LEXINGTON PARK, Md. – On Monday, August 12th, 2024, residents of the Lord Calvert Mobile Park were invited to a public meeting by the property owners The Cherry Cove Group, which was held at the Great Mills High School at 6:30 p.m. The meeting, which was originally announced to residents in a July 9th, 2024 memo that was both emailed and delivered by hand to the front doors of the homes, was held to discuss ongoing changes to the Mobile Home community, which the BayNet has previously reported received a reprieve from pending plans for redevelopment in an announcement earlier this year.
Jacquelyn Meiser, the attorney for Cherry Cove, started the meeting by announcing that the management company would be sharing updates with residents in the meeting before any Q&A would start, and began by addressing announced rent increases and enforcement issues that have taken place since the announcement that the redevelopment of the park would not be taking place in the foreseeable future. Ms. Meiser told the meeting that the redevelopment plans had been scrapped due to taxes and higher than expected construction estimates.
A local housing activist, Jacob Lang, who was present at Monday’s meeting, told the BayNet that the outcry Cherry Cove received when residents attended a St. Mary’s County Commissioners meeting in early 2024 and expressed their concerns about being displaced might have been relevant as well to the decision to cancel the plans to evict residents, as well as an email campaign that generated more than 800 messages to the property owners on the issue. It has been announced that new leases would be provided to the residents by September 1, and should be signed and in place by October 1 of this year now that the development plans are on hold.
Some residents have seen actions by Cherry Cove in announcing the phased-in 20% rent increase and the quick implementation of an initiative to enforce strict towing in the community in recent weeks as harsh and attempting to drive residents away, or even to allegedly punish them for speaking out publicly on the issue. At Monday evening’s meeting, Cherry Cove asked the residents to put any questions they had onto index cards to be read aloud at the meeting. Some attendees felt deprived of the opportunity to voice their concerns in public, and up to 20 of them chose to walk out of the meeting after a brief argument on this point took place.
One attendee, Coretta Henderson, a resident of the community for 17 years, told the BayNet that she was among those who expressed displeasure at being unable to voice her concerns out loud at the meeting. “I think it’s still going to be sold, and they are trying to get rid of as many of us as they can, because they’d have to pay to move our trailers if they evict everyone and redevelop the property,” said Henderson. She went on to detail her account of the rent increases and how that was affecting many of the senior citizen residents, pointing out that in addition to the 20% increase in rent announced, that they had been told there was no longer a discount for seniors which had been part of the old rent structure. Henderson was particularly annoyed at the index cards. “As soon as she said that we could only speak via the written index cards, we were upset…Because I feel like I have a right to say what I want, when you’re saying you’re going to raise the rent and change this and that, I feel we had a right to speak our minds.”.
One area of contention is that the community has begun enforcing parking restrictions aggressively in recent weeks, with a special emphasis on trucks and work vehicles, such as work trucks, vans, and tow trucks. These issues have not been enforced for years, but now they are towing cars with minimal notice and banning the parking of “commercial” vehicles, which many of the working class residents drive for their business and work needs, and have parked in the neighborhood as well. Another new area of focus by Cherry Cove are “add-ons” to the trailers, like decks or sheds. For years, these improvements have been tolerated at Lord Calvert, but now since the announcement that the development project is canceled, some residents are saying that they are making an issue of things that they didn’t do before.
At the meeting, Cherry Cove promised to increase the number of allowed cars to expand from 2 to 3 and to make sure that is in the new lease documents. Residents are waiting to see what the new lease documents will contain when they receive them by September 1. “They are saying that we’ll have to choose between a month-to-month lease, or a 1 year lease,” said resident Coretta Henderson. “They are saying that some properties here have 9 or 10 cars, I think they are exaggerating a little bit…these are good people that live in here, and we think we’re being treated unfairly.”
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