DADE CITY, Fla. — The deadline passed a couple of weeks ago for 130 tenants at The Highlands at Scotland Yard mobile home park in Dade City to pay a $3,557 assessment fee for unspecified “capital improvements” or face eviction.
“We’re a retirement community,” tenant Ned Sponsler, 81, said. “We don’t have a lot of money.”
Sponsler said Legacy Communities purchased the 55 and older park in February 2022 and sent notices to more than half of the tenants this past August stating they had three months to pay the assessment or face eviction. The deadline was Nov. 13.
“I’ve had women coming up to the house with tears in their eyes," Sponsler said. "They’re worried about sleeping in the street at night. They have nowhere to go. Their families are all gone. They’ve lived here eight or 10 years and they can’t afford $3,500.”
The tenants in the park own their mobile homes but rent the land it sits on. Resident Henry Simonetta, 63, has lived in the park for seven years and hired an attorney to fight Legacy in court.
“We followed the law and we’ve gone through every state statute and we’ve done everything that we’re supposed to do and Legacy has not,” he said. “They haven’t given us any kind of a list of what these capital improvements were supposed to be.”
Simonetta said according to Florida law, Legacy can only send pass-through charges to residents when the capital improvements were government mandated.
“We went to the county," he said. "There’s been nothing mandated to be done here. What they’ve done is a little bit beautification and maintenance that they’re trying to get all of these seniors to pay for.”
Legacy spokesperson Molly Boyle would not answer a question about what exactly those capital improvements were for or if Legacy has initiated the eviction process.
Instead, Boyle sent Spectrum News a statement which reads in part: “We are working to meet with residents and their legal counsel to resolve this matter. Legacy Communities is committed to our residents and to providing affordable and quality communities…Our business model is reliant on keeping our existing residents in-place, and affordability is top of mind.”
According to our partners at Tampa Bay Times, in addition to the controversies over rent increases in communities owned by or managed by Legacy Communities in Ohio, there have been other cases closer to home. Earlier this year, residents in the Sunshine Mobile Home Park in St. Petersburg and Ranchero Village in Largo raised questions about high rent increases, according to media reports.
In Ohio, the concerns about the company’s practices brought a critical letter to Legacy from U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown last December.
“These sudden and drastic rent increases have left residents on fixed incomes scared and without options,” Brown wrote to Legacy CEO Patrick O’Malley. “Residents report that they will not be able to afford rent increases, nor can they sell their homes because prospective buyers are unable or unwilling to pay the high and increasing lot rents that Legacy Communities charges."
Simonetta said he’s hoping to get an injunction against Legacy from a judge at their next court hearing.
“It was to be heard on Nov. 24 but Legacy called and asked to move it to the 1st because that was a long holiday,” he said. “I guess their holiday is more important than our eviction.”
Even though Sponsler is one of the 116 unit owners who’re not facing the assessment because they have a different rental agreement, he’s chipping in to help pay for the attorney and plan a protest.
“I feel bad for these elderly people," he said. "I feel a responsibility to help them get to the end goal of enjoying life and dying with a little pride. You can’t do that if you’re worried about being tossed into the street.”