Lazy Wheels Mobile Home Park has been the bane of the city of Ceres for decades and now it’s soon to become history.
As of Nov. 1, residents were ordered to vacate the park, which abuts to the eastern flank of Highway 99 north of the Whitmore Avenue. Calabasas owner Anthony Nowaid said those who remain will be evicted.
City officials have made it clear to Nowaid that once the residents are gone, Lazy Wheels no longer exists as a mobile home park – and that it can’t ever be one again.
“The park is a mess, it needs to be cleaned up,” said Ceres City Manager Doug Dunford. “You can’t go in and put in a few boards and nails and things. It needs to be completely leveled. We want to tear it down but it’s not the city’s property.”
The park has been blight in the community with its substandard units, illegal add-ons, blight and debris and a magnet for homeless and criminal activity.
The city took steps over a decade ago to eliminate the park eyesore but the state of California, which has jurisdictions over mobile home parks, interfered.
Lazy Wheels became the subject of greater focus of local officials following a deadly fire in April that resulted in the death of a squatter and destroyed a car and shed used as makeshift home. While Nowaid claims the person was dead before the fire and claimed the death was a murder, Ceres Police say it’s likely the death was due to smoke inhalation.
City, Ceres Police and Modesto Fire Department officials inspected the park but their hands were tied to enforce health and safety laws since the California Department of Housing & Community Development (HCD) has total jurisdiction over mobile home parks.
Dunford said HCD was out at the park the day before the fire and red-tagged nothing and asked, “What good are they?”
Dunford said the city has been in discussions with Nowaid about possible future uses of the property but the owner is still exploring options.
“Obviously we want to work hand in hand with the city,” said Nowaid. “We want to do something the city wants and to make the residents happy.”
Dunford is adamant that the city doesn’t want “another mobile home park nor will we support another mobile home park” in that location.
According to Dunford, with the tenants gone “it no longer a mobile home park and the state no longer oversees that.” Any new use would have to be approved by the city under the new Highway Commercial (HC) zoning in which residential uses are not allowed. For the past decade the park has been a nonconforming use.
Prior to the fatal fire, residents had turned to California Rural Legal Assistance which sued the owner to remedy conditions inside the park. Earlier this year they received an undisclosed settlement in the class action suit.
Established in 1947, Lazy Wheels Mobile Home Park would have been dismantled years ago if the city had its way. Deeming it an eyesore and unsafe for residents, on Aug. 5, 2013 the Ceres Planning Commission approved the filing of a Notice of Nonconformance to have the park dismantled within five years ending in 2018. Not only did HCD step in but the COVID pandemic resulted in government shutdowns of businesses in 2020, and the state placed an emergency moratorium on all evictions forbidding landlords from evicting tenants for failing to pay rent. That’s when Nowaid began losing lots of income.
It’s unknown exactly how many residents remained in the park over the weekend. Last week Michelle Markle said she had no place to go and suggested she will be left homeless. Ceres Police Chief Trenton Johnson said efforts were being made to find her housing.
Markle, who gets around by use of a scooter, complained that she was unable to leave the park with entrances been blocked off.
Markle, who just received an undisclosed settlement from the residents’ lawsuit, said she came to the park in an RV in 2019 and rented a space for $450 per month. However, Nowaid said Markle has been a squatter from the beginning, moving into a vacant trailer he came into possession of after the owner died.
“If you find a way to break a window and go inside and take over and then you say, ‘I’m living here,’ then you’re a squatter, you’re a trespasser,” Nowaid told the Courier.
Markle was ordered by a judge to remove her 44-foot motorhome she brought to the park. Because it was slowly vandalized and damaged, she said attempts to hire someone to remove it were unsuccessful.
Nowaid alleged that a San Francisco law firm used by residents has been victimizing park owners statewide and has managed to take possession of them by legal means.
It’s up to residents to decide what to do with their own units, said Nowaid, but plans are to dispose of them if abandoned. Many of those units were modified into nondescript structures without building inspection during and prior to Caltrans ownership, he said.
He claims HCD found health and safety violations with some units that needed to be corrected within 90 days but informed Nowaid that he was responsible to enforce the action.
“We go ahead and talk to the tenants and say, ‘Hey, do something. Do it, don’t sit there. Fix it.’”
Nowaid said HCD told residents that he could evict those who didn’t correct violations. After hiring an attorney to process evictions, COVID occurred with state officials mandating that landlords could not evict tenants due to the stay-home orders and loss of incomes.
Residents in time learned they couldn’t be evicted for failing to pay trailer park space rents, he said. And because the unit owners didn’t remedy their violations, HCD revoked Nowaid’s permit to operate the park and he alleged the agency told the tenants they didn’t have to pay rent.
“As long as the violations are not fixed, they know they don’t have to pay rent. HCD did that.”
He claimed that he fixed park issues that he was responsible for in the park, such as a drainage problem.
Nowaid said he was upset about being accused of shutting off power in an attempt to get tenants to leave.
Exactly when the power was shut off to the park is unclear but park residents Ray and Heather Hayes told the Courier in April that electricity service stopped on June 2, 2023 and that they sought legal remedies with CRLA.
While it’s routine for TID or PG&E to cut off power to customers who don’t pay their bills, the state considered Nowaid a utility supplier who didn’t have the authority to terminate service.
Still, he couldn’t afford paying the park’s electrical bills of $9,000 to $10,000 per month with no income from residents so he had the service cut off.
“We did not disconnect the utilities because we wanted to force people out,” he clarified. “The problem is that 45 of them didn’t pay rent and most of them didn’t pay (for utilities) at least one year prior to utilities being disconnected.”
Once residents knew they were getting free service, Nowaid said they were careless about water use and energy consumption with “ACs on day and night while their windows are open.”
The Lazy Wheels property was rezoned in 2010 when the state purchased it and neighboring parcels west of Ceres High School as part of the reconfiguration of the freeway interchange at Whitmore Avenue. Caltrans bought the property for right-of-way. After the interchange was completed, Caltrans sold the excess property to Nowaid in March 2013.
Hopeful another project will happen
After investing a lot of money in engineering and architectural designs and fees, Nowaid’s plans to develop another project, Whitmore Towers, has been hamstrung by funding constraints and high interest rates.
In 2019 Nowaid received city approval to build a 7,280-square-foot commercial building east of Lazy Wheels. COVID chilled all developments in the country in 2020 and the project has since been shelved.
“The capital market has gone very bad in the past few years. Right now it started moving again a little bit after the rates have come down a little bit and money got a little bit easier.”
Nowaid hopes to revive the approval for the Whitmore Towers project which would bring eating establishments on the triangle shaped 1.13-acre island at the corner of Whitmore and Central avenues across from Ceres High School.
