Mobilizing Homes

How a group of Coloradans fought like hell to wrest their "poor people's paradise" from the grip of a PE-backed firm

- Abigail Weinberg

IN SEPTEMBER 2018, Peggy Kuhn returned from a four-day mountain biking trip to her home in Sans Souci park, a 62-plot stretch of land south of Boulder, Colorado, where mobile homes have been set up since at least the 1950s, only to find her neighbors "crying and screaming." Usually an oasis of sorts, the nearly 11-acre, cottonwood-lined property at the foot of the Rockies had radically changed.

Just before she left, a private equity-backed firm had bought the park, and residents soon found blue bags hanging on their doorknobs, containing packages outlining a fresh set of rules. Tenants were not to "wander on the streets of the community" after 9 p.m. Children were not to play in the roads. "Unsightly" or overgrown lawns were prohibited. While Kuhn was away, landscapers hired by the park's new owners had started cutting down residents' rosebushes, lilac trees, and wildflower gardens. Before, Sans Souci was a "poor people's paradise," one resident said, where neighbors greeted each other as they passed by. But now everything that gave the community character, from people's yard statues to the multicolored paint on their homes, had to go.

"It felt like we were under military occupation," said Michael Peirce, president of the community's homeowners association. For weeks, he told me, landscaping trucks prowled the grounds, their yellow emergency blinkers flashing.