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By Giulia Carbonaro in Miami, Florida
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Less than half an hour drive away from the shiny skyscrapers of downtown Miami, what is left of the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park bleeds out in the sun like an open, festering wound.
The once-lively streets are empty, and the weeds are taking over. Row after row of colorful trailers stare at the casual passerby through their dark, empty windows, the odd open door swinging back and forth in the wind like an eerie wave of welcome.
Each one of them has a big red cross on the side, accompanied by a sign reading: “You have been evicted from these premises.”
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Until a year ago, hundreds of families lived in Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater, Florida, a suburb of Miami. Then, the park’s owners, Consolidated Real Estate Investments (CREI), pushed to redevelop the land into a large mixed-use project—building taxpayer-subsidized, affordable units—and handed all residents eviction notices.
In November 2024, CREI Holdings offered the 900 families living in the park $14,000 if they agreed to leave the premises by January—an offer that shrank as time went by after that.
But roughly 200 homeowners refused to leave—as they knew that, for many, there was no other place to go, no alternative home they could afford.
Mobile home parks have been disappearing from Miami and its surroundings in recent years—as well as from the rest of the country—, as owners sell the land they sit on to developers in lucrative deals to build more expensive housing. In May 2022, it was the turn of Lakeside Park Estates in Hollywood. In summer 2024, it was Palm Lakes’ and Li’l Abner’s turns.
With these parks, low-income households in Miami and across the country are also losing that kind of affordable, entry-level housing option they have long relied on to become homeowners. In Miami-Dade, rent in the normal market has skyrocketed by nearly 60 percent over the past five years, according to Rent.com, and the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is now just shy of $3,000 a month.
“They betrayed us. I think they scammed us,” 67-year-old former trailer owner and Lil’ Abner resident Enrique Zelaya told Newsweek of the owners of the park he got evicted from.
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A Home For Those Struggling To Find One Elsewhere
Mobile home parks are residential lots of land owned by a private owner or a company where people place prefabricated, transportable homes for year-round living, while paying rent for the land to the owner.
While they normally offer more affordable housing options than the traditional market, these places occupy an uncomfortable place in the American consciousness, conjuring images of shoddy trailers inhabited by poor people trying to get by as best they can.
Li’l Abner, however, was not the dreadful place the stigma around mobile home parks would make it to be.
“Everybody knew this trailer park was one of the best—if not the best—in all of South Florida. And it represented 25 percent of the whole population of Sweetwater,” Zelaya, a Nicaraguan immigrant who left his home country for political reasons, said.
“The place was good. The trailers were maybe not so beautiful outside, but inside they were like any regular big house, very fashionable.”
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Everything in the park was “magnificent,” 68-year-old Mario Leiva, a former Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park resident who was left homeless by the eviction and is now living in his car, told Newsweek.
Like Zelaya, Leiva is originally from Nicaragua, but he has been in the U.S. since the 1980s. Leiva, who has several medical issues that make him technically disabled, had been living in Li’l Abner for seven years before he was evicted earlier this year.
Initially, he was paying about $700-$800 a month to rent the land below his mobile home. By the end, he was paying roughly $1,200 a month. “They were increasing it little by little each year,” he said, adding that in 2024 he was struggling to meet the rent—but was still grateful to have a roof over his head he could somehow afford.
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Zelaya had bought his mobile home in July 2024, paying $170,000 for his unit.
“I got kicked out of Nicaragua because I fought the communist government for many years. They confiscated everything that I had,” Zelaya said. He took what savings he had and moved to the U.S.
While he used to be a medical doctor in Nicaragua, he found out he could not exercise the profession in the U.S. “So, I started working as a security guard in a hotel. The amount that I earned was too little for any bank loans, so I went to Li’l Abner. It was not cheap, but it was affordable to me,” he told Newsweek at a McDonald’s in Sweetwater before starting a shift there—another job he has picked up since arriving in the country.
Like others, at the time of signing the contract to purchase the mobile home, he was reassured that zoning on the land housing Li’l Abner would not change any time soon.
In November 2024, however, only months after buying the unit, he was handed his first eviction notice.
“Before I bought there, I made sure I went to the office of the building manager and asked if they were going to change the zoning. They assured me that they were not going to do that,” he told Newsweek. “I have a contract which states they were not thinking of changing zoning.”
He was removed from the park on October 14. He is now living at a friend’s house, waiting on condo-association approval to rent an apartment, he said—a process that can take up to 30 days.
After he received the eviction notice, Leiva said he had “zero options” for alternative housing. “The rent on the streets would be thousands of dollars. If you find a room for $1,200, it’s probably just a room rather than a house, you have to share the bathroom, the kitchen,” he said.
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One of the most recent trailer owners was the owner of a well-known restaurant in South Miami, who preferred not to be named in this article.
A few years ago, his now 25-year-old son fell in love with a young woman whose family lived in the mobile home park. The two had a baby and decided that living at Li’l Abner, close to her family, would help them raise him.
But the couple could not buy a trailer home by themselves, so they asked the restaurant owner to be on the lease.
While somewhat skeptical, the restaurant owner was willing to support his son. “The community was very nice,” he said. “Everyone thinks trailer parks are terrible, but this one was not,” he added.
There are no background checks for buying a trailer home; it is like buying an RV or a boat. “The guy who sold us the property could not move out faster,” he laughed bitterly.
While the restaurant owner noticed that the mobile home park was sitting on a “great piece of property to develop,” he was reassured that there were no plans to rezone the area. And yet, five months later, CREI announced plans to develop the mobile home park into affordable housing.
The restaurant owner had just spent $130,000 to buy the trailer his son and his girlfriend were living in with their baby—plus extra to fix it. Now, he suddenly owned an unmovable, unlivable property: the trailer homes at Lil’ Abner were largely too old to be moved around or be accepted into another park.
The American Dream ‘Pulled Away’ From Residents
Several tenants challenged the eviction in court last year, but in September, a judge ruled in favor of the developers, allowing the forced removal of the residents who had decided to stay in the park.
“There’s always a tension between the rights of property owners to develop their property and tenants. And in this case, I see it as a battle between competing property interests,” David Winker, the attorney representing many of Li’l Abner's former tenants, told Newsweek.
“The owners own this land, this place that has operated for over 50 years as a trailer park. But the Florida legislature has put in place protections specifically for mobile home parks,” he added.
“Those protections say you cannot evict tenants from a mobile home except for three reasons: nonpayment of rent; breaking the rules of the park; or a change in use.”
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A change in use is the issue here. One of the rules around these properties says that mobile home owners have to be given the option to purchase the land where their trailers are before being given the boot.
“Our case comes down to this argument: we want to buy the land,” Winker said. “And their argument was, we didn’t have to do that because the homeowners association we had been corresponding with was not legitimate. We’re appealing this,” he added.
“I don’t want to waste anyone’s time or give people false hope. But the way I look at it, we can win. I think they messed this up.”
Meanwhile, Li’l Abner is now the shadow of what it used to be, a strange desert which hundreds of families once called home. The South Miami restaurant owner asks himself why his son was not warned against taking the lease.
“He had what the American dream was set to be and it got pulled away from him.” His son’s girlfriend’s family was displaced and scattered across Miami, stripping the young couple of that fundamental support system for raising their child.
“The whole family was dispersed, the community gone and broken up,” the restaurant owner said.
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Zelaya can think of at least 15 people who spent $100,000 to buy trailer homes they had to leave behind after the development announcement. Some were told to leave the park only days after buying their trailer home.
“There were six deaths related to the eviction and all,” Zelaya said. “Many had heart attacks. Another one had a stroke. But they were all related to the stress they were put under during the evictions,” he said.
“Maybe I’m the fortunate one, because there are many people who are sleeping in the parking lots of McDonald’s,” Zelaya said. “But it was a tragedy for each one of us. We know it’s private land. We don’t want the land. But we have the right to be relocated in a proper place. That’s all we want,” he added.
“But they just wanted to kick us out and manage a project which is very expensive, a project that cost about $400 million, maybe even more.”
‘Affordable’—For Whom?
It is not only the end of the American dream for those evicted mobile homeowners. It is the end of the dream at the foundation of Li’l Abner, which was created by the father of the current owner of CREI Holdings, Raul F. Rodriguez, as a place where young immigrant working families could live and thrive.
Leiva said he understands that the owners had a right to change the zoning of the land the park sat on—“but on the other side, if you move people out of the mobile home park, you have to relocate them,” he said.
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“This is sad for society. Sad for human rights, because we have a right to housing, I think we do. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, Black or white, you have to be treated equally and with the same respect,” he added.
“There is a law. And America is the land of the law, the land of the rule, the land of the Constitution. What has happened to America now?”
Leiva is thinking of leaving Miami, though he loves the city. “I’m trying to get a place, but it’s very, very difficult. I probably will have to go up north,” he said.
The affordable housing units being built by CREI “are not affordable,” Leiva said.
In a building already finished by the company near the former mobile home park, Li’l Abner II, rent went for $2,194 for a one-bedroom and $2,634 for a two-bedroom, according to a sign outside photographed by Leiva. The price on the sign had been covered when Newsweek visited Sweetwater in November.
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“If I live as a retiree with $1,200 and the rent is $2,000 or $3,000, that’s not affordable,” Leiva said. “I’m low-income. And they said it’s going to be affordable housing for low-income, poor, disabled people—but the reality is different, and that’s a fact.”
CREI Holdings has received more than half a million dollars for Li’l Abner’s redevelopment project under a 2022 resolution. If Rodriguez has his way, Li’l Abner III—an eight-story apartment complex with 328 units—will rise where the mobile home park used to be.
Only 40 percent of the units will be reserved for tenants who make 80 percent of the area's median income.
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For Winker, it all goes back to the idea that you have to have different levels of housing in your community. “The answer isn’t just to price everybody out, you have to offer different things,” he said. “And trailer parks are a very important entry level for people to live and be able to raise a family.”
Li’l Abner offered “true affordable housing” to hundreds of families. “We’re going to displace them and us taxpayers are going to have to pay for all that goes with that—we’re giving them money to displace one third of the population of Sweetwater, to put them in homeless shelters, let them live in their cars and everything that goes along with that,” Winker said.
A spokesperson for CREI Holdings told Newsweek that the company is “now focused on creating a community that will serve Miami’s essential workforce for years to come.”
The community, they said, “will be one of the largest attainable housing communities in the state with dedicated affordable and workforce housing units for teachers, nurses, first responders, hospitality workers, veterans, and other essential workers.”
For the advertised price of over $2,000, it would be up to this increasingly struggling workforce to decide whether that is truly affordable housing or not.
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