Normally, life in Holiday Village Mobile Home Park is pretty quiet.
It’s 185 manufactured homes sit under mature trees in the 39-acre park where roads wind past tidy yards.
Here’s a look at the park from FlashEarth:
Its mostly elderly residents enjoy their twilight years playing community-coordinated bingo, brdige, line dancing, potluck dinners and more at the clubhouse and around the pool and spa.
Until now.
A couple weeks ago, the park’s corporate owner, Equity LifeStyle Properties or ELS notified the residents that existing phone, cable TV and internet service providers were being evicted. Read the letter here:
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Instead of Qwest Communications or Comcast, residents will now be served by Primecast. ELS signed an exclusive agreement with Primecast to allow the Florida-based company to be the sole provider.
ELS vice president Lance Beatch said individual phone numbers will remain the same. But any e-mail addresses tied to Qwest or Comcast will have to be changed.
Of course the residents can keep the addressed if they want to pay a premium. ELS has offered to pay the fee for a few months. But beyond that, it will up to the residents to pay or change e-mails.
Many are outraged at the change and are rallying the community to oppose it. They scheduled a “town hall meeting” to discuss strategies. Here’s a flier announcing the meeting:
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Some are upset because they’ve heard bad things about Primecast. Here’s what the South Florida Better Business Bureau rates the company:
Yes, that’s a D+.
Beatch was unable to say whether other services will translate to Primecast, such as Qwest’s Telehealth equipment which transmits vital health statistics of some Holiday Village residents to their doctors on a daily basis.
Nor did he know if Lifeline panic buttons will operate on Primecast. Lifeline buttons are worn around the neck. Should someone fall or become incapacitated, they can press the button to call for help.
But Beatch defended the switch to Primecast saying it will lower everyone’s bills for phones, cable TV and internet serivce and the residents will appreciate it in the long run.
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I work from home using my landline phone and computer. I am required to have phone service that is not considered “satellite” as well as non-satellite internet service. I have had comcast since we moved into Holiday Village in 2007 and am very satisified, not to mention comcast offers phone and internet service that allows me to work from home.
I am forced to switch to Primecast now and will lose my job! I asked the Primcast representative at the Town Hall meeting on Sat. if their company can assure me they will provide me with connections similar to comcast so I may continue working, he did not have an answer. The representative for ELS property management said to give her my name and phone number and she would “take care” of it..I’d like to know how she is going to do that???
I want to know when our country became Nazi Germany. Freedom is not having someone elses choices forcred on us with out us having the right to have choose whether we want these things. ELS has been running rough shod over its tenants long enough. We have had to absorb exorbitant rent increases although they know the age restricted parks are full of people on fixed incomes and this has now reached the point where tenants are having to sign the deed to their home over to ELS and walk away because they can no longer afford to live in these parks. Our park in the past two years has gone from the star of our community because it was always clean and neat. No one was allowed to let junk or old cars sit around for long. The old manager made sure of that and she was respected and appreciated by most of her residents. Now we have a manager who tells blatant lies and does so with in a matter of minutes depending on who she is talking with at the time. She favors one tenant over another and gets away with it. In the past 2 almost three years she has managed to alient most of the residents. Our “star community” now has the appearance of any other poor white trash trailer park. I did not move in here to be treated like this. My adult children were delighted when we moved in and now wish they all had the money to get us out. Talking to the manager, writing to her superior, AND the owners of this dump has gotten us no where. Phone calls, letters, emails and faxes have all gone unanswered and ignored, from the highes to the lowest level. All they want is to collect our rent and nothing else. WE, the people who PAY their exorbitant salaries are nothing more than a speck on the wall to be squashed or flicked away when we annoy them. The mananger is incompetetent and unable to handle the problems on a day to day basis. I can no longer stand to be in the presence of this “educated” incompetent. Some one says she has a PHD in something and we the common people know that does not always equate to common sense or the ability to handle a job. To my chagrin this seems to be a problem that starts with our maintainance manager who rarely works and appears to be “sweet” on manager and does not do the job he is hired to do, he can, however, sit in the manager’s office and has complete access to all the tenants private information. As I said this starts at the bottom and no one wants to take responsiblity for any of it, so we sit with no voice, now solutions and a degrading park with the rent increasing year by year and the quality decreasing with each passing day. Are there any others out there who face this same situation. It is time we made our voices loud and clear. If not this will continue until each of us is forced out or dies whichever comes first!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So now we have to bear one more insult with not voice, no choice again. Something needs to change. This used to be the least expensive way to live–well not any more.
judy@thebensons.org
Bear Creek Village Mobile (excuse me manufactured Home–a rose by any other name is still a rose with the same thorns) Home Park
3500 S King St #36
Denver, CO 80236-6166
303-781-4018
all comments appreciated