My wife came back from the weekly women’s craft gathering today, amused that one of the other women had forgotten her name and called her a “little girl.” Debbie is the same age I am (51) although she doesn’t look it. She was bent out of shape for a minute from having the “girl” diminutive applied to her, but realized after a moment’s reflection that to most Casa Loma residents, she is a “little girl.” Many of them have children older than we are, and we’re usually the youngest people in the room when we participate in community activities, which are a popular part of trailer park life in this part of Florida.

Because of federal (HUD) regulations that prohibit discrimination against families with children, “adults only” communities must limit residents’ minimum age to 55. We live in one of only three resident-owned trailer parks in all of Manatee County that aren’t limited to the 55+ crowd, but a majority of our neighbors are still retirees, many of whom use their trailers as winter homes and are only here for three or four months out of the year. It’s “the season” now, so the place is almost fully-occupied. It will start to empty by the end of March, and by June only about 2/3 of the homes will be inhabited. Wednesday night Bingo attendance, usually over 150 now, will drop below 100. The Neighborhood Watch will be hurting for volunteers. Some activities, like the biweekly pancake breakfasts, will shut down until the snowbirds come back in November or December.

Cultural Divides

Our older neighbors, especially the part-timers, tend to be conservative Christians from the midwest who have lived in traditional “heartland” culture most of their lives, where the women took care of the home and the men held decent union or middle-management jobs until they retired with fully-funded pensions. They are nice people for the most part, but we have little in common with them. They see no harm in a joke that pokes fun at Jews or blacks, but I have mostly Jewish forebears and my wife has mostly black ones, so we find this a little unsettling. The thing is, they really don’t mean any harm with their jokes and offhand comments, and there is little racial or religious discrimination or thought of it in our neighbors’ hearts. Their expectation is that we all need a little Christian prayer in our lives; that Jesus is our savior and that’s that, and everyone — regardless of race or religion — is welcome to participate in the neighborhood craft circles, barbecues, Bingo nights, billiards and dart tournaments, shuffleboard playoffs, hymm sings, holiday parties, prayer breakfasts, and endless volunteer activities that are a necessary part of life for people whose world-view was shaped in all-white midwest communities in the 1940s and 1950s.

Debbie is the only non-white person who regularly shows up at any of the neighborhood events, so she stands out, but we have never gotten the impression that she is unwelcome. If anything, extra effort goes into making her feel comfortable here, but that may be as much on account of age as race. There is a notable lack of participation in neighborhood activities here by residents our age and younger, and the older people would like to see younger residents get more involved because this is a true community in the old-fashioned sense, and most people here — including us — would like to see it stay that way for many years to come.

Casa Loma is a co-op run by an elected board of directors. Not one of the directors is under 65, but several new members, including the current president, are “young retirees” who are less rigid than some of their predecessors. There are power struggles going on, and modernity is creeping in. The monthly Casa Loma newsletter is no longer being edited by the 80-year-old minister’s wife who used it primarily as a platform for religious proselytizing — and tried unsuccessfully to influence the last board election by slanting candidates’ biographies to make sure the people she wanted on the board made it, and those she regarded as disruptive did not.

Some of the conflict is between year-round residents and seasonal visitors. For those of us who live here year-round, this is home, not someplace we go on vacation. On average, we year-round residents are less prosperous than those who can afford to own an $80,000 Florida property in addition to one “up north” that is worth $100,000 to $400,000. This doesn’t mean the two-home retirees are rich, just “comfortable,” and only because they worked hard and saved for many years. Most of them bought their first homes before the 70s/80s inflation rounds and paid them off years ago, and bought their trailers here when Bradenton (the county seat) was barely on any maps, for 1/2 or 1/3 of what they’re worth today. Most of people who have bought homes here over the past few years live here all year, but the old-timers who still determine how most things are run still tend to be winter-only residents who see this as somplace they come “to get away from it all.”

But “all” is now here, too, including drugs, crime, and traffic. Manatee County is nowhere near as bad as Miami or West Palm Beach or even Tampa, but it is no longer a bucolic haven in the middle of nowhere. Beach towns on nearby Anna Maria Island that were modest residential communities only two or three years ago are sprouting ugly condo-farms that only social parasites can afford to inhabit — and only tasteless parasites would want to live in.

Sarasota, the county immediately south of here, has brokered an uneasy truce between the no-taste, “money is the only god” crowd and the natural beauty that lies beneath the strip malls and factory-look, overpriced residences that try to spring up on every piece of usable land within 20 miles of the coastline, but Manatee County has not. It is still dominated, politically, by ultra-conservative religionists, land developers, and contractors who see the land as something to despoil — and seem to view people who visit or move here from someplace else as marks to be exploited.

Law enforcement here is a joke. Our (elected) sheriff is famous for two things: Removing all political materials that didn’t follow the Republican Party line from a “town meeting” held last year by our esteemed Congresswoman, Katherine Harris (yes, that Katherine Harris), and holding regular prayer meeting for Christian deputies. Effective detective work is not high on the agenda, nor is traffic enforcement. If we have a lot of petty thefts committed by drug users, Sheriff Wells’ solution is to pray about it, not catch the thieves. Purse-snatchings at the mall? Vote Republican and they’ll stop. Dangerous drivers? Print more accident report forms. Low morale among deputies? More prayer meetings!

I’ll give Wells major credit for one thing: Late in life, he went to college and obtained a degree, and the example he set, showing up every day for class in uniform, was worth more than any million words ever spoken or written about the value of education. He’s done some other fine things, too, but still seems to be overwhelmed by the job of being a boss cop in modern America. He seems to belong, mentally, to a simpler time — the 40s and 50s most of our neighbors seem to wish had never passed.

I sympathize with Sheriff Wells and our neighbors who want to pray today’s problems out of existence, and want everyone to just be nice and law-abiding and not make waves. I often wish life could be that simple myself.

No Shortage of New Trailer Park Residents

Builders here concentrate on homes in the $200,000 to $1,000,000 range that are beyond the reach of most working families. For a couple whose members both work in the growing service sector, with its sub-$10 per hour wages, a mobile home that costs less than $100,000 including land, is the most practical home ownership opportunity available. A few single-family homes still sell for less than $100,000, but they tend to be in seedy neighborhoods, while Casa Loma offers a community pool, underground utilities, and a general aura of neatness. Yards are well-kept, often showcases for their owners’ gardening and decorating prowess. Cars are generally clean and in decent shape. Few homes look run down or unpainted. This is a clean, prosperous neighborhood, inhabited for the most part by clean, prosperous people, and when one of the homes in it goes up for sale it generally doesn’t last long.

We’re about 10 miles from the beach, a not-unreasonable distance on 40 MPH roads, but far enough inland not to be easily flooded or blown away in hurricanes. Most of the mobile homes here (including ours) have add-on “roofover” assemblies and solid tie-downs that make them much safer in dangerous weather than the unsecured trailers you see tossed around by high winds on TV — and besides, the large community center usually used for Bingo and other activities is also a hurricane shelter, complete with heavy roll-down metal covers to protect its sliding glass doors, so there’s someplace to go and ride out extreme weather without driving to the local school that doubles as a hurricane shelter for people who don’t have one in the center of their community.

You’d think, given the growth of hotels and other businesses here that depend on low-cost labor, that there would be new mobile home parks being built with land-included price tags in the sub-$100,000 range, but there aren’t. There’s not even any real movement to upgrade or restore existing mobile home parks. It’s as if the “trailer people” don’t exist to our developer-dominated county government, even though something like 35% of all dwellings in Manatee County are mobile homes.

The most likely way the shortage of family mobile home ownership opportunities will be eased is through either intentional or accidental decertification of some of the “55 and over” parks as “adult communities.” On a per-square-foot basis, land-owned homes in all-ages parks seem to sell for between 1.25 and 1.5 as much as those in parks where buyers must be over 55. The HUD standard for maintaining “adults only” status is that 80% of all residents must be 55 or older. Even a small uptick in interest rates that makes homes hard to sell could force some of the current 55+ parks to vote themselves into the “all ages” category if enough residents want to sell and fail to find buyers, and some parks might just stop enforcing deed restrictions actively, which would get them decertified as “adult communties” by HUD without having to do anything at all — except field the inevitable complaints from older residents who don’t want to deal with children riding bicycles, teenagers hanging out on street corners, and the other fun that comes with an all-ages community, especially if many new residents display the stigmata of poverty and/or drug use, which some inevitably will — especially if speculators start buying up park units as rentals, which is a sure way to destroy a community’s cohesiveness and is, unfortunately, a potential problem facing almost all mobile home communities here.

Strict county building code enforcement, plus enforcement of community deed restrictions, could go a long way toward keeping local parks from degenerating or even toward upgrading some of them, but the will is usually lacking. County officials are likely to be in landlords’ pockets and tend to enforce building codes only when forced, and park boards are generally not far-sighted enough (or well-funded enough) to prepare for a future in which a majority of local trailer park residents will be working families, not retirees who only come for the winter.

Meanwhile, Casa Loma is a decent, low-key, low-cost place to live, especially for a writer like me who works at home and needs a quiet environment in which to concentrate — and appreciates being surrounded by affable, community-minded neighbors, even though Debbie and I have little in common, culturally, with most of them.

Update:Debbie and I have now purchased a duplex in Bradenton’s Village of the Arts, where Debbie can run an art gallery from home. We will miss Casa Loma in many ways, but we’re also excited about becoming part of Florida’s most dynamic artists’ community.