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The $29 million effort to save Palo Alto's last mobile home park (references research of Amado Padilla)

July 18, 2015
San Jose Mercury News
By 
Bruce Newman

PALO ALTO -- Of the 115 or so trailers in Buena Vista Mobile Home Park, it would be difficult to find even one that could still be described as "mobile" -- a distinction shared by some of the park's 400 residents. F.G. Cope III, for one, has been sitting in the cactus garden outside his rusted Dutchmen Classic, off and on, since 1992. Cope has lived on a fixed income for 23 years, since a disability forced him to retire from the Ferry-Morse Seed Co. of Mountain View.

"I was a peddler, a con artist, a vinegar man," he says, recalling years of relentless travel as a seed salesman. "If you didn't get 'em with your BS, you got 'em with your fancy footwork."

Now, Cope is just trying to stay put. He and 400 of his neighbors in the mobile home park await the outcome of a frantic effort by one of America's richest cities to preserve what is, by far, its poorest neighborhood. For the past several months, city and county officials have conducted public hearings on the park's possible closure that had more feel-good endings than a Frank Capra movie.

The only mobile home park in Silicon Valley's most upscale city, Buena Vista is as much an enclave within Palo Alto as any high-tech corporate redoubt -- although, unlike the nearby grounds of Hewlett-Packard and Tesla, nobody ever calls the 4.5-acre trailer park a "campus." Sitting in an adjoining Zip code to Internet titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and the late Steve Jobs -- where median home prices top $1 million, and median household incomes are more than $117,000 -- Buena Vista has become the political darling of a city whose residents would have a hard time finding it.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS.

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