After reading the article regarding the crisis among residents of Vista Del Rio on Vancouver’s east side, I am horrified and chagrined (“Senior residents trying to buy their east Vancouver mobile home park,” The Columbian, Oct. 18). The law that gave mobile home communities the right to buy their property to keep from being moved out and displaced had the right idea from a humanitarian perspective. But if it is impossible for residents of most mobile home communities to accomplish the task of gathering scores of millions of dollars to make the purchase, it isn’t a well-considered law.
If our cities are worried about homeless individuals, they clearly need to stabilize the housed who are low-income. We need to be mobilizing to provide support to neighbors who might be tipped toward houselessness, if their current cost of lodging is made impossible to maintain.
Those of us with loved ones in other mobile home parks have to know that the threat looms over our own, as long as this precarious situation exists for anyone in the same situation. Mobile home owners should not be at risk of being displaced when their property owner decides to sell.
