Everything has its place in Unit 2 at the Swiss Village Mobile Home Park in Ouray.
The plants Sherrie Haselnus tenderly cares for, perched on the windowsill in her kitchen. The framed photos of her dogs, her faithful companions over the years, lined up on her bedroom dresser. The bunk beds in the guest room ready for her grandkids.
Even Haselnus herself has a place: a comfy chair in her living room, where she spends time reading books, listening to music or enjoying the view out her window of her hummingbird feeders in the summertime.
Her clothes dryer rarely works. And her dishwasher automatically starts every time the door latches. She doesn’t have the money to fix them. But Haselnus doesn’t dwell on those imperfections.
“This is my heaven right here. And that’s why I was so upset,” she said.
The news that blindsided Haselnus and her neighbors last week still has her reeling. The 3 acres of land including Swiss Village’s 20 mobile homes at 1500 Oak St., along with an additional 13 acres that span the hillside west of the park, are for sale.
Homes in Swiss Village Mobile Home Park are located along Oak Street, on the western side of town. The mobile homes each have yards and their backyards face the mountain. Across Oak Street, vacation rentals and high-priced homes have been built recently. Swiss Village’s owners, Ross and Arlene Crawford, have listed the park for sale with a price of $3.95 million, and the residents are trying to find a way to purchase the property underneath their homes to ensure they can stay. Erin McIntyre – Ouray County Plaindealer
The fact that Swiss Village could change hands for the first time in 35 years creates uncertainty for the future of the residents in the park because they don’t own the land underneath their homes. Mobile home parks that have gone on the market elsewhere in the state have been marketed as a potential moneymaker for buyers who could pocket thousands of dollars of rent payments a month or scrape the trailers and build larger, pricier homes in a redevelopment.
That’s not how Swiss Village is being marketed, though the listing with NextHome VirtualRealtor Marc Hitchcox notes the vacant land above the mobile home park has “development potential” and is located in a zoning district that allows higher density residential construction. Ross and Arlene Crawford, the owners of Swiss Village, say they would prefer to see residents stay in their homes, though they acknowledge that’s out of their control.
Swiss Village homeowners don’t want to leave things to chance. Within days of receiving a notice of intent to sell in the mail, they organized a meeting to form a cooperative that could seek to acquire the property itself or work with a local government or nonprofit that would own the land.
‘We call it home, not a park’
If Haselnus can’t find a way to stay in her trailer at Swiss Village, she’s not sure she can find a way to stay in Ouray. While some of the residents own their trailers, she still owes money on hers.
When she moved into this home in 2022, she barely made the numbers work. Three lenders turned her down before she found one who would let her borrow the money she needed to buy the trailer. Now, she’s about two years away from paying off the mortgage.
She’s 72 years old, with no signs of retirement in her near future. She’s frugal, wearing a coat indoors in the wintertime to limit utility bills. Eating out at a restaurant is a rare treat, and she calculates the cost of gas for a trip to Montrose and tries to make her trips worth it.
“I don’t anticipate ever being comfortable,” she said, “At the end of the month, I have to do my math to see what I need to juggle to be able to pay everything.”
Sherrie Haselnus looks out her kitchen window while filling a watering can for her plants on Sunday. Haselnus isn’t sure where she would move if she can’t stay in her mobile home at Swiss Village. She still has a mortgage on her trailer, which she bought in 2022, and though she’s turning 72 next month, she cannot afford to retire. Erin McIntyre – Ouray County Plaindealer
She followed her son, Brian, here when he decided to move to Ouray. Since then, she’s done a variety of jobs, including home health care for hospice patients and the elderly.
To make ends meet, Haselnus works piecemeal for a property management company, and does some home health care, cleaning, pet sitting and caretaking of homes.
Between those odd jobs and her Social Security, that’s the only way she can make her mortgage payments and the rent on the space where her trailer sits. Just the rent on the land in the trailer park is $624 a month. That’s one of her biggest fears – that a new owner will increase the rent so much she can’t afford to keep her home there.
But she can’t really afford to move it, either, and she doesn’t know where she’d move it even if she had the money to do so. She worked so hard to stay in Ouray. She doesn’t want to leave her cozy home, and she has no idea where she would live if it’s not Swiss Village. “I don’t know,” Haselnus said, choking up. “I know there are other people like me who have no place to go.”
Adam Kunz has called Swiss Village home since 2016. He’s worked hard since then to make Unit 15 just that, complete with a grassy backyard filled with flowers and a basketball hoop in the driveway out front, where his sons, 14-year-old Christopher and 13-year-old Parker, spend plenty of time playing 1-on-1. In the summer they watch movies in the back yard, projected on a screen on the trailer.
The Kunz family lives in Swiss Village, where 14-year-old Christopher, right, and 13-year-old Parker play basketball in the driveway where their dad’s fire department vehicle is parked. Adam Kunz, who serves as the chief of the Ouray Volunteer Fire Department and a captain for the Ridgway Volunteer Fire Department, decided to list his mobile home for sale before Swiss Village went on the market last week. He’s not sure how the park being for sale will affect his ability to sell the family’s mobile home, and he’s not sure where they’re moving. Erin McIntyre — Ouray County Plaindealer
“We call it home, not a park,” said Kunz, the fire chief of the Ouray Volunteer Fire Department and a captain at the Ridgway Fire Department.
But as much as he loves his home, he’s ready to find a new place. He had already decided to sell his mobile home, but the park went on the market first, potentially complicating the sale for prospective buyers who may balk at purchasing a trailer in a park with an uncertain future. If he can’t sell the trailer where it sits now, he estimates hauling his mobile home to Montrose would cost $4,000, but he doesn’t know where he would put it.
Even if the sale of his trailer goes through, he’s not sure where he’ll land next. Figuring out a way to stay in Ouray has proven challenging, even with new affordable housing under construction.
“What they call affordable housing now … $485,000, it’s not affordable for anybody,” he said.
Neither Haselnus nor Kunz blames the Crawfords for selling now. Kunz credits them for enacting and enforcing rules to keep Swiss Village attractive and well-kept. At the same time, “if he (Ross Crawford) kicks out 20 families, that’s not going to be good.”
Some of the owners have another layer of uncertainty — their homes are too old to remain in the park if they sell them. The current rule at Swiss Village is that trailers up to 30 years old can be sold and remain in the park. People can continue to live in trailers older than 30 years, or hand them down, but they can’t resell the units and keep them on the current lots.
Residents quickly mobilize
Selling a mobile home park isn’t like selling most any other property. Park owners can’t simply list a property and take the highest offer.
Colorado’s Mobile Home Park Act, a law most recently updated in 2022, provides some protections for residents. It requires owners to notify residents when they intend to sell the park and give them 120 days to make an offer to purchase the property themselves, paying fair market value. Owners must provide another 120 days for residents to close on the purchase.
The Crawford mailed letters dated May 29 notifying residents of the couple’s plan to sell the park. The asking price? $3.95 million, with the Crawfords willing to carry nearly half that amount as a loan to be paid back over 15 years.
A local nonprofit may also be able to assist. The Crawfords contacted the Home Trust of Ouray County when they decided to list the property with Hitchcox, who is also a member of the nonprofit’s board. They had already met Andrea Sokolowski, the Home Trust’s executive director, who had been in contact with the couple in recent months about the neighboring River Walk affordable townhome project the Home Trust is building on Oak Street. In one of those conversations, Sokolowski asked Arlene Crawford to keep the Home Trust in mind if she and Ross ever decided to sell Swiss Village.
Sokolowski received an email from Arlene Crawford on Saturday, June 8, notifying her of the intent to sell. She started making phone calls on Monday.
Kunz organized a neighborhood meeting on June 13 at the Ouray Community Center, where he said all but four homeowners attended and agreed to form a group to try to purchase the park. They had more than enough participants — only 51% had to agree to join in.
Since then, all the owners have agreed to form a cooperative, according to Paula Damke, who is the second-longest trailer owner in the park. She enlisted attorney Christina Usher to help the residents legally form the cooperative.
“It was scary when we got those letters,” Damke said. “It’s not as scary now that we know more.”
Residents have two avenues, according to Sokolowski. They can work with Thistle Community Housing, a Boulder-based nonprofit that helps convert mobile home communities to resident ownership, to acquire Swiss Village themselves.
Since 2018, Thistle has helped residents of mobile home parks in Durango, Leadville, Lafayette, Golden, Longmont, Johnstown, Cañon City and Boulder to obtain funding to purchase the land under their homes and become resident-owned communities.
If residents can purchase the land through a cooperative, they would be able to set their own lot fees and invest any revenue into the community. They would also be able to protect the park from future threat of development by another owner, who might see the potential to build luxury homes along the river.
Swiss Village residents could also partner with a local government or nonprofit — like the Home Trust — and seek to obtain funding from Impact Development Fund, a Loveland-based nonprofit that would loan money to secure the purchase of the park. The park would then be owned by the partnering local government or nonprofit.
“To me, the way it’s all unfolding is really about the best scenario that could possibly be,” said Hitchcox, referring to state laws protecting those who live in the trailer park as well as funding resources for them to purchase the park or enlist help from a nonprofit or local government to do so.
At this point, Sokolowski said, the Home Trust is playing a supportive role for residents, answering questions and directing them to potential resources. She said if Swiss Village homeowners were to enlist the Home Trust to try to acquire the property, the nonprofit would simply own the land and enlist a property manager to make sure residents are paying their monthly rents and meeting other obligations. Still, someone has to come up with more than $3 million, which Sokolowski acknowledged will be a challenge.
Asked how optimistic she is that residents will be able to purchase the mobile home park and stay in their homes, she said: “I’m an optimist. I’ve always been an optimist.”
“I think that these folks came together quickly. They are motivated. They can form a group that can act and that’s the biggest part. Oftentimes these mobile home park sales get totally hung up in the stage they’ve already gotten to. It’s the community organizing piece that trips up a lot of mobile home parks. That didn’t happen here.”
‘Time to hand it over to someone else’
The Crawfords live in Swiss Village, too — a 1,411-square-foot trailer manufactured in 2021. They purchased the park in 1989.
But they’ve been thinking about selling for the last couple of years. As Ross, who’s getting ready to turn 71, put it, he and Arlene are “in the fourth quarter of our lives. I’m hoping for a double overtime.”
“We felt it was time to hand it over to someone else,” he said.
To them, Swiss Village is Ouray’s original affordable housing, a reasonable place to live long before affordable housing nonprofits began forming and elected officials stopped talking about the need for affordable housing and took action to make funding and projects happen. Ross Crawford said they’ve installed new utilities, encouraged tenants to take care of their homes and properties and tried to keep rent low, although there have been rent increases the last couple of years attributed to hefty utility rate hikes the city imposed to help pay for new water and sewer treatment plants.
Crawford said he and his wife have put significant time and effort into Swiss Village. They take pride in the comments they’ve heard over the years from people who say it’s the nicest mobile home park they’ve seen. They would like to see it stay just as it is. But he insists that’s ultimately out of their hands.
“Time marches on and things change. And I know the county, the whole state, is screaming for affordable housing. Whatever happens, happens,” he said.
The residents are determined to find a way to make sure they can stay in their homes.
During the meeting last week, Damke looked around the table at the faces of her neighbors, people who work in the community and are an important part of this place.
“These are the people that make Ouray, Ouray,” she said. “They’re hard workers, they care about this place. They don’t want to move. We can’t afford to lose this.”
