But Hughes, 71, does not own the land.

He rents a lot in Ligon Park, a mobile home park, and he doesn't know how much longer he can stay. A company that plans to buy the property got Raleigh to rezone it in the winter as part of a planned 1,100-home subdivision.

"This is going to be hard on us," said Hughes, referring to himself and other residents in the park, which has about 60 homes.

Just about every year, a rental mobile home park quietly disappears in the Triangle, as old single-wides give way to new homes or shopping centers. Rising land prices turn the parks into valuable real estate, while changes in the mobile home industry mean few new parks take their place.

Dozens of mobile home parks survive in the Triangle, often hidden down country roads and gravel paths. But with each one that closes, the Triangle loses some of its lowest-cost housing, while residents face wrenching decisions about moving their homes or leaving them behind.

The decline of mobile home parks, particularly rental parks, is difficult to track. Wake County Revenue Director Emmett Curl says the number of mobile homes registered without land in the county has remained steady at about 12,000 for about a decade, but only because the county has stepped up efforts to count them. Curl can name several parks that have closed, particularly in fast-growing areas.

Meanwhile, dealers increasingly sell new mobile homes as "land/home" packages with lots included so buyers can qualify for conventional mortgages. About 80 percent of people who buy mobile homes today also own their lots, up from about 20 percent a decade ago, according to the N.C. Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade group based in Raleigh.

"Mobile home parks are wanting to become a thing of the past," said Curt Westbrook, who owns Chatham Estates, one of a handful of rental parks left in Cary.

The shift to land/home sales means Westbrook and other park owners have vacant lots to rent, something unheard of five years ago.

But that won't help many Ligon Park residents. Even if they can cover the moving costs -- which can be $1,500 or more -- many of the homes are too beat up to move or too old to meet the age limits of many parks.

Betty Moore, 72, doesn't expect to find a park that will take her 1983 single-wide. Moore, retired from the state Division of Motor Vehicles, has lived in Ligon Park since 1972. She hopes to buy a house somewhere but isn't optimistic about finding one she can afford.

"Everything is so expensive," Moore said. "I'm like everybody else out here. I don't have but so much."

A simple home

There's nothing extravagant about Ligon Park. Most of the homes are older single-wides. Some have decks, carports or flower gardens, while others are simply long, unadorned boxes surrounded by trampled grass.

A few homes are empty, including one gutted by fire in April when one resident killed another and set the home ablaze, a burst of violence that residents say was unusual for Ligon Park.

The park is a mix of longtime residents and newcomers, particularly Mexican immigrants who work as roofers, painters and carpenters. Cars, toys and kiddie pools clutter the yards. Asked to describe the park, two of the Mexican residents used the Spanish word for beautiful.

It's also cheap, with many homes selling for well under $10,000 in recent years. Most residents own their homes and pay $235 a month in lot rent, which includes trash pickup and water from a community well.

Eluterio Hernandez, a forklift driver, paid $2,500 for a single-wide five months ago for himself, his wife and two kids, ages 4 and 9.

"I like it because it's peaceful, not a lot of noise," Hernandez, 32, said through an interpreter. "You can leave whatever you want outside, and nobody steals it."

Like many mobile home parks, Ligon Park began as a mom-and-pop operation. In 1971, Sid and Lola Jones carved a couple of roads into a farm field in what was then a remote part of Wake County. They called it Jones Mobile Home Park.

Hughes, his wife and four of his children were the second family to move in, picking a lot on Sid Jones Lane. He remembers stray stalks of corn, remnants of the previous year's crop, coming up in the yard that first summer.

Everyone in Ligon Park knows Hughes by his nickname, Steamboat, which he has had since he was a little boy. He worked as a carpenter at Raleigh's Memorial Auditorium until he tore his shoulder loading scenery last year and now spends much of his time looking after things in the park.

"I'm what you call the mobile home park policeman," he said. "When someone's speeding, I stop them and give them a warning."

The Jones family sold the park in 2002 to Tayco Properties, a company owned by Boyd Taylor of Wake Forest. Two years later, Taylor sold it to Southern Commercial Properties, which has a sales agreement with Centex Homes, one of the nation's largest builders.

Hints of a change

It's easy to see why Centex wants to build homes there. Highland Creek, the company's 271-acre subdivision, will front on U.S. 401 about two miles from a planned interchange with Interstate 540, the Outer Loop.

Ligon Park is not part of the subdivision's first phase, now working through the city approval process. Hampton Pitts, Centex's Raleigh division president, said he doesn't know when it will close.

"The answer to that question depends on a number of different business decisions we will make in the future," Pitts said.

In the meantime, Tayco Properties, which continues to manage the park and collect rent, has not told residents about the rezoning or the planned subdivision. Reached by telephone, Taylor said only what he has told residents: "It's business as usual."

Some residents read about Centex's subdivision in the newspaper. In May, the city stuck a "Raleigh city limits" sign at the park entrance, and one resident reported seeing surveyors setting stakes in the ground.

Isabel Tallez, a mother of two who has lived in the park with her husband for four years, said she would like to sell her home before the park closes but realizes that won't be easy.

"No one's going to want to buy it knowing in a short time they would have to leave," Tallez, 26, said through an interpreter. "It's not so easy to move the houses."

Investing in parks

The risk of having to move is one reason mobile homes on rental lots are generally a poor investment, said Chris Estes, executive director of the N.C. Housing Coalition, a Raleigh-based group that advocates for affordable housing. In addition, homes sold without land seldom gain in value, the way stick-built houses do, Estes said.

"Mobile home parks are not places where people build wealth through homeownership," he said. "They are places where people find housing they can afford."

Still, people should think of mobile home parks as neighborhoods that can be revitalized like any other, said Peter Skillern, executive director of the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, a consumer advocacy group based in Durham. The association would like to see nonprofit organizations buy mobile home parks, fix them up and provide residents with stability and more favorable financing.

"You've got about a half-dozen nonprofits working on revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods in Durham alone," Skillern said. "There's not one developing mobile home parks in the state of North Carolina."

It's probably too late for Ligon Park. Hughes, the long-term resident, has begun looking for a piece of land for his mobile home but wonders whether he can find something he can afford. He's even more worried about his neighbors.

"These people out here that are working for $5.25 or $6 an hour, how are they going to pay to move their homes?" he asked.

Jeffrey Roberts thinks he'll probably leave his home behind. Roberts, a carpenter, paid about $1,800 for what he calls his "handyman special." Paint and new carpeting and countertops have made the house more comfortable, but he's not sure it's roadworthy.

Roberts and his wife, Danielle, have lived in Ligon Park about 2 1/2 years and now have a 1-year-old son. It's a neighborly place, he said, and he can watch deer on a nearby hill from his front porch.

"Those deer probably won't be here next year," Roberts said. "And I will have to move, too."

(Staff writer Michael Easterbrook contributed to this report.)

Staff writer Richard Stradling can be reached at 829-4739 or rstradli@newsobserver.com.
Staff writer Michael Easterbrook contributed to this report.

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