Olivehurst mobile home park residents get 30-day notice to leave

Her 16-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, wrote about how the family, facing a March 30 deadline to leave the Olivehurst mobile home park where they live, hopes to help her mom and find a new home.

"I almost cried," Tosha LeVally said Tuesday at The Gardens off Feather River Boulevard.

The teen wrote the owner of a house for rent and told about the bank notice that the family received because the previous owner of the mobile home park hadn't paid his loan.

"I would really like to tell my mom we could rent this place," Cheyenne said in her e-mail to the homeowner. "It would mean a lot to me and my family if you could help us.

"Also, it would be nice to get this house around my birthday so my mom is not stressing about where we are going to be living then," the home-schooled teen continued. "If we cannot find a place, we will be living at the river bottoms."

It's tough, Tosha LeVally said, to find housing for the $500 a month she and the 15 other families at the mobile-home park each pay for the industrial-green metal units that are home. Many of the residents are on fixed incomes, said LeVally, who is manager of The Gardens.

"My kids feel safe here," she said. "I have nowhere to go."

LeVally said before the getting the 30-day termination of tenancy that she believed improvements were planned to upgrade the mobile home park.

"I don't understand what's going on," LeVally said.

A showdown may loom as residents face the deadline to leave, LeVally said.

"A lot of us — they're going to have to force us out," she said.

Linda resident Bob Hites, a volunteer advocate for mobile home residents, said people living at The Gardens received notices this week from a Stockton firm representing U.S. Bank, which foreclosed on the previous owner Murray Allan Kay, 47.

"Mobile home parks in California are considered cash cows," Hites said. "The people who move in and rent them are at the whim of the owner.

"It's just sad," he said of the situation families face at 5848 Garden Ave.

They had been trying to improve their units — and the state Department of Housing and Community Development issued a compliance order in January for The Gardens owner to meet state standards for mobile home parks.

Hites believes a developer may see the five-acre property, most of which is vacant land, as a site for a new project.

Kay could not be reached for comment. Documents in Yuba County Superior Court list a Sonoma County address, as well as one in Marin County, for him.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Bank said she could not comment.

The Gardens resident Rachel Roberts, 44, who with her husband, Paul, have 5-year-old twins, said the mobile home park that survived the 1986 flood may not have much of a future. "We heard they're just wanting to bulldoze it," Roberts said.

Resident Reed Simmons, 33, said the termination of tenancy surprised him.

"Who are these people to come in and give us a notice?" he asked.

LeVally stood near her home and remarked about the color shared by it and all of the residential units Kay owned in Olivehurst and elsewhere in Northern California.

"All his properties were the same color," LeVally said. 'It was like he got a discount on paint."