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Nonprofit would help seniors stay in their homes

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When Julie Butler moved into the Shadow Mountain Village mobile home park 10 years ago, she figured she was home for good.

It was a small community with a rural feel; it was exactly what she was looking for.

“I bought this thinking it was going to be my last place to live,” Butler said.

She figures a lot of her neighbors were thinking the same way when they bought into the community.

That’s not going to happen.

The property is in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the tribe is not renewing the lease when it runs out in 2026.

A tribe spokesman did not return several calls for comment for this story.
That leaves many seniors on a fixed income no where to go.

“We’ve gotten to the point where everybody’s just building apartments, stuffing everybody into them and the elderly can’t afford anything,” Butler said.

And that’s going to leave many in the community with some difficult decisions to make.

“The seniors who live here, not the ones with their snowbird housing, but the ones who live here are losing their housing, low-income housing. Nothing’s affordable for them anymore. I’ve got people calling me who have sold their home in here and they’re wishing they hadn’t. They’re wishing they had just waited until the park closed because everyone is raising the rent on them. They don’t even know where they’re going to live next. It’s just terrible.”

Many of the mobile homes in the community are “pre-HUD” manufactured homes, which means they don’t meet the standards of the federal Housing and Urban Development’s standards, making them worth very little.
People are selling their homes for around $25,000, Butler said.

“What are you going to buy with $25,000? You can’t even go buy a home in another park for that,” Butler said.

Butler’s got a plan though.

She’s started paperwork to create a 503 (c) nonprofit called Love from Above that would buy land and allow seniors to move their mobile homes on to it.

The problem is the plan hasn’t gotten much farther than that in the past eight years.

Even the filing is daunting. The paperwork is difficult to fill out and she’s been using her own money to fund the process.

She’s applied for some grants to help buy land but that never came through. Everyone told her to find a grant writer to help so she looked for one that was willing to help but she hasn’t found anybody who has followed through.

Butler’s got a piece of land she would like to buy to start her community. It’s 108 acres near Benson in Cochise County and it’s got all the infrastructure — electricity, water, septic tanks — already on site. Without those things, you can’t start a community.

The problem: the property costs $4.5 million and Butler doesn’t have dime one or a grant writer willing to help her.

“It’s like, we’re going to have to talk to God about this,” she said.

Butler’s looked for property for much less, in the $600,000 range, but the cost of adding utilities would be prohibitive.

“We’d even be happy if somebody wanted to give us a piece of land, but it’s got to have something on it because we don’t have any money to develop it. You can give us a piece of land but what do we do with it?”
The one thing Butler does have is people who want to be part of the new community.

For instances, Karen Walters is a retired artist with a paralyzed right arm who has lived in Shadow Mountain Village for two years.

“I love the neighbors around here,” Walters said. “I love the people.”
She envisions Butler building a similar community where everyone would help each other.

“I think it would be a lovely opportunity to build our own lives with like minded people wanting to help each other,” Walters said.

J. Graber can be reached at jgraber@iniusa.org. We invite our readers to submit their civil comments pro or con on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.

Love From Above, Julie Butler, Shadow Mountain Village

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