A great person. Unlike the parasites who are buying up mobile home parks and continually raising the rents because they know people of stuck there.

https://www.aspentimes.com/news/trailer-park-owner-strove-to-keep-beloved-renters-after-sale/

Jason Auslander
March 7, 2018

When Harriett Noyes’ mother and father started the Phillips Trailer Park 50 years ago, the concept of affordable housing did not exist.

“I just don’t know if (my mother) ever thought of it that way,” Harriett said recently from her cozy kitchen as an early March snowstorm raged outside. “This was a cash cow to them.”

But when her mother’s health began failing in the late 1980s — her father died in 1985 — and Harriett returned to help run the family business between Woody Creek and Old Snowmass after decades in Utah, the concept was immediately obvious to her.

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after 30 years, when Harriett’s health and age began telling her it was time to slow down, she said she never considered a retirement solution that didn’t include a future for her renters, most of whom work in Aspen.

“I’m 87 years old,” she said. “It’s getting too much for me to take care of. It’s not an easy job.”

The family could have chosen to sell the property on the open market, though that would have certainly spelled the end of the trailer park. Hyrum, who is 60, said a developer once offered him $35 million for the 76-acre property with the express demand that he get rid of the renters.

“If I had sold on the open market,” Harriett said, “a lot of people would be homeless.”

So instead of grabbing the big payoff, Harriett and Hyrum and the rest of their family recently sold the trailer park to Pitkin County for $6.5 million. The sale includes 35 mobile homes, four cabins, an old ranch house, three-quarters of a mile of river frontage on both sides of the Roaring Fork River and three irrigated pastures.

Hyrum, who helps run the park, and Harriett have raised the rent just twice in 25 years, Hyrum said. Current rent is $350 a month for those with their own trailers and $450 a month to rent a trailer owned by Hyrum and Harriett.

“I had a feeling for the underdog,” Harriett said. “And I had a feeling for the everyday workers of Aspen because Aspen didn’t take care of them.

“My heart went out to them.”

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