Durango residents celebrate the acceptance of their offer to buy their mobile home park
DURANGO, Colo. — After days of negotiations and sleepless nights, residents of the Westside Mobile Home Park received the news they’d been hoping for: their landlord accepted the residents’ second offer to buy the land from underneath their homes.
“The frustration, the tears — they were all worth it,” said Alejandra Chavez, Westside resident and president of the community’s co-op.
Chavez and more than a dozen of her neighbors all huddled around a laptop on a video conference call with Stefka Czarnecki Fanchi Thursday afternoon. Fanchi is the president and CEO of Elevation Community Land Trust, the community trust that put in the offer on behalf of the residents.
“It has been a really tough week,” Fanchi told residents, “We’ve been in contact with the seller, with the broker and with the other buyer… and I do have an update and that is that we are buying the Westside Mobile Home Park.”
Before Fanchi could finish her sentence Chavez turned to the crowd of her neighbors and cheered: “Yes!”
People clapped, jumped up and down, hugged one another and some even picked up their children and kissed them with relief. After a few seconds of celebration and tears, Chavez turned back to the laptop and told Fanchi, “I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say. I haven’t slept in days; I already bit off all my nails. Thank you so much for all your hard work. I know we couldn’t have done it without you.”
Westside Mobile Home Park has become the fourth park in the state to sell to their residents since the law giving residents opportunity to purchase the lands passed in 2020. According to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, previous parks that sold to residents are San Souci in Boulder, Animas River View in Durango and Arrow Mobile Home Park in Leadville.
Chavez said that while there is still a lot of work to be done around the park, right now they plan to celebrate this huge win. The residents are planning a cookout with carne asada for Fanchi next week, when she comes to visit them for the first time.
Fanchi hasn’t provided a copy of the accepted offer, but she did share the first one. It was for $5.56 million, but not all of it was cash. Fanchi had mentioned they were working to make it a full cash offer to help convince the landlord to sell to them.
It has been about three months since the residents at Westside received notice that their neighborhood was going up for sale. The impending sale made the residents nervous and fearful of displacement, as mobile homes are different from single family homes in that residents usually do not own the land beneath their homes, even if they own the house itself.
You can read our original story below.
Sonia Gutierrez is a multimedia journalist at Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach her at soniagutierrez@rmpbs.org.
Benjamin Waddell contributed to this report.