Clearing Abandoned Mobile Homes in Brunswick County, North Carolina

by Scott Young

A newcomer might not notice. Even locals tend to forget. The scarred cars and junked homes of years passed? – bulldozed and trucked off to landfills. Brunswick County, North Carolina’s astonishing ACE (Appearance & Code Enforcement) program has cleared more than 2,400 structures, all eyesores and health hazards, from county landscapes. The reclaimed acres are a gorgeous reversal, steadily raising home values in Brunswick and the eyebrows of onlookers.

How did a small, coastal county transform so quickly?

It all started with $500 in 2000. Enough for rakes and shovels and a few months, bare bones, hoping to boost property values with yard work.

Then they saw. Not a few but hundreds of mobile homes, all rot and abandoned, that spoiled forests and moaned for attention with rust and roaring boards that slid full of nails from ceilings not far from the fences of well-kept neighborhoods. These “homes” sheltered rats and snakes and untold diseases, perhaps just a fence away from children at play.

They saw the same blight that county residents across the state have occasion to see. The same public health hazards, value-destroyers, and blights to environment that plague daily our eyes and our pockets.

They saw it was no place for rakes.

Still, locals rushed to a county program which, despite poor funding, promised the semblance of solution. Citizens volunteered their structures for demolition. Non-county owners eagerly accepted the free disposal of unwanted property. Raw popularity moved the county to allocate more and more resources and expertise to the project, which by 2001 had become ACE, a county department all of its own.

Led by Fred Morris, a former police captain for North Myrtle Beach, the 4-person Code Enforcement Department runs ACE for Brunswick County.

How do you prep for a job like this? Fred Morris isn’t sure.

“I’ve worn a lot of hats,” says Morris, who has worked on police, fire, public safety, animal control, health, and sanitation issues as special projects coordinator for Conway, South Carolina. There he learned too that results matter, especially in an abstract world of “administrative affairs” that cloaks the human struggles between charts and lines.

So when Morris says, “We do the dirty work of the county,” he speaks with a quiet passion for the grubby, humbling, crucial work that ACE does for Brunswick County.

Formally, ACE subsidized clean-up for the abandoned and decaying structures that had been littering Brunswick County’s landscape. The county notified property owners in violation and, profiling ACE, offered the program’s free demolition and removal services. With bulldozers and a track hoe, ACE metamorphosed rotting boards to raked yards in an average of 4 hours and carried the strewn metal guts from dead homes and junked cars off to local landfills. Some of the worst regions vanished first, bringing jarring new beauty, and with results came more resources.

Defining “Abandoned”: Minimum Housing Codes

But note: not all “homes” were abandoned.

Morris describes one encounter, one face of a systemic problem. On a deserted property, in the worst summer heat, county officials uncovered an old woman, widowed, and writhing to survive in a sickening singlewide.

“No water, no electricity, no ventilation. Didn’t have anything.”

As Morris would learn, the woman had worked at a local hospital until fire devoured her doublewide. Then, working someplace and dropped off alone at night, she crawled into an abandoned “home” – rats, snakes, diseases – to sleep. She could find no recourse in public housing or social services.

In a similar way ACE might discover whole families and dwelling groups among the decrepit debris of abandoned mobile homes, no electricity, no air, no water, suffocating in structures worse than condemned, with nowhere else to go.

These are what Morris calls “hardship cases,” symptoms of flawed social services and swamped public housing. In these cases, ACE helps file papers with local agencies and churches, lobbying hard for results, case by case.

“We will never put anybody out of their house. These are old people, handicapped, poor. These are people trying to make a go at life. We’ll push and shove with other county departments to force them to get stuff done. The house [demolition] becomes last priority. First is to get the people out and into livable conditions. Power. Electricity. Water pumps. Septic. Or else problems snowball.”

Other problems are legal. Clearing abandoned, dilapidated structures is straightforward, and most owners volunteer property, but reaching absentee owners is exhausting. ACE sends a flurry of certified and uncertified notices and engages due process as necessary to find owners and solve problems. Still, Morris insists that some files swell with evidence like a murder case.

Above all, logistics are crucial; and Morris links the success of ACE with its origins. ACE began as free service for interested residents, non-mandatory. The county sent letters to owners of dodgy property with pamphlets on ACE and placed ads to spread local awareness. This ‘grace period’ from 2001-2006 allowed officials to assess problem areas across the county and, crucially, identify and assist those surviving at below minimum housing standards. Only later did ACE set deadlines for free service – an effective ploy to push dawdling owners to act.

Morris’s advice?

“Never start a program on mandatory enforcement. Never. Or else you need outstanding public housing & social services, because you will find people and they have to be helped and have nowhere to go. These can be people with physical problems. Some need assisted living. And you can’t just toss them out with mandatory enforcement. I would resign before these sort of people are tossed out with no options.”

All told, ACE is a huge success of astonishing scale. The project has filled 83 percent of the 2,897 removal requests, clearing 450 mobiles homes and structures each year, and as of June 2008, just over 450 cases remain.

ACE has removed, free of charge:

• 1,200 mobile homes
• 1,200 junked vehicles
• 1,000 structures
• 200 junked boats or campers

Total costs to the county were $4.5 million ($2.3 landfill, $2.2 labor), large, but few in Brunswick County question the cost, gazing from their windows and porches into new fields of green. This was the old rot, now ripe for parks, forests and homes.

“Anything that can make the county look better is worth it. It becomes more attractive to live there. People take pride in it. It’s just a win-win when you start cleaning up a county.”

~ by Scott Y. on July 8, 2008.