As snow began to fall, Bristol, Tenn., families evicted and trailers deemed 'Unfit for Occupancy'

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Two of the dozen trailers in a broken down mobile home

park at the end of Anderson Street were condemned Friday afternoon, bright

orange notices taped to the windows declaring the homes “Unfit for

Occupancy.” Just as the snow started falling, the families that lived

inside were given a couple of hours to collect their things and told not to

come back without a city escort. “We don’t deny this is the ghetto,” said

Rodney Vigil, formerly of trailer number four.
“But, it’s our ghetto,” interrupted Terri Hooker, who shared the trailer

with him.
Vigil is unemployed, and Hooker works for minimum wage at Bristol Nursing

Home. They have two big dogs and two old cats, and live on about $300 every

two weeks.
They gathered with a dozen of their neighbors late Friday three trailers

down from their former home in the Alpine Trailer Home Park, where three

trailers have already been condemned and hauled away this year alone.
Still, some of those in the community say they’re all as “close as cousins”

and describe themselves as the working poor: a mechanic and a carpenter, a

fast-food chef and a retired truck driver.
Several other trailers were given a list of things to fix, and smoke

detectors were donated by the city’s Fire Department.
But Hooker and Vigil, along with one other family, were cast out

immediately, given no time to pull together a plan B.
“I make minimum wage, I can’t afford anything better,” Hooker said. “It’s

got heat, it’s got a roof. And I wasn’t complaining. I’m not hurting

anybody, we’ve never done nothing wrong to anybody. But how am I going to

keep my job if I don’t have a place to live?”
Karl Cooler with Bristol Tennessee Code Enforcement said the city’s Better

Property Board required the inspection, which they do on three to four

homes each week. But, he said, the conditions inside have to be very bad

for the family to be turned out on the streets.
“If it’s bad enough inside that I make the call they’re better off outside,

it means that unit is in immediate danger of catching on fire or something

so severe it needs to be evacuated. Unfortunately, that happens, but it

does not happen often.”
He said the Hooker-Vigil home, on a scale of one to 10 of horrors they’ve

seen behind other closed doors, was “probably in the nine range.”
But he said it should not have come as a total shock. The city tried for 60

days to get them to willingly let them in, before going to a judge for

search warrants. He said they knocked on doors with no answer, left cards

with call-back information but no return calls. They tried to track down

and contact the homeowners, he said.
That’s where things got tricky; there’s no real paper trail of the

trailer’s ownership.
The city went through a man named Leon Smith, who lives part time in the

park and on Friday was given a list of improvements for his trailer.
The utility bills for four of the five trailers inspected is in his name

and, at one point, he owned them all. When they started calling Smith in

May, he decided he didn’t want to deal with it so he unloaded the

properties to the tenants “dirt cheap,” thus becoming a “caretaker” rather

than a landlord.
“I was tired of dealing with it, I wanted out of the rental business,” he

said. “I figure they were after me as a landlord, and I was just tired of

messing with them.”
He paraphrased the city’s impression of him as “slumlord.”
Meanwhile, he egged them on: “I told them to go ahead and try to get a

warrant.”
The tenants couldn’t afford deposits on utilities, so he kept them in his

name and billed them each month, he said.
Mobile home ownership in Tennessee works essentially like that of a car –

with titles. Smith never signed over the titles to the tenants. In fact,

he’s not even sure if the titles were ever signed over to him. So the legal

ownership of the trailers is not clear.
Smith got a voice mail at 11 a.m. saying the inspectors would be there at

1:30 p.m. to serve the warrants. The actual residents, and quasi-owners,

got no notice of the warrants.
The park itself is owned by Walter Bolling, who rents the lots for $150 a

month. His son, Eddie Bolling, collects the rent and runs the place.
“I just don’t want to see people kicked out on the street in the snow a

week before Christmas,” Eddie Bolling said. “I don’t want to see anybody

kicked out of their house at all. Their houses may not be the nicest in the

whole world, but it’s their house. If they own a house that’s inadequate,

who’s to judge that? Nobody’s forcing them to live there and that may be

all they can afford to do. If the house is that bad, well then there’s

probably a reason they live there.”
Meanwhile, the neighbors who managed to remain in their trailers Friday

were worried, theorizing that the city is out to shut the whole place down.
“I’m kinda, sorta worried,” said a 15-year-old kid down the street, who

lives with his father and twin brother. “There’s a lot of homeless in

Bristol already. My dad makes $50 a day doing carpentry or roofing or

whatever he can get. If we get kicked out, I don’t know where I’m going to

go.”
He paused.
“But if they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it and I ain’t gonna be

able to stop them. It’s like, ‘Merry Christmas’ from the city of Bristol.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531