In June 2020, residents of Rockin' H Mobile Home Park in Victor, Idaho found an eviction notice posted on their door. The park was recently acquired by the company next door, which is a summer resort called Teton Valley Resort, offering RV connections, tipis, luxury cabins and spa. This is a booming period for Teton Valley's outdoor and tourism business, and the resort wants to expand.
Residents have 90 days to move out-under state housing laws, there is not enough time. Brian Stephens, an attorney for the Intermountain Fair Housing Council who represents several related families, pointed out that trailer parking is a special issue. "There is a piece of property to be moved," he said. "You are not just leaving an area; you are looking for a new place to put your home."
This is the problem faced by Mario and Celerina Hidalgo and their five children. Their neighbors have left, but their family is still there, fighting the deportation in court. In the spring of 2021, the Hidalgo family trailer began to develop in earnest: an excavator dug a trench and knocked down a tree outside their front door. One day, an excavator was idle for several hours outside their window. The workers erected barbed wire around their yard.
“We feel very scared and threatened. With nowhere to go, we feel that everything is approaching us,” Mario Hidalgo said in September. "This is terrible," his 18-year-old son Dario added.
The new owner, Randy Larsen, regards most of these incidents as misunderstandings. He said he understood why the Hidalgoss were upset, but the city zoning law forced him to build a sidewalk near the family trailer.
When asked about the loss of affordable housing due to the closure of the park, Larson replied that seasonal workers used his RV spot during the summer; he said that last winter, he provided employees at Jackson Hole and Grand Targhee ski resorts. Approximately 80 taxis were purchased. He also provided free housing for Hidalgos and other families in the park, who lived in a double-storey building in the resort. "To be honest, I am someone who wants to build some houses," he said. "There is a crisis here."
Larsen and Intermountain Fair Housing Council agree with this. For Stephens, this case involved more than a trailer park. The relocation of working families to make way for holiday cottages is a result of Xishan’s housing crisis.
"This is one of the last affordable housing districts in Teton County," he said.
Log cabins at the Teton Valley Resort in Victor, Idaho. Rodriguez Jr./Highland News
Teton Valley is located west of the border between Idaho and Wyoming, below the jagged peaks of the Teton Mountains. The regional economy once relied mainly on agriculture, but today it is dominated by outdoor recreation and tourism, driven by the ski resorts scattered on the slopes of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
The mountain range to the east is Jackson Hole. Jackson, Wyoming is called "a wide-ranging tax haven" by local real estate companies, attracting some of the world's richest and most powerful people-including Wal-Mart heir John Walton's widow Christie Walton and Google CEO Eric Schmidt-billionaires flocked to the area to snap up mountain properties worth millions of dollars. This is partly due to Wyoming’s loose corporate disclosure laws and a lack of income, inheritance, inheritance, real estate sales, or capital gains taxes. The worst income inequality in the United States occurs in the Jackson Hole metropolitan area.
A small group of service staff clean the mansion, provide drinks, run the chair lifts, groom the ski slopes and mow the super-rich lawns. For a long time, they could find an affordable place in towns such as Victor or Driggs in Idaho to cross the mountains and borders. The mobile home park reflects this reality: all residents are Latino families, and many people, such as Hidalgos, work for businesses that rely on tourism. Mario and Celerina Hidalgo moved to Teton Valley from Mexico in 1999, and they worked on packing potatoes and cleaning houses before finding a better job in a local restaurant. Recently, Mario Hidalgo has noticed that affordable rents have become increasingly scarce, although it seems that more tourists come to visit every year.
The pandemic brought this trend to a climax. Part of it is Zoom Boom-people who can choose to work remotely have pushed up housing prices in small towns in the western mountains. In a recent analysis of Zillow real estate data, Headwaters Economics, a non-partisan research organization, found that from July 2020 to July 2021, house prices in Teton County, Idaho increased by 15%, including Driggs and Victoria. Kata. In the one-hour commute from Jackson, prices soared to unprecedented levels. (At the same time, at Jackson, somehow, the market continues to climb: total sales by the third quarter of 2021-$2.166 billion-are more than twice the previous high.)
This also has an impact on renters: higher house prices mean fewer people can buy, leading to a shortage of rents. This is very clear on the community’s Facebook pages, which are almost completely consumed by housing issues. In late September, a frustrated resident wrote in disbelief that a small house less than 800 square feet sold for $500,000. The rent competition is so fierce that the posts of potential tenants often read like job applications with reference materials and professional avatars. Some applicants described their car life on public land. Pet owners eagerly swear that their pets are well-behaved. Many people emphasize that they are long-term locals and community members, and they are willing to stay here as long as they can afford it.
For example, Joseph Goddard, who runs a small construction and landscaping business and snowboards on weekends, learned this summer that he will lose his home in the fall. After months of searching, he finally found a place. He said that the rental market in Driggs is even worse than it was a year ago. "The market here has reached the damn moon," he said.
This is not the first time Teton Valley has experienced a real estate boom. In the early 2000s, the county approved and launched new development projects in droves. Then came the 2008 collapse. Thousands of half-finished "zombie" houses are scattered in the valley. Anna Trentadue, an attorney at Valley Advocates for Responsible Development, said the community felt a whiplash as housing prices skyrocketed again. (Trentado is one of the lawyers representing the Hidalgo family.)
Some people want to encourage new development; others want stricter supervision to promote correct growth. Policy changes may be coming: The Planning and Zoning Committee of Teton County is holding hearings on possible overhaul of the county's zoning system, which is outdated and provides few tools to control development. But this process is progressing slowly. Trentado said that this change is imminent. "The floodgates of speculative development are open; the whole community can see this."
The trailer of the Hidalgo family is surrounded by the new development of the Teton Valley Resort. The family moved out in July, although they continued to fight deportation. Jr Rodriguez/High Country News
By mid-November, only the Hidalgo family trailer was left in what used to be the Rockin' H Mobile Home Park; the family itself moved away in July. They knew they would eventually have to leave, Mario Hidalgo said; they felt "suffocated" by the resort. But the legal battle between the family and the resort is not over yet. As of press time, the two parties are in the final stages of a potential reconciliation. There is also a separate positive complaint, alleging racial discrimination and illegal eviction, which was filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on behalf of Hidalgos and three other families.
This process is sometimes ugly. Larsen claimed that the Hidalgos failed to pay the rent. However, according to documents reviewed by High Country News, as The Teton Valley News first reported, the family provided rent checks until July 2021. Larsen then said that the resort had returned the check and accused the family of squatters. In the same month, a resort employee told Hidalgos that they had three days to leave or the sheriff would deport them; the county attorney eventually told the family's lawyer that she would instruct the local police force to take any deportation actions against her in the park.
Mario Hidalgo said that they would have left earlier, but the local housing contraction prevented it. "We have been looking for new rental locations or new locations for mobile trailers, but we couldn't find a place that could accept us for rent or find rent within our range," he said. In the end, the family found a townhouse in Driggs. In the trailer park, their land parcel fee is $500 a month; the rent for the new townhouse is $2,300. This is the cheapest place they can find.
Nick Bowlin is a reporter for High Country News. Email him [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. Please refer to our letter to the editorial policy. Follow @npbowlin
Note: This story has been updated to reflect the excavator, not the bulldozer, digging a trench around the Hidalgo family trailer.