Nancy Lee Sprouse moved to Charlottesville 12 years ago after a visit from her long-distance boyfriend who had lived here all his life.
"One time when he had to leave we had gone to Walmart, and I started crying, because he had to leave," she recalls. "I said, ‘I just don’t want you to leave,’ and he asked me to marry him right by Walmart, so I said yes, and that's how I got here."
Today, she and her husband – Jimmy – are active in their church, a few blocks from home, and they’re living on a pension, so when word came that the Carlton Mobile Home Park was being sold and they’d be evicted, Nancy was distraught.
"We couldn’t afford to move anyplace," Sprouse opines. "There’s no place in Charlottesville for another mobile home, and we don’t want to leave our church family. That’s the only family we have here."
Then, one of her neighbors reached out to Dan Rosensweig at Habitat for Humanity.
"A woman from the mobile home park came to our office in a panic," he told Radio IQ. "She showed us a note that’s been distributed to all of the residents at Carlton that said the mobile home park is being sold. It was basically a 60-day notice."
Working with the Piedmont Housing Alliance, the Legal Aid Justice Center, and park residents, he offered to buy the place with $7.25 million dollars from the city. Over the next three years, Habitat will help residents plan a new community with plenty of affordable housing. No one will be forced to leave, and the group says it won’t raise rent more than $15 a month.
Rosensweig says this model has worked well at two other sites in the area and has caught the attention of other communities nationwide.
"This is really a national crisis. There are 20 million people who live in mobile home parks right now who don’t have secure tenure or the rights to their land, and those trailer parks are ripe for sale and redevelopment, and when that happens the people are typically out of luck."
So when Sprouse got the news, she wept.
"It was just overwhelming. I called Donna next door, and I talked to Laura down the street and I called my daughter, and I called my sons and my pastor because I’m really close with this church. It was just such a relief – it gave us so much time."
And instead of scrambling to find some other place to put their trailer, she’s relaxing and looking forward to the future.
