Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.
Please log in, or sign up for a new account to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Welcome! We hope that you enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for signing in! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Please purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Your current subscription does not provide access to this content.
Sorry, no promotional deals were found matching that code.
Promotional Rates were found for your code.
A mix of clouds and sun. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 91F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..
Clear skies. Low 62F. Winds light and variable.
Lifelong El Portal Trailer Park resident Luke Harbin sits in the front yard of his mother's mobile home before getting ready to move out for good on March 13, 2022. (Craig Kohlruss/The Fresno Bee/TNS)
Lifelong El Portal Trailer Park resident Luke Harbin sits in the front yard of his mother's mobile home before getting ready to move out for good on March 13, 2022. (Craig Kohlruss/The Fresno Bee/TNS)
Lynn Harbin is having a hard time adjusting to her new life in a small rented dorm room in Yosemite Valley.
She moved there a couple months ago, after Yosemite National Park told her and around a dozen other homeowners in rural El Portal, located just outside Yosemite’s west entrance, that they could no longer live in their homes.
No compensation was given for having to leave the El Portal Trailer Park, where Harbin lived for nearly four decades – 34 years in the current home she owns.
After Yosemite terminated housing agreements in March for the land she leased beneath her home, Harbin and her neighbors were no longer allowed to live there, but were granted extensions to continue removing their personal belongings.
They were told the final deadline is June 30, when they must remove or surrender their homes.
A full closure of the mobile home park will begin July 1, and any property left on site “will be treated as abandoned and processed by the National Park Service” in accordance with federal management regulations, Yosemite officials said.
Harbin cried many times during a recent interview, thinking about all that has happened since Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon sent her a letter shortly before Christmas, informing her that her housing agreement would soon be terminated due to unsafe power lines there that Yosemite owns.
“She could have played nice,” Harbin said repeatedly.
Harbin wanted more time to leave, some financial compensation, and for Muldoon to hold public meetings about the issue.
The mobile home park, also called the El Portal Trailer Court, has been gradually closing by attrition as Yosemite workers retire. The 66-year-old Harbin put a new $6,000 metal roof on her mobile home in 2019, thinking she could probably live there for another 10 years until she’d have to leave upon retirement. Most of the 58 sites in the trailer park are empty because it’s been years since new homeowners have been allowed to move in.
“I didn’t see this coming,” Harbin said.
Her son, Luke Harbin, has done a lot of advocating on her behalf. He describes her new tiny dorm room as a walk-in closet.
“I have to call her every day, try to like bring her back up and tell her that everything’s OK,” Luke said tearfully, “but I know deep down inside nothing is OK.”
Several residents said they haven’t received the political and legal help they had hoped for.
A GoFundMe donation account to pay for legal services for the community was created by one affected trailer park resident, and a change.org petition was made by a former El Portal resident.
One of the affected homeowners and Yosemite workers, Toni Covington, died a few days after she was forced to leave her longtime home.
Residents feel threatened by NPS as June deadline nears
The El Portal mobile homes are too old or large to move – or it would be too expensive to do so, residents said. Roads in either direction have narrowed since the trailer park opened in the 1950s due to a major rock slide and a reconfigured Yosemite entrance along Highway 140 that squeezes through an opening between boulders.
If the homes can’t be removed, the National Park Service said there is just one option, to surrender them by June 30. Many residents worry they will be threatened with lawsuits if they don’t hand over ownership of their homes.
“We’re all scared, like what’s going to happen?” Luke Harbin said. “My mom doesn’t have a lot of money. If they’re going to sue her, that means she’s going to be working the rest of her life. She’s never going to be able to retire.”
Those affected said letters signed by Muldoon telling them to leave weren’t legal eviction notices. Still, they did leave, after Yosemite threatened them with six months imprisonment or a $5,000 fine per violation for unlawfully residing on federal lands and trespassing if they decided to live in their homes past March 13.
Yosemite turned off power to homes in the trailer park later that week.
Yosemite has quoted language stating that the government “reserves the right to manage its housing in whatever way it deems necessary.” That language doesn’t acknowledge that many residents own their homes.
“There was never an eviction notice,” Lynn Harbin said. “I was watching on the news the other day, and some people (elsewhere) were being evicted, and they went and put this big ol’ sticker sign on their door that said ‘eviction,’ and we never got one of those.”
Terri Nishimura, among the affected homeowners, called what’s happening to them “like a war on poor people.”
She takes offense at Yosemite saying homes in the trailer park will be considered abandoned on July 1.
“They weren’t abandoned,” Nishimura said. “They were stolen. They were taken from us. We were threatened with jail if we would stay in our homes, and now they’re called abandoned properties.”
Why is Yosemite closing the mobile home park in El Portal?
It wasn’t until late last year that residents were given a deadline to leave and were notified of an estimated start date for future construction there. There have been various, changing long-term plans for the site over the years.
Yosemite stressed in December that unsafe electrical infrastructure that Yosemite owns in the mobile home park is why residents had to leave this year.
In 2024, the national park plans to start converting the site into a public and administrative-use campground for recreational vehicles.
Yosemite recently redid power lines around the trailer park with an influx of funds provided by the Great American Outdoors Act, and will redo power at the site as it’s converted into a campground.
The unsafe electrical infrastructure argument doesn’t make sense to Harbin, who has gauged the status of electricity there by how often she’s had to light candles because of power outages.
“Years ago, when we first moved there, whenever there was a bad storm we got out the candles, because every time there was a bad storm, the power would go out. The last couple of years, that hasn’t happened, so I thought the power was good,” Harbin said. “Maybe I was blind by the whole thing, but we haven’t had our candles out in quite a few years, so I figured every time they came over to work on the power lines, that it was OK. So when she (Muldoon) said that about the power lines, I thought she was just making stuff up as she goes along.”
Yosemite officials said there are still no plans to use the site this year – after backtracking on previous statements that the area would also be needed soon as a construction staging area for various park projects – and said “NPS management actively pursued the question of providing direct financial compensation to tenants, but we have not found a viable legal authority.”
The Bee has a pending request, covered by the Freedom of Information Act and California Public Records Act, seeking more records from Yosemite. The request was filed over two months ago.
Missing home alongside the Merced River
Further complicating matters, Yosemite officials said park wildlife managers trapped a bear in the trailer park on May 18 and relocated it, but that GPS data from a bear collar shows it has returned to the area.
“Park staff are currently working with former tenants to secure empty trailers and mitigate bear attractants,” officials said on May 24.
The bear reportedly broke into the home of the late Covington.
Most of the displaced residents are only able to visit the mobile home park along Highway 140 to pack up their belongings when they’re not working and there’s still sunlight.
One of the affected homeowners, Nancy Dawson, hurt her lower back in April moving large items and hasn’t been able to work since.
Harbin gave away a beloved dining room and bedroom set that previously belonged to her mother because there isn’t room for those family treasures in her new dorm.
“We’ve left a few pictures on the wall ... we don’t want them to come in and think we’ve abandoned it,” Harbin said.
She still thinks of her mobile home near the tranquil Merced River as home. When asked about some of her favorite parts of living there, Harbin said, “everything.”
©2022 The Sacramento Bee. Visit sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.