Residents of burned Santa Rosa mobile home park sue owner over lagging rebuild efforts

May 17--For Alison Gould and other residents at The Orchard, the rebuild clock is ticking.

Gould last week took a visitor to where her home once stood along the western edge of the Orchard, a mobile home park off Pinercrest Drive known for grass front yards and for clientele aged 55 and older. Her lot, with a distant view of Mount St. Helena, now sits cleared and vacant, one of nearly 70 homesites there that burned after a deadly wildfire roared through northwest Santa Rosa in October and jumped the SMART train tracks from Coffey Park.

"We had less than 10 minutes to get out," Gould recalled of the night last fall when she and her husband, Dennis Silva, escaped the flames.

The couple hope to take advantage of an offer from the park's owner to buy a new manufactured home at a discounted price. But seven months after the fire, Gould and a number of other residents say the rebuilding process is taking too long.

The frustration boiled into public view Wednesday when seven Orchard residents and their attorneys announced they had filed a class-action lawsuit against the park owner, Chicago-based Hometown America, a company that owns mobile home parks in 13 states.

Among those appearing at a press conference was 94-year-old Eleanor Miller, who had moved to The Orchard in 1981.

"I miss my home," Miller told a small group of reporters. "I want it back."

A Hometown America executive responded in a telephone interview Wednesday that he empathized with the residents' frustrations. But he said the company has made considerable efforts to help residents acquire new manufactured houses as quickly as possible and for "the most reasonable costs."

"Seeing the devastation, the right thing to do was to get these people back into houses," said Stephen Braun, the company's co-president and chief operating officer. He said Hometown America's discounted prices would save residents more than $100,000 per house, with third-party models retailing from an estimated $272,000 to $311,000, according to the company. Anyone can choose to make a deal with a separate home manufacturer, Braun said.

The mostly senior residents of the 223-unit Orchard have been caught up in the most destructive wildfires in state history. The North Bay fires claimed 40 lives and burned nearly 6,200 homes in a four-county region. Insurance claims have totaled nearly $10 billion.

In Santa Rosa, the fire's destruction included not only 1,200 homes in the flatland subdivisions of Coffey Park and 1,400 homes in the hillside neighborhoods of Fountaingrove, but also damaged portions of three mobile home parks, a type of lower-income housing in relatively short supply in Sonoma County.

Gould and her husband aren't parties to the lawsuit against Hometown America. But in April, they used up the last of the available rental assistance money from their insurance company. Gould said the couple are seventh on a waiting list to get a new home, but they have encountered numerous delays in their efforts to sign a contract.

"It just is no way to be doing business," she said.

At the news conference and in interviews last week, residents complained they had received few written communications from Hometown America. They said that has made it difficult to understand the rebuilding process and to be able to provide key details in writing to their insurance companies.

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