Prancing across the living room last week, Emely De La Garza took one look at her father disassembling a television and her mother frantically packing boxes and declared with the sweeping authority only a 5-year-old can possess: “This is a mess!”
A mess indeed. Her parents, Erick and Marta De La Garza, stayed up the entire night packing in preparation for a moving company to transport their home from Country Road Park, a trailer park in northwest Houston, to a new mobile home community in Spring.
The De La Garzas — Erick, Marta, Emely and her older sister, Yocelin — are one of 53 low-income families living in the community forced to relocate by next Tuesday after their landlord sold Country Road Park last year.
The new owner, Summit Acquisitions & Development, told residents it plans to use the land for something else, but did not specify what. The sale requires residents to move or sell their mobile homes and find a new place to live, a significant expense for community members largely living paycheck to paycheck.
There are six families remaining in the park who have been unable to sell their homes or find a new place to live.
Residents first learned of the sale in a notice from the landlord last September and were told they had to move out by Dec. 31, but landlord Grady Brown agreed to push back the vacate date to April 8 after residents held a press conference in November.
Neither Brown nor any Summit officials responded to requests for comment.
“It’s really frustrating,” said Damaris Gonzalez, an advocate with the Texas Organizing Project. “We tried by all means to have a conversation with the owner, but it’s like he’s a ghost.”
TOP has been rallying support and connecting Country Road Park residents with resources since last year. Gonzalez said the nonprofit, which champions Black and Latino communities in Houston, Dallas and Austin, sought financial assistance from Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis’ office last year, but was told the county already had put together its budget for fiscal 2025.
The commissioner declined comment.
Losing community
The De La Garza family is one of the lucky ones, Marta De La Garza said.
The move is costing the family roughly $6,200 – the equivalent of 10 months of rent.
“We always try to have savings for accidents, emergencies,” De La Garza said. “But this wiped us out.”
After thunderstorms and muddy conditions prevented a moving company from transporting their mobile home last Thursday, the family was able to move everything to the new community in Spring on Saturday.
Down the road, Marisol Morales is battling an uncertain future for herself and her family.
The mother of three held back tears last week as she scribbled a FOR SALE sign and taped it to her trailer window looking out across Country Road Park.
Morales’ mobile home was built in 1992, which means most other trailer park communities will not accept it. Even if Morales could relocate it, the 38-year-old doesn’t know if she can afford the $3,000 or more it will cost to move the trailer, on top of storage costs and a new security deposit. Her husband often travels for work at a tree-planting company and brings home roughly $21,000 a year.
“We didn’t give (the owner) any problems,” Morales said in Spanish. “His rent was coming in. We never made him walk to us and say, ‘Pay me the rent, pay me the rent, pay me the rent.’”
According to the initial September 2024 notice of the sale, Brown sold the park because “the state of existing infrastructure … and the Owner’s stage in life, we felt like now is the time to transition the Property to a new owner.”
Regardless of why the park was sold, the residents are losing their community, Morales said.
“Here women (in the community) have come to me with their babies … and I have taken care of those babies and told them, ‘Don’t you worry,’” she said.
Morales said she would be comfortable leaving her 11-year-old daughter in charge of her siblings after school in Country Road Park because she trusts their neighbors.
“If we had more time here I would get a job or something while we establish ourselves,” Morales said. “But when you go to a new place you don’t know how your other neighbors are going to act.”
Mobile home owner rights
TOP also tried to enlist the help of state Sen. Molly Cook, D-Houston, on behalf of Country Road Park’s residents.
Cook said she called the former landlord every day for two weeks, went in person to Country Road Park and to Brown’s business address, all to no avail.
“A staffer left their email and number and the landlord called back, but the second he realized it was State Sen. Molly Cook on the phone, he hung up,” Cook said. “If I can’t get him on the phone and talk to me, how in the world is someone vulnerable going to get him to talk to them?”
Cook said that she and her office were limited in their ability to advocate for the community because mobile home owners who lease the land their trailer sits on are not protected by state law.
“Home ownership is really out of reach for a lot of Texans and Americans and manufactured homes are a critical part of making the American Dream accessible,” the freshman senator said. “It’s really important we make this right and we’ve been thinking about ways to fix this problem.”
Cook has introduced four bills to protect mobile home owners’ rights, including one that would give tenants in a manufactured home community the right of first refusal when a landlord decides to sell the property. Another would prohibit children in manufactured home communities from being displaced during a school semester by barring landlords from not renewing leases during that time.
Cook acknowledged the bills, if passed, would be too late to help Country Road Park residents, but she hoped lawmakers will consider them because housing affordability is a pressing issue for legislators.
Meanwhile, Gonzalez and other advocates at TOP are researching how best to establish a union for mobile home owners and renters.
“A lot of (Country Road Park residents) have found new homes, but nonetheless we don’t want this history to repeat itself,” Gonzalez said. “We’re going to put our demands together and present them to the county probably by the end of July when they start talking about the budget for 2026.”
Almost two weeks before Country Road Park shuts down, the northwest Houston community looks and sounds like a ghost town.
More than a dozen mobile homes sit abandoned by their owners, who were unable to sell or could not afford to move their homes.
Judith, 20, and Jaqueline “Jacky” Blanco, 23, a pair of sisters who live with their older brother, mother and Chihuahua mix, Blanquita, are trying to avoid becoming the next family forced to leave their home behind.
“It’s really frustrating,” Judith said, “we keep making calls. We want to transfer the mobile home but we haven’t paid it off yet. Our mom is trying to buy a house, but we don’t know where to put the mobile home in the meantime.”
The sisters quit their jobs at a pizzeria and put their culinary and cosmetology studies on hold to help the family pack.
A GoFund me for the remaining families has been circulating, but there’s not much else organizers can do to help, Gonzalez said.
“The fact is … this really is a challenge,” she said, “because the owners, the majority of the landlords that we met, have some experience with properties or they are attorneys who know real estate law and they know what to do.
“Sadly, there’s no protections for the tenants.”
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