Evictions sharply rise at Sunny Meadows Mobile Home Park
Butch Ellis describes why he and Yohnda Ellis, his 80-year-old mother, are being evicted from the mobile home park Yohnda Ellis has lived in for 25 years.
Ellis had to help his 80-year-old mother to a courtroom table Wednesday afternoon as she listened to the reasons she may soon have to leave her home of 25 years: A shed they had built with permission years ago spills over their property line and they aren’t parking where they should.
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“The reason for this eviction is because they are refusing to remove from that space, refusing to stop parking in that space, refusing to comply,” attorney Craig McReary said in Cowlitz Superior Court.
Though a judge denied the initial request to evict Yohnda Ellis, she’ll be back in court soon for a trial.
“And we’re not the only ones who will be coming through here,” Butch Ellis said.
A handful of residents say it’s not so sunny at the Sunny Meadows Mobile Home Park, where a wave of evictions has followed a new park manager’s first year at the West Longview community.
Yohnda Ellis is among those being told to leave the gated trailer park on Ocean Beach Highway.
“It’s not right to make an elderly person start over again like this,” she said Monday from a neighbor’s home where a dozen people gathered to join her in voicing concerns.
“(The park manager) is raising all sorts of havoc with people’s lives,” said 61-year-old Butch Ellis.
A former bartender, Butch Ellis is disabled and lives with his mother in the mobile home she’s owned for decades.
They said in the 25 years of residing at the park under multiple managers, they have never had a problem until now.
Sunny Meadows park manager Diana O’Sullivan has presented the Ellises with three “15-day notice to comply or vacate” orders since October.
“By occupying the area north of your space with vehicles, a shed, non-permitted activities and other personal property, you are in violation of the terms of your rules and regulations,” read the notices.
O’Sullivan did not return phone calls seeking comment Thursday.
Next to Yohnda Ellis’ neatly kept blue home is a grassy field that serves as a common area. This is the space her 12-by-18-foot storage shed is apparently encroaching on.
Moving the shed — beyond the question of where it would go — just isn’t possible, Butch Ellis said.
“It would kill us,” he said, adding that he and his mother live on fixed Social Security incomes.
Previous managers had allowed him to build and maintain the shed, and he wasn’t aware that it wasn’t on his mother’s rented space.
McReary, O’Sullivan’s lawyer, said that a verbal agreement isn’t a permanent agreement.
“That act produces, at best, a license. The park reserves the right to revoke the license at any time,” McReary said in court Wednesday. “What has happened with these 15-day notices is that the license has been revoked.”
Other residents have been given similar notices for parking violations or driving vehicles that were deemed too loud, Butch Ellis said. He accused O’Sullivan of fabricating charges to spur additional evictions.
Judge Michael Evans on Wednesday said the two sides are “at loggerheads” and mediation or a trial would be needed to resolve the matter.
The Ellises will find out their court date next week.
For Yohnda and Butch Ellis, it’s a fight to save their home — and they’re fighting to the death.
“She intends to die here, I intend to die here,” Butch Ellis said.
Contact Daily News reporter Brooks Johnson at 360-577-7828 or bjohnson@tdn.com.
