Originally published Dec. 16, 2024, by Belleville News-Democrat
As resident Patty Totty walked through her mobile home community this fall, she reminisced about how things used to be when she moved in 19 years ago so that her daughters could go to Belleville East High School.
She lives at Greenmount Station, just off of Mascoutah Avenue near the old Belle Valley South school.
“It’s sad. … This place used to be very nice,” Totty said, recalling trimmed lawns, quick repairs and compassion from the landlord when tenants fell on hard times.
“I didn’t expect to live here that long,” she said. “I thought I would move.”
She stayed because she likes her neighbors and because she does not want to live in an apartment. But now her bathroom floor is caving in, a hole has formed in the utility room flooring, windows and a door let water into her home, and vacant trailers sit around her. So she’s thinking about leaving.
“I don’t think they know how to do this,” Totty said of Homes of America LLC, the company that took ownership of the park two years ago.
Residents of multiple local mobile home parks purchased by Homes of America have been living with leaking roofs, mold and pests and going without heating or cooling because they say the company is deferring needed maintenance and leaving tenants feeling ignored, while also raising the costs to live in what were once affordable homes. Their complaints and living conditions were detailed in interviews, as well as a number of lawsuits and government inspection reports.
Homes of America has ties to Alden Global Capital, an investment firm known for gutting distressed community newspapers, leading some to suspect the lack of investment in the mobile homes is part of a business model to maximize profits by reducing expenses while hiking rents or creating new fees and levying fines on tenants.
One family at Swansea Mobile Home Park, for example, received monthly bills that were about $100 higher after Homes of America bought the property. The family said it was because of additional charges for utilities that had previously been included in the rent, according to a lawsuit they filed against the company alleging deceptive business practices and other complaints.
A report published this fall by nonprofit advocacy groups accuses Homes of America and Alden Global Capital of exploiting vulnerable tenants across the country, including some who own their mobile homes but rent the lots they sit on. Often, they cannot afford the thousands of dollars it costs to move the mobile homes off the property.
Former tenant Elena Smith said it can be difficult to leave, even for people who rent the trailers.
“Homes of America came in and it was almost like they wanted to trap us there,” she said. “By introducing all of these fees, you’re making it harder for people to save up and move. If you don’t want to be homeless, you’re forced to pay whatever they say.”
Smith and her sister consider themselves fortunate to have moved earlier this year, leaving a rental at Homes of America’s Shiloh property, Lake Suzanne Mobile Home Park, after experiencing two summers without air conditioning, among other problems.
“As we were moving, we said if we could take everybody with us we would because that’s inhumane,” Smith said.
The company and its lawyers did not respond to the Belleville News-Democrat’s interview requests.
Jim Hodgkins is one of several tenants who have sued over needed repairs. Like Totty, he rents a mobile home at Greenmount Station in Belleville.
“I’m not gonna sit back and be treated like I don’t matter because I live in a mobile home park,” Hodgkins said.
Hodgkins took Homes of America to small claims court for reimbursement of over $1,000 he spent to replace the bathroom flooring in his home, which was rotting and growing mold because of a leak in his roof.
“The room was a health hazard and uninhabitable,” he wrote in a late 2023 court filing. “I tried multiple avenues to reach the defendants to have repairs done. But no one ever responded to daily phone calls or emails.”
Hodgkins said the company wrote a check to cover the flooring job. But water still gets inside the home where an awning was damaged by a storm earlier this year. His daughter Hollie Hodgkins says she puts towels down every time it rains.
Hodgkins said his furnace broke this Thanksgiving, leaving them without heat for nine days and through the region’s first snow of the season. He and his daughter used a space heater and ran the oven with the door open to keep the home warm for the first five days until a property manager answered his calls and brought over a pair of electric heaters to use while they waited for a replacement part to repair the furnace.
Homes of America owns a total of nine mobile home parks locally — in Belleville, Swansea, Shiloh, Caseyville, New Baden and Centralia — under different LLCs that share a common address with Smith Management. (Homes of America also owned a mobile home park in Granite City before selling the property this summer.)
Smith Management is a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital and together they formed Homes of America to manage the mobile home park investments, Land of Lincoln Legal Aid attorneys state in one of the lawsuits against the company.
The village of Shiloh has been communicating with representatives from all three companies about code violations at Lake Suzanne since Homes of America purchased the property two years ago, according to emails and letters obtained by Land of Lincoln Legal Aid through public records requests. It shared copies of the records with the Belleville News-Democrat.
Smith Management is owned by Randall Smith, co-founder of Alden Global Capital. Homes of America’s chief operating officer is Bryon Fields, a former Duke University football player who interned at Alden Global Capital, according to the resume he posted on LinkedIn.
Neither Fields nor Alden’s chief legal officer, Michael Monticciolo, responded to the BND’s requests for comment about tenant complaints. Local attorneys representing Homes of America in lawsuits involving its metro-east properties also did not respond.
Fields gave a rare statement to NPR in 2022, saying “The dedicated team at Homes of America is committed to creating safe, well-maintained communities that our residents are proud to call home.”
Those who live and work in the mobile home parks tell a different story.
‘They just refused to answer’
The BND interviewed half a dozen current and former tenants, a former property manager who also lived at one of the local mobile home parks, a group of legal aid lawyers who have taken calls from approximately 150 tenants, most of whom lived in southwestern Illinois, and representatives from two nonprofit groups that have been investigating Homes of America.
They say Homes of America is understaffed, with few maintenance workers and a revolving door of property managers, which makes it difficult for tenants to reach the company at times.
At Greenmount Station, neighbors gathered at the Hodgkins home this fall and commiserated about the challenges.
Resident Tom West said he is lucky to have no issues with his home at the moment, but he worries about a sudden need for repairs, like a hot water heater going out, given his neighbors’ experiences.
“When black mold was growing in the bathroom…they just refused to answer,” Jim Hodgkins told his neighbors.
“They have to get everything approved,” Totty added of the property managers they have cycled through since Homes of America bought the mobile home park in 2022.
Amanda Wellbaum used to work as an on-site property manager for Homes of America, while living in a mobile home at Lake Suzanne in Shiloh. She left the company in November 2023 after working there for five months.
She said a consultant working for Homes of America fired her, and she believes it was because she pushed back on business practices she did not agree with involving billing and employee work conditions.
Wellbaum said she was managing multiple mobile home communities in the metro-east, including those in Belleville, Shiloh and Swansea, and part of her job was to prioritize work orders tenants had filed requesting maintenance and repairs.
“When I started, there were over 100 work orders just at Lake Suzanne and there were 45 of them that needed to be done immediately. Their floors were caving in, walls were caving in, mold was so bad they closed off one of the doors and just didn’t use that room,” Wellbaum said.
She said the company did not employ enough people to handle that volume of repair requests, with four maintenance workers and two porters on staff at the time to care for hundreds of mobile homes. But she said landlords are still supposed to complete needed work by hiring outside vendors to do it.
Standard practice in property management is to bring the property owner competitive bids for the work from at least three companies, according to Wellbaum, who said she worked in the industry for 13 years.
“They just kept saying, ‘It’s too expensive.’ ‘Will they go cheaper?’” Wellbaum said.
“In all my time in property management, I’ve never seen a company fail so hard for their residents,” she added. “… It’s not the residents’ fault that you don’t have enough staff and don’t want to pay enough money to maintenance technicians.”
Wellbaum said tenants started withholding rent either because the company was not fixing things or because they disputed the rent. She estimated that when she left, the company had $1 million in delinquency on all the properties they owned in the Midwest.
Tenants, code enforcer take legal action
Land of Lincoln Legal Aid has heard from about 150 aggrieved tenants at 12 Illinois mobile home parks owned by Homes of America since around 2022, according to the team of attorneys handling housing cases for the agency. It is a not-for-profit that provides free civil legal services to low-income residents in southern and central Illinois.
Attorneys Patrick Graham, Noah Halpern and Kendall Sibala said Homes of America tenants have asked for help fighting evictions, seeking repairs and disputing new charges, which has led to lawsuits in some cases.
Five lawsuits that either remain active or were settled this year allege the following:
- Inadequate repairs to the damaged roof of a mobile home at Lake Suzanne, causing the glass cover of the kitchen ceiling light to fill with water. Failure to respond to other needed repairs at the home in a reasonable amount of time.
- Failure to repair the central air conditioning of a mobile home at Heatherlynn Estates in New Baden in a reasonable amount of time, instead providing window units that were insufficient to cool the home, including during an excessive heat warning with heat index values of up to 117 degrees.
- Inadequate wheelchair ramp on a mobile home at Swansea Mobile Home Park, making it difficult for the tenant who uses a wheelchair to get in and out of the home. Failure to respond to other needed repairs at the home in a reasonable amount of time.
- Charges for water, sewer, trash, administrative and late fees that were not agreed to in leases at Heatherlynn Estates, Lakeshore Estates in Granite City and Swansea Mobile Home Park.
Each of these lawsuits accused Homes of America of violating either the tenants’ leases, local housing ordinances or state protections for mobile home tenants. Two Lakeshore Estates complaints over fees were settled when Homes of America sold the property in July. The rest of the cases are ongoing.
Homes of America has denied allegations it failed to make timely repairs and charged tenants more than it was owed in the court cases it has responded to so far.
One former Homes of America tenant, Brittania Saulsberry, asked her neighbors at Shawn Drive Mobile Home Park in Swansea to sign a petition this spring, which she said she showed to a judge in an eviction case against her. The petition stated that they never signed a lease with Homes of America and that tenants were performing the property maintenance the owner failed to do.
“How can they charge someone fees and try to illegally evict their tenants when their tenants never agreed to anything?” the petition asks.
Saulsberry said she had leaks causing mold to grow in her bathroom and under the kitchen sink. The mobile home park was also infested with mice, according to Saulsberry.
“It was actually traumatizing to be honest,” she said.
She and her family left Shawn Drive and have since found another home.
A local municipality has also taken the company to court. The village of Shiloh has written seven tickets against Homes of America.
At least 34 mobile homes at Lake Suzanne in Shiloh have failed multiple occupancy inspections since 2022. Problems included mold and soft floors from leaks, cockroaches and other issues.
Code enforcement employees repeatedly sent letters and emails and met with company officials about needed repairs at Lake Suzanne, village records show.
The village wrote the tickets earlier this year alleging Homes of America violated a local ordinance because seven mobile homes remained in disrepair. The homes each failed three inspections in March 2022, May 2023 and March 2024, according to the village’s communications with the company. One home failed a fourth inspection in January 2023.
Homes of America has so far failed to appear at every court appearance scheduled for those tickets.
What will ‘vulture capitalist’ do with mobile homes?
The Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Manufactured Housing Action are two nonprofit groups that published a report this fall about similar tenant experiences at Homes of America’s mobile home parks across the country.
The report drew comparisons to Alden Global Capital’s other business ventures.
Alden is the country’s second-largest owner of newspapers based on circulation through its subsidiary Digital First Media. It owns the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers owned by Tribune Publishing. Three years ago, it tried but failed to take over Lee Enterprises, which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
It has become known for steep budget cuts to increase profits, which politicians, guild members and other media insiders have criticized.
Alden co-founder Randall Smith has been called a “vulture capitalist” for investing in troubled companies since at least the 1990s, according to reporting at the time. Critics continue to use that term in referring to the company.
Heath Freeman, another former Duke football player who is now president of Alden Global Capital, has said in an interview with the Washington Post that the company got into the newspaper business because it “saw an opportunity to help fix the broken model.”
Freeman believes newspapers need to be cut — and chains merged together — to be saved, Washington Post reporter Sarah Ellison wrote.
A University of North Carolina study from 2018 found that Digital First Media cut newsroom staffing by as much as twice the national average, based on a poll of guild representatives at a dozen of the company’s papers.
Twenty-one U.S. senators sent a letter to Alden executives in 2019 urging them to drop a hostile takeover bid to acquire the country’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett. The bid was ultimately unsuccessful. They argued the company’s practice of laying off staff and selling assets left a “skeleton of the paper incapable of meeting the basic information needs of its community.”
“In short, your newspaper-killing business model is bad for newspaper workers and retirees, bad for communities, bad for the public, and bad for democracy,” the senators wrote.
Another Alden subsidiary, Twenty Lake Holdings LLC, has also been purchasing Greyhound bus stations, putting at least some up for sale in downtown business districts that are attractive to developers. Critics have noted that the consequence of this redevelopment is that it pushes bus stops to less convenient outdoor locations for passengers who otherwise lack access to transportation.
Representatives from both the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Manufactured Housing Action said the company’s strategy for its mobile home parks remains unclear.
The groups used mortgage documents and other property records to connect more than 130 mobile home parks in 17 states to Homes of America and Alden Global Capital, which was news to some of its tenants.
“That’s part of the story with them,” said Jordan Ash, one of the authors of the report. “There is no website for Homes of America. There’s no list of the parks. They’re not marketing them. They’re not trying to have a brand. It makes it so hard to find out what they own. They were not trying to call attention to themselves.”
Ash is the housing campaign and research director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
The earliest Homes of America mobile home park purchase that the nonprofits are aware of was in 2020. Paul Terranova, the Midwest community organizer at Manufactured Housing Action, said he has not seen it close or flip a property for other development in that time.
Ash noted that Homes of America tends to leave units sitting vacant after tenants leave or get evicted instead of bringing new people in, but it may also be trying to bring in new mobile homes for its parks, based on a breach of contract lawsuit it filed over $10 million worth of trailers that were never delivered.
It often bought parks with mobile homes that were already distressed, according to Terranova. At Lake Suzanne, for example, some of the trailers are from the 1960s and residents felt the previous owner had also been ignoring maintenance requests, the village of Shiloh records state.
But Terranova said he has seen some examples of Homes of America moving new tenants into units and charging them more for rent. Some cost as much as $1,200 a month, he said.
“How they decide when to do that and when not to is somewhat baffling,” Terranova said.
“There are inconsistent patterns,” he added. “The only consistency is people are suffering.”