Long Beach mobile home residents win $5.57 million in financial elder abuse case

Roger Lackey stands outside a mobile home in the flooded Friendly Village, where residents have sued the owners for their alleged negligence in maintaining the land. (Courtesy Gina Fernandes)

Residents of a Long Beach mobile home park on the site of a former landfill were awarded $5.57 million in damages on Monday, Nov. 19, after they sued its owners for a litany of charges including negligence, unfair business practices, retaliatory eviction and financial elder abuse.

The award was just the first in a series of trials, the residents’ lawyers said in a statement. The jury also found Friendly Village Mobile Home Park to be liable for elder abuse, as well as fraud, oppression and malice. The punitive damages will be argued in court next week.

Friendly Village will be responsible for the damages, which will be split among 55 people, although over 200 residents joined the original class action lawsuit.

Attorneys for Friendly Village did not respond to a request for comment.

“The jury found, as we did, that the defendants clearly took advantage of some of the most vulnerable members of the community,” the residents’ lead trial attorney Brian Kabateck said in a statement. “These are people on a fixed income, the elderly, the disabled and folks on the brink of poverty. This company allowed the residents to live in squalor with raw sewage backing up into their homes while they raised rents and collected millions upon millions of dollars in profits. While these crooks should be ashamed of themselves for their behavior, they will surely feel nothing of the sort.”

The land that Friendly Village currently occupies at 5450 Paramount Blvd. in North Long Beach, was used as a dump during World War II and shut down those operations in 1947. In 1970, Long Beach decided to use the land for a mobile home park instead.

Along with flooding, sinkholes, rats, possums and sewage bubbling up, residents said the ground constantly shifting beneath their homes has created financial hardship for many of them.

Milly Bejarano has lived there for 12 years, and she said she’s paid out of her own pocket to level the land three times for a total of about $2,000. She said that some of the homes sink in such a way that if residents don’t continuously level the ground, some wouldn’t even be able to open their own doors.

As conditions have worsened, Friendly Village has continued to raise the rent without addressing any maintenance issues, she said. Because Bejarano is a senior on a fixed income, that means the increases are slowly cutting down on her quality of life.

“I thought I’d be retired here forever, but my lifestyle has gone down the drain,” she said. “Vacation? What is that? I’ve never taken a vacation since I’ve lived here. … I’ve got to be saving constantly to make ends meet.”

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Long Beach mobile home residents win $5.57 million in financial elder abuse case