Palo Alto Trailer Park Residents Offer to Buy Land for $14.5M

Luxury apartments or a mobile home park -- or what if the developer could get his money and keep the trailers?

Residents of Buena Vista, "the last mobile home park in Palo Alto" -- and one of the only affordable places to live in the tony Peninsula town -- have offered the property developer who wants to replace the trailers with luxury apartments $14.5 million for the land, according to the Palo Alto Daily News.

The Buena Vista Mobile Home Park Residents Association has offered Prometheus Real Estate Group $14.5 million for the 4.5-acre property, according to an Aug. 19 letter.

The cash includes mortgage funding from federal and state sources, as well as "resident equity and funding from private soruces," according to the letter.

Mobile home park owner Toufic Jisser has filed an application to close the park and sell the property, but in order to do so, he needs to complete a closure plan, the newspaper reported.

And the plan he's filed has been slammed as "incomplete,"  and the relocation assistance plan -- $11,000 per trailer owner, plus at least $21,000 for the trailer, if it can't be moved -- as inadequate in a city where two-bedroom apartments can cost thousands of dollars in monthly rent, the newspaper reported.

No reply to the offer from Jisser was reported in the newspaper.