Below is a letter my office received from a homeowner at the Halcyon Mobile Homes Park, Patty Zeitlin, in response to a recent letter from Mayor Durkan attacking the Halcyon community’s hard won moratorium stopping redevelopment of their community. We stand proudly with fighters like Patty in their struggle to stay in their homes and ensure the homeowners at Halcyon receive permanent protection against eviction and displacement. Halcyon is an island of affordable housing in a sea of sky-rocketing rents and housing prices; as we fight to make Seattle affordable for all, we absolutely must protect the affordable housing still have.
Dear Mayor Durkan,
I am an 82 year old, low income voter, one of 80 senior home owners in Halcyon Mobile Home Park who are afraid of losing our homes to development. I helped raise funds so we (many of us disabled) could take buses to the inaccessible (for us) Seattle City Hall to fight for our homes at THREE City Council meetings. Spending what little energy we have, with great effort, we organized a home owners association with the help of Councilwoman Sawant to convince the Seattle City Council to vote for that 1 year moratorium. With a unanimous vote, we celebrated! We were ready to move quickly to the next step of getting our park and Bella-B changed to mobile home park zoning to truly protect us.
So we were shocked and upset to learn that you, our Mayor, who said you wanted to prevent homelessness, would then say we should have made a “voluntary agreement” with the property owners that would “better protect residents from evictions or rent increases!”
But I can’t blame you. Because you don’t know how unreliable our management has been. Even if such an agreement was made, how could we possibly trust it would be kept, when, for the past three years, the managers/owners of Halcyon have raised each resident’s rent about $600.00 a year. But they have not made major needed repairs. They have allowed this property and the structures for which they are responsible, to fall into disrepair. Often the work they did do was poorly done or incomplete. Meanwhile, during that time, on the backs of us seniors (many on low, fixed incomes) the rent raises generated an estimated additional $400,000.00 dollars for the management/owners!
I am hopeful that knowing more about our situation here will lead you to acknowledge that the one year moratorium is now law, and to act quickly to move this process through the zoning change to Mobile Home Park Zoning to help keep us from losing our homes.
Yours sincerely,
Patty Zeitlin