After his wife died and the kids moved away, Arthur Morf decided to move out of his old apartment and settle into a new place of his own. So he bought a mobile home–12 feet wide, 46 feet long–in a trailer park on Waukegan Road in Glenview. By and large, his neighbors consisted of an assortment of widows, widowers, and down-on-their-luck divorcees, who can appreciate life in a trailer for less than $300 a month.
“First of all, it’s not just senior citizens who live in that park,” counters Gregory Gann, Bredemann’s spokesman and attorney. “There are at most 30 people living in the 24 trailers on the eastern part of the park. Of those people, 11 are under the age of 65. There are people 40 years old there. There are people who make a good living. That’s not to say that we don’t care about senior citizens. We do. Or that we have not been generous to the people who live there. We’ve made them very generous settlement offers. But the issue here has nothing to do with senior citizens. The issue is that the tenants are under the impression that they have a right to stay on property that is not their own forever. And they are wrong.”
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For Bredemann’s purposes, the trailer-park location at 2000 N. Waukegan is ideal. There are two other car dealers on that stretch of road, so nearby residents probably wouldn’t be too put off by another showroom. And it’s only a few miles from the wealthy North Shore suburbs. That’s important because the Toyota Lexus–the car Bredemann plans to sell–goes for about $30,000.
“Some people in the park make less than $500 a month. They can’t afford the cheapest apartments in this area. Do you know what it’s like to lose your home? It’s like going through a divorce, or having your kid hooked on drugs. It just eats away at you. People get-high blood pressure. They lose sleep. They cry. I’ve gained 30 pounds since this started. I don’t have money to see a shrink, so I spend a lot of time in my trailer drinking beer.”
“We’re more like single-family-home owners than renters,” says Ed Grabow. “I’ve put $2,000 into my trailer. I bought a new refrigerator. I installed carpeting. I painted it. I had the roof redone. I put in venetian blinds. Of course, if you stuck my trailer out in some field it would be worthless. But it’s not out in a field. It’s in the trailer park on Waukegan Road. And so long as this is where it is, there’s always going to be someone willing to pay at least $6,500 to buy it and move there.”
A few residents rose to oppose the car dealership on the grounds that it didn’t make sense to put more retirees out of housing, since Glenview already has a shortage of senior-citizen housing. But after Cropper attempted to describe the plight of her clients should they be evicted the village attorney admonished her, just as he admonished Bredemann’s lawyer, to stay away from the more personal details of their dispute.
Obviously.
