Moving in while the residents moved out: Ingleside Mobile Home Park

March 22, 2008

I was nervous.

I parked my car near the entrance of Ingleside Mobile Home Park and looked through the windshield at the destruction in front of me. I reached for my notebook, closed my eyes tight and took a deep breath before stepping out of the car and into a world I knew nothing about.

Lexington developer Neal Evans bought Ingleside in January for $3.3 million with the desire to build a new apartment complex designed for students. There were the 18 families living at the mobile home park that would have to go somewhere once construction began.

That’s who I wanted to talk to that day: the families being forced to leave their homes, many who had no where else to go. But would they want to talk to me? I was a college student (the enemy) and I was probing them for a lot of personal information on a sensitive subject.

Not knowing where to start, I walked through the trailer park, my photographer Elliott Hess in tow, and weaved my way through piles of demolished mobile homes with remnants of broken tables, old couches and frames with pictures of smiling faces still trapped inside the glass that cluttered the grounds. Ahead of me were sagging homes with broken windows and missing siding that lined the paved road. A broken underground sprinkler sprayed water straight up into the air and I ducked through the midst and around the corner and stood in front of my first faces of Ingleside.

Jason Hanson, a resident of the mobile home park since 2001 was helping a neighbor start his truck when I stumbled upon him. I introduced myself and asked him if he’d like to talk to me about the development and his plans for the future. I looked confidently into his eyes as he looked me over, trying to size up my request, and hid my hands that shook with nerves deep in my pockets.

“Well I’m mad,” he told me but took a step back as Elliott pulled out a microphone and other audio equipment to begin our interview. “Um, I’m mad and I don’t think it’s right and I don’t have anywhere to go.”

As we continued to talk, more residents joined us. They joined in with Jason and told stories of their own: stories about broken promises, about fear and desperation for finding a new home, and determination to fight for what they thought they deserved.  We stood with the residents in the middle of Ingleside and for the first time, I began to see more than broken down trailers. I saw homes and memories and real people who needed someone to tell their story.

Elliott and I spent more than two weeks with the residents; we played outside with their grandchildren, tossed frisbees for their dogs, and swept up broken plates that fell from kitchen cabinets when the bulldozers drove by. All along, we gained their trust, but more importantly, we gained respect and with it the responsibility of giving the residents something they didn’t have: a voice.

On Tuesday, the Kernel published the story, “Development displaces residents,” the first in what we hope will be a series on the development of Devonshire Apartments on the land where Ingleside Mobile Home Park once stood. Tuesday afternoon I drove back to the park and knocked on the door of Francis Barrera, a resident who had been a fantastic sport through my hours of interviewing, the thousands of pictures Elliott shot and who was surviving the stress of finding a new place to live.

Francis held the paper in her hands and looked at the pictures of her run down home, of herself crying in front of piles of rubble and she began to cry.

“Thank you,” she said and took my hand in hers. She started to speak again but stopped, too choked up to finish. But that’s all she needed to say.

As I left the park on Tuesday, sure to return in a few days, the feeling of relief after seeing the story finally in print left me and the reality of the story set in. The stress was over for me, but not for the Ingleside residents.

“This is our home,” Patricia Ponce had told me a few days earlier as I finished up the story. Five days after the residents were supposed to be off the property 10 families still remained. “We’ll be here, still fighting.”

I left my nerves in the car when I stepped out into Ingleside that first day. It was as story unlike any I’d ever written in my time at the Kernel. It was a story that taught me much more than I ever thought I’d learn.

They’re still fighting. So I’m still writing.

Posted by Blair Thomas | Filed Under Blog 

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