the Oasis

Tenants at Ferndale Mobile Home Park are being evicted from their lots to make way for single-family housing. They are losing their home and their homes.

By Scott Morgan, Managing Editor
May 24, 2026

Photo: Apartment.com

The biggest lie in home ownership is that if you own a mobile home, you own a home.

You don’t. You own a vehicle, which depreciates. Unlike a house, which will almost certainly be worth more in five years.

The second-biggest lie in mobile home ownership is that your vehicle is mobile. 

It’s not. Not unless you have a spare $5,000 to move it. Which, if you’ve entered mobile home ownership, you probably do not have.

The third-biggest lie in mobile home ownership is that your home is safe. 

It’s not. Because even if you own the structure, you don’t have any say at all over the ground beneath your residence. If that land changes hands, you and your home, your residence, the place you’ve laid your head at night believing you’ve been snuggling up to at least a thin blanket of protection, could be taken from you.

This is playing out in real time in North Charleston.The Ferndale Mobile Home Park has 45 mobile home residences on the grounds. Less than two weeks from now, they will be gone. By this time next year, if all goes according to plan, 45 single-family homes will be put in their place, at market value.

Land being rare and expensive in North Charleston, buying a mobile home park is an easy bet for a developer. Addresses already exist. Infrastructure is already there. It’s the kind of business opportunity that makes sense, in the same way it makes sense to say an Italian sailor discovered a country full of people – someone comes in, plants a flag, and claims all rights, and the people who’ve lived there watch their lands get exploited for material gain by the intruder.

The residents of Ferndale have formed a tenant union to try to get “More time! More money!” from the new owner of the park, New Tide LLC. 

They won’t get either. The tenants used to rent the ground beneath their homes on yearly leases. When the whole of the Ferndale property went under sale contract last summer, the tenants’ leases were put out to pasture.

Tenants have been renting their lot spaces month-to-month since the beginning of this year. This is something the park’s new owners tell me should have been a signal to the tenants that they were about to be displaced.

It wasn’t. They were blindsided by a letter sent to them in March to vacate the premises and take their homes with them.

The tenants were offered 90 days to move their structures or those structures would have to be abandoned and would be razed. The tenants want more time to find new places to live. 

They won’t get it. New Tide – managing partner Antonio Ribiero – is paying out of pocket to hold onto the land until the new home construction starts. And he’s not interested in spending any more money than he has to.

Ribiero is offering the tenants $1,500 towards their relocation. The tenants want more money, knowing that the average cost to move a single-wide just a few miles is somewhere between $3,000 and $15,000 (it gets worse with double- and triple-wides) and the average cost to rent an apartment in North Charleston in May, 2026, is close to $1,900. So they’d like a little more financial help to move.

They won’t get it. Because, well, see earlier paragraph about paying for things.

Ribiero says he’s sorry for the tenants and their situation. But them’s the breaks. 

Progress is coming, and as usual, its steamrolling poor Black people who make up almost all of Ferndale’s tenants and who had found a place to stay out of gentrification’s way, until they couldn’t stay out of its way any longer.

The fourth-biggest lie in mobile home ownership is that you matter to the people who own your land. 

You don’t. You are cash to them until someone can make more cash, at your expense or not. 

All of those lies come down to the gravest aspect of the lies themselves – that you are safe. That there are systems designed to give you independence and freedom and an ability to live your lives as you want to or need to live them.

There aren’t. 

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