Their choice is cash and rezoning or nothing
Faced with a heart-wrenching dilemma – whether to lose their current homes at Wellington Mobile Home Park with some cash or lose their homes without the cash – the resident families have chosen to agree to the rezoning of the 36 acres to multi-family residential and receive $250,000 divided between the remaining 40-some families.
The drama that has been playing out on Wait Avenue for the past months has been exhausting and frightening for the family members and community members who have supported them and tried to find an equitable solution.
There is one available. ROC-USA Resident-Owned Communities) has offered to pay Wellington’s owner, George Mackie Jr., the same amount of money he would be paid by Middleburg Communities if the requested rezoning is approved. If Mackie agreed to ROC-USA’s offer, the residents could stay and become part of a community that would jointly own the trailer park.
Thus far, Mackie has been intransigent, refusing to even listen to the offer.
Instead, he has sent eviction letters to all the families, saying he plans to close the park. If the families do not leave and move their mobile homes by January, he wrote, “. . . we will immediately begin eviction proceedings against you.”
Someone who knows the families said that 20 families, half of those remaining, will be homeless when they are forced to leave because they will not be able to afford any other place.
Mackie’s stance is far now is far from what he said when he was negotiating with Middleburg Communities. According to Jason Pfister, vice president for land entitlements with the Middleburg office in Raleigh, Mackie told Middleburg officials not to worry about the Wellington residents because he was going to develop another mobile home park on another property he owned and move the residents there.
That assurance they would not be rousting people out of their homes and the dawning realization since the Mackie-Middleburg contract became public that Mackie intended to do the rousting has led Middleburg Communities to offer $250,000 to the remaining families. Some families that could have already fled the park.
Pfister said Middleburg is working with Childhood Family Services to decide, based on each families particular situation, how to pay for each family’s relocation. He said it could be split between paying the vendors directly or giving the family a check.
Middleburg has found mobile home parks in Burlington and Rocky Mount that will accept the mobile homes or some of them, and there a number of the homes that are too old to be moved. In Rocky Mount the mobile home park owner has also offered some relocation financial assistance and a five-year guarantee not to raise the rent.
At Wellington, the families are still paying $300 a month rent for their spaces.
None of this, of course, addresses the fact that all of the families have ties to Wake Forest. They have family here or they work here. They go to school here. They have enjoyed the community or family they all found at Wellington.
They are being forced out because of Mackie’s decisions. “It’s all on Mackie,” one person said who does not want to be identified.
Supporters in Wake Forest like OneWake are planning a show of force of support for the residents on Tuesday, Sept. 7. They will gather at the Wake Forest Town Hall at 5 p.m. to make signs and be visible to the town commissioners as they enter for their work session at 6. There will be a smaller contingent in the second-floor meeting room at 7:30 when the planning board meets to hold public hearings for requests made to the town before July 1, 2021. The request for mixed-use residential zoning is on the agenda. Two Wellington residents have signed up to make comments on behalf of all the residents.
There is a rumor that the town has set up a GoFundMe site for the residents. This is not true.
When it comes to moving, if the mobile home can be moved, it can cost as much as $25,000 to relocate the home and hook it up to utilities, if those are available. If the relocation is to a private property, the resident may have to pay for a new well and septic system.
Apartments in Wake County begin at $1,000 a month and go up from there. The Wake County Housing Authority, which has about 200 units in Wake Forest, is not accepting requests because the waiting list is so long now.
Middleburg plans to build a new concept in housing, long-term rental housing. It will be called The Hamlet and will consist of single-family homes and townhouses, 264 in all. In a similar Middleburg development in Charlotte, the one-bedroom unit was renting at $1,315 a month. What makes The Hamlet in Wake Forest and elsewhere different is that all repairs and maintenance, outside and inside the units, will be done by a resident manager and crew.
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