then, he’s tried to confirm this with other Housing Authority employees but every time he would ask someone, he would be referred to someone else, Ramirez told the council.
“Nobody had an answer,” Ramirez said.
Buena Vista resident Esmeralda Aristeo, also criticized the Housing Authority for not doing enough to accommodate current residents. She urged the agency to consider requests from some of the Buena Vista families who currently occupy one dwelling to split into two units once the park is redeveloped.
Liney Barrera, a Buena Vista resident for 21 years, said she had been assured in the past that she would have an opportunity to transition from being a renter to being an owner. Under the Housing Authority’s plan, that opportunity no longer exists, she said.
She said several of her neighbors had not been able to get clear answers about their options. Others are unhappy with their appraisals. The situation, she said, has placed her under a lot of stress.
“I really want to ask the Housing Authority to please take into consideration our needs,” Barrera said. “Because I know for some people it might be a project, but for me — it’s my home, it’s my family.”
Her experiences are not unique, suggested Nuemi Guzman, community housing advocate supervisor at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, which is assisting the Buena Vista tenants during the relocation discussions. The foundation’s biggest concern, she said, is the eventual displacement of residents who currently live in the area where the new apartment buildings will go up.
“Lots of folks at Buena Vista have been trying to stay in Palo Alto for a number of reasons … now they’re facing a situation where they’re not getting enough support and not hearing the answers they need to be able to make those decisions,” Guzman said at the Monday hearing.
Flaherty Ward, director of real estate at the Housing Authority, said about two-thirds of the Buena Vista residents have already indicated what they plan to do. Some will stay, others will go elsewhere; some will rent their mobile homes, others will own them; some will live in apartments, others in coaches. But she acknowledged that some people don’t like the options that they’re facing.
“The challenges of redeveloping the park are really complex and there is no one-size-fits-all that will make everybody happy,” Ward said.
No Buena Vista house is the same, she said. Same holds true for Buena Vista complaints.
“Some people want more bedrooms, some people want more square footage, some people want more appraised value for the mobile home coach and the list goes on,” Ward said. “It varies per household.”
She also said that at steward of public funds, the Housing Authority is committed to treating its residents similarly. In many cases, this means being unable to accommodate some of the requests from families that want more space and are hoping to take over multiple units.
“The reality is that the households out at Buena Vista are very large in some cases and there’s not enough new apartments to accommodate everyone who finds themselves in that situation,” Ward said.
She said the Housing Authority is now finalizing its relocation plan, which it plans to release next month and which she hopes will help answer some of the outstanding questions. The Housing Authority, she said, will commit as part of the plan to relocate the Buena Vista families to other apartments in Palo Alto; to pay the security deposits and cover the moving costs; and to pay for the difference between the Buena Vista rents and the rents at the new apartments.
Some residents welcome the change. Amanda Serrano, who has been living at Buena Vista for 14 years, said she is excited about the project and urged the council to support it. Her existing mobile home, she said, gets very cold during the winter and very hot during the summer.
Serrano urged the council to approve the project as soon as possible.
“I can’t wait to move to my new home,” Serrano said.
Council members generally shared her enthusiasm. Most said they strongly support the project, though both Mayor Greer Stone and council member Lydia Kou emphasized the need for Housing Authority to accommodate the needs of existing residents. Kou said she has been receiving phone calls from some Buena Vista residents who were in “complete distress.”
“It’s a complex matter. But also, it’s not just an empty lot or an empty parcel that you’re building new homes on,” Kou told Housing Authority staff. “This is an existing place where there are residents already living there. And one of the problems is not having all the questions and answers ready.”
Stone also said he had visited Buena Vista last summer and heard from some of the residents who were concerned about the redevelopment. He said he was sad to see that some of these concerns hadn’t been addressed in the seven months since those meetings.
At the same time, he and his colleagues generally liked the new plan, which makes several revisions to the design that was presented to the council last year. The design still features a c-shaped three-story apartment building. But whereas the prior plan had the apartment building facing away from the mobile home park, the new plan flips the building around so that the building shares the courtyard with the mobile home.
The development will also include a community room, a BBQ area and a teen room. The one amenity it will not have is gas service. The development will be all-electric, according to the plan.
Monthly rents would range from $829 for a junior one-bedroom apartment in the lowest income category (about 30% of the area median income) to $3,711 for a three-bedroom apartment in the highest income category (80% of area median income), according to the documents that accompanied the plans.
Stone called the proposed development a “beautiful space” and said the project is moving in a good direction. Vice Mayor Ed Lauing also lauded the proposed design.
“It’s going to be transformational when it’s done and we hope it’s transformational and a soft landing, notwithstanding that change is hard,” Lauing said.
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It would be easier to deal with all of these requests if there were more room (and floors) in that apartment building. Building only 3 stories of apartments anywhere in Palo Alto is a shame.