5 years after the Almeda Fire, Talent’s new resident-owned mobile home park is thriving

Erica Alexia Ledesma was born in Ashland and grew up in nearby Talent and Phoenix. After graduating from the University of Oregon, she moved back to Southern Oregon and, as she put it, “immediately got to community organizing.” She was among the community members who gathered for a strategy and solutions brainstorming meeting a month after the 2020 Almeda Fire destroyed thousands of homes, displacing many who had lived in historically low-income, Latinx and Indigenous neighborhoods. People were frustrated with the lack of responses from landlords and government officials. One elder stood up and asked, “Why don’t we just buy our neighborhoods back?”

Ledesma says she co-founded Coalición Fortaleza out of that question. It was a long process involving many more community meetings and a partnership with real estate developer CASA of Oregon. But five years later, Jackson County’s first resident-owned mobile home park is thriving. Formerly called Talent Mobile Estates, the residents have decided to rename it Talent Community Cooperative. With larger individual spaces and improved shared facilities, the park is nearing its 84-unit capacity. We talk with Ledesma about the new park and the other community empowerment work the nonprofit is engaged in.

Note: This post was edited to reflect Ledesma’s correct birth city.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re talking right now about rebuilding homes and lives after the devastating Labor Day fires five years ago. Erica Ledesma joins us now. She was born in Medford and grew up in nearby Talent and Phoenix. After the Almeda Fire, she co-founded Coalición Fortaleza as a way to help create new affordable housing for people who had lost their homes. Erica Ledesma, welcome.

Erica Ledesma: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Miller: I’m thrilled to have you on. Can you just tell us a little bit about your own personal story first? Where were you when the Almeda Fires swept through your home towns?

Ledesma: Yeah, I was in town. I was in Medford there, and I just remember the wind. I remember waking up at like five in the morning that day and just hearing the strong winds and going outside and it just seemed off. And then I went to work – I used to work at Eagle Point High School and so I was there with my coworker who lived in Ashland – and she started talking about a fire that had just begun in Ashland. And so we started kind of talking about it and then an hour later she’s like, “Hey, I guess they’re evacuating people.” And I was like, “Really?” She’s like, “Yeah, I guess it’s spreading and it’s going north.” And at that moment I was like, wow.

And then another hour passed and she’s like, “Yeah, I guess they can’t control it.” And at that moment, I called my family in Phoenix and Talent, and I was letting them know that there was a fire. And so that’s kind of like how the day started, and I got off work, I went home, and yeah, we just kind of started hearing the news, the evacuations, just trying to connect with family members who lived in Phoenix and Talent to ensure that they were evacuating safely and trying to support my my parents to get out of Phoenix. That was just kind of like the day.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the impact that the fire had on your friends, your family, your community?

Ledesma: Yeah, I mean this fire destroyed over 2,000 structures. 18 mobile home parks and these were mobile home parks that I grew up visiting. My grandfather lost his home, my aunt and uncle lost their home. It really devastated my family, but also it devastated my community, the community that saw me grow up in these close knit communities and so you can only imagine the impact it was. A lot of these neighborhoods were predominantly like Latino/Spanish-speaking, but also low income communities and a lot of seniors on fixed income. And so now you’re seeing that the housing that is still having the hardest time to recover and come back are the manufactured home parks five years after the fire.

Miller: Can you tell us about the meeting, just a few months after the fire, that led you to co-create Coalición Fortaleza?

Ledesma: Yeah. My best friend and I got right to doing fire relief work. And it was about November of 2020 and we were at Northwest Seasonal Workers Association at the Workers’ Benefit Council. And you can only imagine… It was in the middle of the pandemic. We were in Central Medford High School, their gym, the doors were open, we were all in a circle with face masks, like really trying to protect ourselves. And our community was there trying to account for the loss and really had a lot of questions for what was going on. And in this moment they were growing frustrated with the lack of FEMA and the lack of these federal resources and making them accessible to the community, and one of our elders just stood up in frustration. He said, “Well, how much does a mobile home park cost? What if we just put our money together and buy one of these parks back and rebuild it? We have the landscapers, we have the construction workers, we have the plumbers. We have everyone that we need in our own community to build this housing. What is it gonna cost us?”

People pulled out a calculator, they started to figure out how much money was in the room, and then my friend and I looked at each other. And he looked at us. He said, “you two, you went to college, look this up, figure it out. Who does this type of housing?” And at that moment we didn’t really know about resident-owned communities. We know more about cooperatives, which are similar. And so we googled and surely we found Casa of Oregon. They’re basically developers that work with mobile home parks with residents to convert them into resident-owned communities. And so from there we got on Zoom a week after and then really told them the story of our community and that they could come down here and support us to rebuild. So it was just from really our elders and our community and asking these questions and like is this type of housing a possibility? Yeah. That’s how that’s how it kicked off our vision.

Miller: What kind of responsibility did you feel at that moment? I mean, so as you’re saying these elders are saying, “hey, why can’t we just do this?” And then they turned to you as someone who I guess they saw had more experience navigating the world of bureaucracy. How much responsibility did you feel to carry through on this vision?

Ledesma: Yeah, it felt heavy. It felt like a lot of responsibility, and I think the reason why our community trusted us is because we had been active in the community. They’d known us from community organizing, and being active, and so I think they looked to us as people… I was born and raised in these neighborhoods. They’re like, oh, if whoever is going to really support us through this process, it’s going to be our own community.

And so yeah, we were tasked with a big responsibility and it was heavy. But the thing is, we started talking about this vision and we began to really align with other community leaders and other CBOs that really believed in this possibility. And yeah, it’s been hard. It’s been a hard five years and Talent Mobile Estate was the park that Casa of Oregon was able to purchase. And it was July 2020, and this idea that really came from our community is no longer an idea. It actually became true and Talent Mobile Estates is the first resident-owned community of Jackson County.

Miller: Well, can you describe what the model is?

Ledesma: Yeah, definitely. So, historically, mobile home parks, now we call manufactured home parks because you realize you can’t move them, they’re not mobile. And so, typically it’s privately owned. A lot of the owners are foreign owners or live out of state, don’t have any relationship with the community, and so people own their home, but they don’t own the land. So they don’t have any say in the future of the park. So sometimes parks close down. There’s a lot of eviction. There are rent hikes that happen. So with a resident-owned community, the residents collectively own the land and they own their home. So they are the owners, and it gives them that power and agency to decide the rules and regulations for the park and the way that they want to lead it.

Miller: How many people live in Talent Community Cooperative now compared to the Talent Mobile Estates that preceded it?

Ledesma: Yeah, so Talent Mobile Estates was 100 manufactured homes, and 10 were not destroyed in the fire. And so part of rebuilding the park and bringing people together, especially previous residents, we also realized that a lot of them were single-wide, and so you had like five to eight people living in a single-wide, two-bedroom mobile home and so one of the communities asked was can we allow for bigger units? Can we see four-bedroom and three-bedroom units? And so that was part of our community engagement theory, for the community to come together and tell us what their needs are and to learn more from basically their family structures. And so now 74 units came back, and so right now it’s 84 units in total of the park.

Miller: What have you heard from community members about if life feels different there now in this place that they own.

Ledesma: Part of us is, like, we really wanted to not just focus on rebuilding after the fires, it’s also rebuilding that sense of community that was really important to our people. People were living in these neighborhoods for 15, 20, 25 years. They had their babysitter down the road. They had their coworkers where they were carpooled to work together. They had other relatives that lived there. People who knew each other pretty well and felt that sense of safety. So for us, when rebuilding Talent Mobile Estates, we really wanted to rebuild that sense of community and solidarity, economy, and so it’s hard because people couldn’t wait four or five years for housing.

We’re happy to say that about 24 previous residents returned to Talent Mobile Estates, but the park is mixed from residents from other parks and also now renters as well that were impacted by the fire so it is a new neighborhood. However, through this community engagement process and also the meetings of the resident-owned community model – because the residents are also building their board of directors, voting and making decisions together – it does provide that space for them to get to know each other and to build this relationship. So I also see how this new community is building these relationships through this whole process of rebuilding the Talent Community Cooperative.

Miller: What else do you work on right now? What else are you focusing on at Coalición Fortaleza?

Ledesma: Yeah, definitely, for us, we really came out of the fires and we led a hyperlocal research study and spoke to 150 families, and a lot of what was also destroyed was all that wealth building. All that equity was lost in a matter of minutes that people are never going to be able to get back. And a lot of small entrepreneurs lost also their their business equipment. And through this survey we really realized like, oh, let’s not just focus on housing, we also need to focus on wealth building in our communities. And so we’re in an individual development account program. It’s widely known in the state of Oregon, and it really helps people navigate their financials, and that’s one of our programs. We also started the first BIPOC and Latinx market called El Mercadito where we create a space for entrepreneurs to be able to share their business with community. And also we are really working on creating these spaces for entrepreneurs or small business owners because it’s needed as well and a lot of it is rooted in creative placemaking. We want to also bring more joy and celebrate our culture for our community and so that’s a little bit more of the work that we’re doing as well as just advocacy and community organizing.

Miller: Do you feel that the community is more ready for the next fires than you were five years ago?

Ledesma: Oh, that’s a heavy question. I still think there’s a lot of work to be done. I think people are more cautious now. And when we do see the smoke and wind, I think a lot of us get triggered and that kind of like ‘ok, something could happen’ moment, but I think there is still a lot of preparation needed. But I’m really grateful to say that there have been a lot of initiatives for emergency preparedness to have these conversations with community, and just even talking about like go bags and stuff, but I… And the cities have also put in some infrastructure like the text messaging system. I just think we never know how we’re going to react to any disaster, right? So I want to say that I feel like we feel a little bit more ready, but I think there’s still some work to do.

Miller: Erica, thanks very much.

Ledesma: Yeah, of course.

Miller: Erica Ledesma is one of the co-founders and now the executive director of Coalición Fortaleza.

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