Plan for Carver Park mobile homes abandoned

A plan to demolish several Carver Park mobile home parks and replace them with new manufactured housing has been abandoned, a city official said.

Mike Steele, director of Yuma's department of community development, told The Sun this week that the original plan will be too costly to work.

Up until recently, city officials had planned to acquire and redevelop several mobile home parks on 3rd Street between Avenue A and 13th Avenue. City officials said the parks were blighted and overcrowded.

However, after studying the plan further, it was decided it was too expensive, Steele said.

He added that the city will now try to find a way to build new manufactured housing for people to move into on vacant lots in the city's historic Carver Park neighborhood.

Steele said the details of the new plan are rough and need to be fleshed out before being brought to the public.

Patricia Stanphill of A Shady Tree RV Park and Apartments, 1210 W. 3rd St., has been a vocal opponent of the city's mobile home park redevelopment plan. She has said she feared the city would try to take her property.

When asked for her reaction to the city's abandonment of its original plan to tear down the blighted parks, Stanphill said, "Relief would not be the word to describe it."

Stanphill has maintained that there is nothing wrong with her park except that poor people live there.

"My tenants are happy, and I'm happy," Stanphill said. "We do the best we can."

She said that recently - and for the first time since the issue of blighted trailer parks in Carver Park had been raised - she was visited by a Yuma City council member who walked through her park with her.

She also said her property was recently appraised by the city, although she said she hasn't yet been told what the appraised amount was.

She also said her property had recently been inspected by health officials and got an OK in all categories.

The only comment on the inspection, she said, was that there were too many stray cats and the residents should be urged not to feed them.