El Rancho tenants get reprieve

POST FALLS – Residents of Post Falls’ El Rancho mobile home park have been given a temporary reprieve.

Vandervert Developments has put on hold indefinitely a plan to build a shopping center on the property at the northwest corner of Highway 41 and Mullan Avenue, giving the trailer park’s cash-strapped residents the certainty of keeping their homes – at least for the foreseeable future.

The postponement is good news for people living at El Rancho, but it won’t last forever. Eventually the land will be converted to commercial uses, as has other property on the highly trafficked intersection.

Vandervert Development project manager Dave Dixon said he doesn’t see any construction on the site for at least two years, although he did not have a specific timeline.

For the time being the developer is focusing on filling spaces at the River City Center just across Highway 41, Dixon said.

Those in the community working to help El Rancho residents relocate said they will continue to do so.

“It’s a foregone conclusion that they will have to move out someday because of the location. It’s such a prime place,” said Chris Setty, a pastor at North Country Church in Post Falls.

The 70-unit mobile home park is located on one of Post Falls’s busiest intersections, with strip malls on two sides of it.

North Country Church is doing its part to help residents by raising money for things like mobile home moving costs and first and last months’ rent for new housing.

The group will use the money it raises at its concession stand at the North Idaho Fair and Rodeo for those purposes, Setty said.

“Each year we get a portion of the proceeds to use for whatever cause the Lord leads us to do. We prayed on it, and kept coming back to the families in El Rancho,” he said.

Sherry Eutsler is relieved that she’ll have more time to move her trailer out of El Rancho. Eutsler’s husband was recently deployed to Iraq with Army National Guard.

She’s trying to save the money to move the trailer to her parents’ property near Newport, Wash.

“At least this way I can keep it here over the winter if I have to,” Eutsler said.

Moving the trailers is problematic. Some are too old to move. Moving those than can legally be relocated to other parks can cost thousands of dollars, and that’s if the owners can even find a mobile home park to that will accept them.

For those with trailers that are too old the only option is to move into some other kind of housing. But most units – even affordable housing units – cost more than the $260 in rent that El Rancho residents now pay each month.

Waiting lists for that housing can be months, if not years, long.

Jana Hardin, who has been working for months to collect information about El Rancho residents’ moving needs and to help pair them with some resources, said that few have found a way to move out yet.

“Most of the people are still there. They’ll probably be there until they’re drug off the property because they don’t have anywhere else to go,” Hardin said.

Finding resources is difficult, but Hardin said she is hopeful that more national funding for low-income housing will make its way to Post Falls and Kootenai County.

She’s been tracking developments at the National Housing Trust Fund, which has been able to secure monies for low-income rental housing through a new federal act that will raise money by collecting a percentage of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s new business.

The formula could result in more than $300 million in low-income housing funding each year.

“There’s a lot of big obstacles put in front of people,” Hardin said. “We need to help.”