The remaining residents of the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater are running out of time to find a new place to live as the deadline to leave arrived on Wednesday.
A final notice of eviction was posted on Tuesday that gave residents until noon the next day to leave the property, or they would be removed by the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
An attorney representing the residents of the mobile home park to appeared in court and asked a judge to give residents more time to move out.
The judge did not agree with the residents’ request.
“When we found in the prior case, OK, we found that there had been proper notice, including notice posted on the trailer themselves and whatnot throughout the park as was required by the mobile home eviction proceedings,” said 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida Judge Diana Gonzalez-Whyte.
“Today was a very technical argument, and the technical argument is that they didn’t properly serve all the parties,” said David Winker, an attorney. “They took a shortcut, served only on one of the residents, one of the tenants, in each of the cases, sometimes there were two, but they didn’t serve everybody.”
Back in November, Li’l Abner’s residents were told the mobile home park would permanently close on May 19 to make way for a new development.
In June, eviction notices were sent to those who remained. There are still about 220 trailers on the property.
Several residents did leave, but many refused and argued that the property owner did not give them enough compensation, which led to a lawsuit by the owner.
NBC6 spoke to several tenants who expressed their disappointment with the ruling.
“The law only apply for the millionaire and the powerful, the poor people have no right,” Mario Leyva said.
“If you want us to leave, fine give us 90 days so we can take our time to move out because we don’t even know where we’re going to go,” Roberto Guido said.
The owner is planning on building new housing at the site.
Winker is planning on appealing the judge’s decision.
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