New owners address violations at local manufactured home park after almost a year of complaints

Following a lawsuit from the Door County Land Use Services Department, owners of Carlton Heights Mobile Home Park in the Town of Egg Harbor have addressed some maintenance and sanitation problems in the park, including sewage backups, water outages, and roads filled with potholes. 

Park residents and others associated with the park said it took too long for the problems to be addressed, and initial complaints to ownership were made at least a year ago. Some problems, like the heavily potholed roads, had been an issue for years before being fixed.Residents are not getting what they pay for, according to advocates for the manufactured home park.  

In April 2024, homeowners at the park received a letter notifying them it had new ownership. Carlton Heights LLC indicated that, as the new owners, they would be “keeping the park in good order and making improvements as necessary,” according to the letter. 

The new owners also raised the rent. Residents of the park own their homes, but rent the land underneath it. As of June 1, 2024, rent was raised from around $300 per lot, to $485 per lot. 

Rent for the land residents’ homes sit on is now $565 per month, according to Cecilia Fernandez, the on-site manager for the park. Residents said the increase was made earlier this year. Fernandez was contacted a few months ago by Carlton Heights LLC and offered the job, she said. 

Fernandez, who has lived in the park for several years, initially declined the offer. Eventually, she accepted it because “there are so many things going on here,” and thought she could help, she said.  

History of issues

The park “has a long history of disreputable owners and of owner maintenance issues,” Michele Munson, an advocate for residents, wrote in an email. One long-time issue was the condition of the private gravel road access from the main road to the park. 

Potholes and poor drainage left the road nearly impassable in wet conditions and hard to navigate any time, according to Juan Quezada, who has owned a home in the park for about six years. The gravel roads had been in that condition for almost as long as he has lived there, he added. 

Additionally, the high-water alarm for both of the park’s septic tanks was going off regularly, according to Paul Salm. Salm is the owner of Baileys Harbor Cornerstone Pub, where Quezada works. Quezada approached his boss for assistance last November when park residents became frustrated by the lack of response from ownership about the road and other problems.  

Salm in turn reached out to Door County District 17 Supervisor Bob Bultman, who represents Jacksonport and Baileys Harbor. Even though Bultman is not the representative for the park’s district, Salm said he thought Bultman would be able to help because he serves on the county’s Resource Planning Committee.

Bultman forwarded the complaint to the county’s Corporation Counsel Sean Donohue on Nov. 20. From there, the county performed an inspection on Nov. 25.  

The Land Use Services Department is responsible for sanitation oversight and enforcement, according to Karyn Behling, interim director for the department. Though there were no county ordinance violations observed during the inspection, Behling said, “there were concerns over the general condition of the park.” 

As a result, the county filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Professional Services in December 2024. DSPS is the regulatory and licensing body for mobile home parks in the state. 

On Dec. 17, DSPS conducted an investigation of the park and found four violations: several homes appeared to be abandoned and were found to be creating a nuisance in the park;  streets not properly maintained; numerous potholes and lacking adequate gravel and drainage; operating permit expired; and unsecured lids on septic tanks. The first two violations were to be addressed by June 27, 2025, and the last two were to be remedied immediately. 

Both Munson and Salm wanted to help the residents. Munson is a member of the Hope United Church of Christ in Sturgeon Bay. She has been working with park residents for years, she said, as part of the church-affiliated LEAF Fund, a financial assistance and volunteer group that serves low-income families,

Besides the road and drainage issues, Munson and another LEAF volunteer, Imelda DelChambre, began hearing about raw sewage backing into homes and yards, and residents concerned about contaminated drinking water in November.

Munson initiated another complaint about the sewer and water issues to the Door County sanitarian, John Teichtler, in January. The complaint included reports from residents about the sewage, contaminated water, dead and dying trees falling on or threatening homes, as well as the ongoing road conditions. 

At least two resident families reported sewage backing into their homes, according to the Jan. 8 email from Munson to Teichtler, who retired in April 2025. 

“Families have repeatedly called the number they have been given to provide information on this and other issues but have received no response,” Munson wrote. 

That complaint led to “multiple onsite inspections” in February from “various county departments,” Behling said in an email. “There was not a failing sanitary system violation observed at that time and no legal action our department could pursue.” 

As far as the violations found by DSPS in December, the roads were finally fixed in mid-February, Quezada said. 

John Beard, communications director for DSPS, confirmed that the road was fixed, septic tank covers were secured and the operating permit was renewed when the state performed a follow-up inspection in July 2025. Inspectors noted dead trees marked for removal adjacent to some properties, Beard said. 

Those trees have been marked for over a year, according to DelChambre, and none have been removed. 

Beard said the owner posted notices at some of the neglected homes that posed a nuisance related to removing rubbish, but this particular issue is not easily enforceable because it is not “black and white.” 

“It’s hard. The (park) owner is responsible and they have to work with the homeowners,” he said. “It’s a judgement call. How much (rubbish, neglect, lack of maintenance) is too much?”

DSPS has received no new complaints about the park since the one last year, he added. 

LUSD received a call in June about an overflowing sanitary system, according to Behling, and another inspection was conducted on June 11. This time LUSD investigators found “sewage surfacing” and a failing septic system, she said. 

The department issued letters to the park owners on June 25 and July 11, notifying them of the complaint and ordering them to contain and stop the effluent sewage and fix or replace the failing septic system. The owners failed to respond by the July 22 deadline and the county submitted a request to the courts  for a default judgement.

County Circuit Court Judge Jennifer Moeller filed a default judgement against the park owners on Sept. 9, indicating they must either install a new wastewater treatment system or repair the current one and pay fines of $100 per day from June 25 until it is corrected. The fines currently amount to $7,600.

Judge Moeller also authorized the county to hire a contractor to pump the system and recover costs if the owners failed to do so. 

Before the default judgement was filed, DelChambre and Munson began contacting the media. Families were afraid to let their children play outside in the park, according to Munson, and the situation was getting worse, with the smell of raw sewage everywhere. 

On September 10, NBC Channel 26 from Green Bay broadcasted a report from the park, showing puddles of raw sewage pooling in yards and alongside homes.

On September 12, a Sturgeon Bay company, Septic Maintenance LLC came and made repairs to the system, according to residents and regional manager Meyers. 

One of the residents that had sewage in his yard has two young daughters, and said he hopes the problem is solved for good. 

But DelChambre is not optimistic. Problems at the park go back years, she said, and it took too long to fix issues that posed serious health risks for residents. 

“People are paying rent, people own the homes,” she said. “(The owner) never responded to them. These are human beings where sewage is coming up. (The owner) is not here, he could care less as long as he gets his rent.” 

For Salm, the issues at the park are human rights issues. 

“How long did these people live in absolute s—? … How can we allow that to happen?” he said. “What effects long-term, physically, mentally, emotionally, come from literally living in s—? Kids running through it to the bus?”  

“I hope this is a success story,” he added.

New owner 

The owner of Carlton Heights LLC is Abraham Anderson, according to Joseph Meyers, a district manager for the company. 

Anderson is a real estate investor in Tennessee and owns at least 85 manufactured home parks in more than seven states, Meyers said. He is among the fifty largest manufactured home park owners in the country by number of parks. He bought his first park in 2018.

Until the last few decades, most manufactured home parks were “mom and pop” affairs, with owners who lived on-site or at least locally. In recent years, mobile home parks have become a magnet for corporate investors looking for passive income.

Anderson credits Mobile Home University’s “bootcamp” for teaching him what he needed to know to start investing in parks. He has been a guest on the program’s podcast. 

Mobile Home University is a program designed to train investors on how to purchase and operate manufactured home parks. The company offers books, courses and instructions ranging in price from $50 to $2,000. 

Regarding manufactured home parks, “…the more I got into it, and I really looked at it carefully, I realized the business model was just like a parking lot. And what really appealed to me was with apartments, what always killed me was the repair and maintenance and the tenant turnover,” Anderson said in one podcast episode. 

Meyers said Anderson genuinely wants to improve the parks he purchases and make sure the living conditions are good.

“I was actually responsible for fixing it,” Meyers, who also lives in Tennessee, said. “I couldn’t get anyone out there. No one will do mobile home parks. After weeks of trying, a tenant recommended a company.” 

Meyers said he was unfamiliar with Door County and did not know it is a peninsula.

The septic issues at Carlton Heights are fixed now, including repairing some pipes, according to Meyers. 

As far as park ownership not responding to resident complaints, he said, “Whenever we find out about them we try to fix them right away. It’s always such a hassle to get anyone to fix them. That scenario took way longer than any other trailer parks we own.”  

‘Trapped’

Stephen Parliament is a co-founder of Wisconsin Manufactured Home Owners Alliance, a nonprofit whose mission is to “to strengthen, protect, expand and promote the rights and interests of manufactured homeowners in Wisconsin through education, public policy, leadership development, civic engagement and cooperative community building.” 

Absentee investor-owners are often predatory, according to Parliament. 

“When a predator buys the land, the person who owns the trailer is stuck, they can’t go anywhere. They have no choice but to pay the increased rent,” he said. “There are seminars all over the internet that describe this strategy.” 

In one podcast episode, Anderson described his “turnaround” strategy for making a park profitable when he takes ownership as a combination of selling park-owned homes to tenants and raising rents. 

“Raising rents, because that’s the easiest,” Anderson said. “Costs you a postage stamp to raise the rent.”

Mobile homes are not actually that mobile, Parliament said, and the term is a misnomer. The correct term is “manufactured home,” and it is often used interchangeably with “mobile” or “trailer” home. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considers mobile homes to be homes built in a factory before June 15, 1976. Manufactured homes are factory-built and constructed after that date, when a federally-regulated code was developed for the industry.  

Manufactured home owners own their home, but not the land it is on, and it costs between $6,500 and $11,500 for a professional moving company to move the home. There is also a risk of causing structural damage when moving a manufactured home. 

“They can’t take their home anywhere. They are trapped,” Parliament said. “It’s a vicious nasty relationship between home ownership and land ownership. It’s un-American, antithetical to the dream of land ownership. It should be illegal but we aren’t there yet.” 

Affordable housing option, when cooperative

Manufactured homes are relatively inexpensive compared to stick-built homes. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, as of April 2025, the average price for a single manufactured home in the Midwest is $90,700, and $154,900 for a double home. 

Used manufactured homes are even more inexpensive. Juan Quezada purchased his home for around $15,000 six years ago, he said. Manufactured homes typically depreciate in value, unlike stick-built homes, and most of the time they are not eligible for mortgage loans. 

Manufactured home parks still can be a solution to affordable housing for many people, according to Parliament, and parks are even more affordable when they are cooperatively owned by residents versus absentee owners. 

In a resident-owned park, homeowners do their own maintenance work, like mowing, raking and snow removal rather than hiring it out to contractors. Resident owners can also keep their own books, set budgets and rent prices, pay bills, market available units and perform other administrative tasks, he said. 

“It eliminates administrative overhead and the need for a profit margin for the absentee owner,” Parliament said. “It’s a break-even operation.” 

Getting into the market is the difficult part for manufactured home owners, however, especially when competing with investors who have a lot of capital. 

“We think we’re operating in what should be a fair market, but we’re not,” he said. “It’s a battle.” 

Parliament and his partners try to organize residents, often going door-to-door in parks that are at risk of predatory ownership and neglected infrastructure maintenance, to tell them about the opportunities available to them. 

“We’re the first ones on-site to talk to residents to give them an understanding of the power they have as a group,” he said. “It often never occurs to residents they can do this.” 

If residents agree to make an offer to buy their park, the next step is to get a nonprofit agency to act as a financial agent, Parliament said. He works with his own organization, Wisconsin Manufactured Home Owners Alliance, the Wisconsin Farmers Union, and West CAP to be the interim owners until residents can put together financing to buy the park themselves. 

West CAP is a community action program that serves seven western Wisconsin counties. Lakeshore CAP is the program serving Door County. 

The Countryside Park Cooperative in Cumberland, Wis. has been resident-owned for 20 years and is an example of how successful this model can be, Parliament said. Residents organized and partnered with West CAP to prevent the park’s owners from evicting everyone and building condos on the property in 2005.  

The park sits outside Cumberland city limits, but after West CAP purchased it, they worked with the city to annex the park and connect it to city water and sewer, Parliament said. He was West CAP’s director at the time. 

Agencies like CAPs have access to various sources of government money, from the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, U.S. Department of Agriculture and others, Parliament said. 

“There are pockets of money not specifically designated for mobile home parks, but it’s a possibility,” he said. “We went around and put together enough financial resources to sell the park to residents.” 

Besides organizing manufactured home park residents, Parliament works on advancing legislation and public policy to give those residents more rights. “They should have the right to withhold payment to demand improvements, and the right of first refusal (for purchasing a park),” he said. 

Additionally, DSPS should be making sure that county housing authorities or health departments are doing regular inspections and licensing renewals for parks. 

“Those are techniques that any reasonable public official should agree to,” Parliament said. 

Zoned for, stigma against

It’s not necessarily easy to build a manufactured home park, according to Mariah Goode, former Door County Land Use Services director and Door County Housing Partnership board member, but county zoning ordinances are not the most difficult part of the equation. 

County comprehensive zoning allows for manufactured home parks with a conditional use permit in the following zoning districts: countryside, heartland, rural residential, and high density residential. The list of zoning requirements is not long.

But land and infrastructure–roads, sewer, water–for a park can be expensive. Also, since a conditional use permit is needed, it requires a public hearing. Then, “the neighbors come out,” Goode said, and usually they are not in favor of a manufactured home park in their area. 

A persistent stigma follows manufactured home parks, held by neighbors and municipal governments alike, according to Carlton Heights’ owner Anderson. He himself held the assumption that parks were dangerous or trashy, he said in both of the Mobile Home University podcast episodes he appears in: 

“I don’t want to buy a trailer park. That’s so trashy. Those things, you want to stay away from those. And so, that was my gut reaction for quite a while.” – MHU podcast, September 22, 2020 

“Just the bad stigma attached to them. I thought the tenants were dangerous and I just didn’t like the idea of it.” – MHU podcast, May 24, 2023

However, Anderson said he eventually saw the benefits of manufactured home parks from an investment standpoint and purchased his first park in 2018. Anderson said he believes the stigma is unwarranted.

“All these cities talk about how they want more affordable housing, but they hate parks,” he said.  “It’s totally backwards … And these tenants they’re just …. Most of them are pretty normal people. They’re just working class families that want to be left alone and have a safe place to raise their kids.”

According to Paul Salm, the Cornerstone Pub owner who acted as a resident advocate in the past, the people he knows in Carlton Heights are hardworking, productive Door County residents, many of them with young families. 

Getting what is paid for

Carlton Heights’ residents are feeling uncertain about the future of the park and whether living conditions will continue to improve or deteriorate once the spotlight is off the park and it goes back to being an invisible community tucked away in the woods, according to Munson and DelChambre. Residents are also concerned rents will continue to rise. 

In the letter to residents announcing the most recent ownership change, residents were told the rental increase was fair and consistent with other area park rates. Lot rental is $795 per month plus a parking fee at Thunderhill Estates, a manufactured home park in Sturgeon Bay. 

If residents are paying market rate, they should be receiving market amenities, according to Munson and DelChambre. Snow removal, laundry facilities, outdoor lighting, a playground, paved roads and high speed internet are some amenities offered by other parks. 

Carlton Heights has none of these things, DelChambre said. There are also no shelters for inclement weather– mobile homes are not considered safe during a tornado – or a water supply for fire trucks to connect to in the event of a fire, she added. 

Residents and advocates said snow removal is spotty in winter months and they were not notified that Fernandez had been hired as an on-site manager.