Street View: Mobile Home Park Residents Organize Against Alleged Mismanagement

Street View is a monthly column taking a close look at development-related issues affecting different neighborhoods throughout the city.

Stephanie Vergara, a student at Nashville State Community College, has lived with her family in Antioch’s Suburban Mobile Home Park since 2013. Last year, a tow truck started waking them up in the middle of the night. 

The property, owned by North Carolina-based Stackhouse Management (and their associated development company Jones Properties LLC), had recently instituted a two-vehicle-per-trailer policy. Additional vehicles were towed, sometimes late at night. Releasing the vehicles cost between $450 and $500, Vergara says — and payments had to be in cash. The truck that showed up at Suburban was always from the same company: Boswell Towing.

“They had expired plates and tags, and they would come armed,” Vergara says. “If anyone tried to tell the employees of Boswell anything, they would get aggressive, and flash their gun to try to intimidate us.” 

The ongoing scenario was frightening to many residents. But in recent weeks it has especially impacted the young people at Suburban — many of whom experienced the January shooting at Antioch High School. 

Suburban residents had other issues too: Some water bills had increased, there was no physical office on the property, there was no visitor parking, rent had increased, and some residents were concerned about trees on the property falling during storms. 

This isn’t the first time Jones Properties has been accused of mistreating residents of its mobile home parks. At one Ohio property, residents say they went without water for days. Back in 2021, Stackhouse used residents at a North Carolina mobile home park as a bargaining chip in zoning disputes, suggesting they’d lose their homes if Stackhouse couldn’t rezone part of the property to allow a gas station and apartment complex. And in 2022, residents of another Stackhouse-owned mobile home park in Ohio reported overcharging on utilities, failure to maintain common areas, racial discrimination and rent increases multiple times per year.

Residents of mobile home parks are in a unique and sometimes tenuous situation with landlords — they usually own their mobile homes but pay rent for the land they are on. This can lead to housing insecurity when properties change hands, and often leaves residents vulnerable to exploitation. 

At Suburban, residents formed two groups to organize for better living conditions: Unidos por un Cambio and youth committee Justice de Jovenes. Together the tenant unions grew to more than 100 members. 

“The process to form the youth committee was built on turning our frustration into action,” says Vergara. “We were tired of not only seeing our parents suffer through this injustice. … We were also tired of experiencing it ourselves.”

Alongside the two unions, local organizers Poder Popular got involved. They’d previously worked with tenants at Cedar Glen Mobile Home Park in La Vergne, who had formed a union called Unidos por Nuestras Familias to protest similar issues — including a two-car towing policy — from property managers Stockbridge Capital. “Companies like Jones Estates and Stockbridge Capital buy up the mobile home parks, and they start charging way more rent, and then they implement these policies like the towing policy, which specifically negatively impact working-class families and communities,” says Indu Kumar, a spokesperson for the group. 

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Residents and the developer reached an agreement Monday night

In February, the three groups created a petition with a list of demands. They collaborated with three North-Carolina based organizations to deliver the list in person to Stackhouse’s main office in Durham. And on Feb. 16, the groups met with Metro Councilmember Tasha Ellis to share their concerns. 

Ellis — whose District 29 is home to Suburban — immediately went into action. 

“A regular tow only costs between $75 and $100,” Ellis says. “So I felt like they were being exploited by that.” Ellis says residents also had water bills “at $300 to $800 a month,” and a few families said Lonnie Prevost, Suburban’s property manager, wouldn’t allow Metro Water to check water meters when they suspected leaks. 

Ellis contacted Metro Water to inspect the leaks, and called the Nashville Electric Service to inspect a low-hanging wire. She also reached out to Legal Aid and the Nashville Hispanic Bar Association to help an evicted resident and advise about potential exploitation from the towing company. After that, she reached out to Melissa Solomon, director of corporate governance and transactions for Stackhouse Management in North Carolina. 

On Feb. 25, residents received a response from Solomon. In an email shared with the Scene, Solomon writes that Stackhouse has a few next steps planned: creating several small guest parking areas at Suburban, looking into a “pocket park” that can provide a kids’ play area, and conducting an annual tree review to “identify and remove” any dangerous trees. Solomon also acknowledges that this action is “only a portion of concerns raised,” and that in the next 30 days, Stackhouse would be sending out an invitation to each household to organize an upcoming community meeting to address the additional concerns; in early April, Stackhouse emailed residents an invite to a town hall on April 29 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Electronic devices won’t be permitted at the meeting, and only residents are invited. (A representative for Stackhouse Management declined to comment on the ongoing conversations with residents, but did confirm that a future meeting has been planned.)

Now the towing has also stopped overall — at least for the time being. “I want to think that me reaching out and letting Lonnie know that he had been exposed stopped that,” Ellis says.

While most of their direct action for Suburban has finished, the youth organizers in Justice de Jovenes have organized around other causes — like anti-immigration bills in the Tennessee General Assembly. 

At home, Vergara hopes Suburban residents will “have a bigger involvement on what rules are placed for us.” 

“It is easy for landlords to attempt to exploit and discriminate” against tenants, says Vergara. “Change only happens when the community organizes within themselves and stands united, through the struggles, and wins.”