Original Oct. 7, 2022

My school is next to a trailer park with 250 tenants. Roughly 30% of the students at my school live there. Recently, it sold for $16.8 million.

I got a call this last week from a grandparent who got an eviction notice taped to her door. The company that bought the trailer park told all tenants to pay rent through an online portal, but the portal doesn’t work. This grandmother dropped off a check to pay rent, but the landlord didn’t cash it. Now she thinks she’s being evicted, and she’s worried her grandson she has custody of will have to change schools.

I looked at her lease and the notice and told her it wasn’t legal because it wasn’t served by a sheriff and she’s not on a month-to-month or rent-to-own lease. The deputy I called said it was a legal "Notice to Quit" instead— not an eviction. I traced the address of the notice to a company’s PO box in Delaware, 8 hours away.

Today, the special needs aides at work told me all of their students’ parents received the same notice on their door. The new landlord is trying to force renters out so he can bulldoze the trailer park and replace it with higher occupancy apartments.

It’s a beautiful time of year with red leaves on the mountains and the fields are full of pumpkins. The kids at my school are hopeful everyday and have no bitterness in their hearts. It is absolutely insane to me that we live on a planet that could be heaven, but the circumstances of human relations created by capitalism make it hell.

Update 1 Oct. 9, 2022

TLDR: the trailer park across from the elementary school where I work in VA was sold to an anonymous investor and they are evicting all the tenants— possibly 20% of the students at our small school.

This is some Pynchon-level chaos involving professional football players and the Panama Papers. I’ve tried to get the help from the media, but nobody has picked it up. Maybe you guys know how to piece together what’s happening?

The public announcement of the sale does not include the name of who bought the trailer park for $16.8 million. The tenants are supposed to make out checks to PO Box 249, Englewood, NJ. So that’s all we are working with.

This address is linked to several trailer parks in Virginia with sewage issues and many trailers parks all across the country (Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Florida). One park listed is Pinecrest MHP in CA, and a document says the legal address is the Corporation Trust Center in DE which is listed in the Panama Papers as using the Isle of Man as a tax haven. A company using the same PO Box, HOA II Finance One, LLC also links back to the same Corporation Trust Center.

The name listed as a manager for some of the parks using the same PO Box all over is "Byron Fields" with an email linked to a defunct website, ourhomesofamerica.com. There’s a LinkedIn profile for Byron Fields that says he works for Homes of America, but the profile picture is of Byron Fields, Jr, who played football for Duke and signed for the Giants.

Did a professional football player use a shell corporation to buy a trailer park and evict all the tenants? Can anyone find anything else?

Update 2 Oct. 14, 2022

Half the busses that take students to the elementary school where I work come from a trailer park down the road, which sold for $16 million in April.

The property itself is only assessed for a little over $2 million. It was never on the market. The buyer spent over $10 million for the land and another $6 million for the buildings, buying the park directly from the family who owned and managed it. The buyer was kept off public documents. The new owner raised the rents and now (6 months later) is evicting all the tenants.

After the sale, the tenants were told to pay rent to [the old name of the trailer park, + new 'LLC' added to the end] and a PO Box in Englewood, NJ. The PO Box is shared by a professional football player named Byron Fields, whose LinkedIn says he works forHomes of America. He was an intern for Alden during college. That guy is now the nominal 'manager' of a dozen trailer parks in the US bought by Homes for America. The PO Box gets forwarded to Corporation Trust Center, where American money disappears into offshore accounts to evade taxes.

Byron Fields didn’t buy this trailer park. On investigation, the buyer is Thomas Del Bosco, an executive of Alden Global, who bought the trailer park under a nonprofit called Homes for America. He’s also an executive of Smith Management LLC. Alden Global owns stakes in both my local paper and the bigger paper nearby me— who (surprise!) are not covering this story. Alden Global is mentioned in the Panama Papers because it’s sheltering all its money offshore.

Past investors in Alden have included the Knight Foundation (a nonprofit that, ironically, funds sustainable journalism projects), pension funds for employees of Coca-Cola, Citigroup and CalPERS (the California public employees’ retirement fund), as well as some nonprofit foundations and Swiss financial institutions… more than $236 million in pension funds for some Digital First Media employees are invested in Alden, although the company said this year it’s in the process of pulling them out.

How can hedge funds operate through nonprofits? They are buying papers, ruining them by cutting the staff in half, and creating nonprofits about sustainable journalism while investing the pensions of the employees of the papers they have bought into their own hedge fund.

If you have so much money, you can ruthlessly buy everything and create profit margins by casting out workers and tenants onto the streets. We need to jail hedge fund managers and slumlords, nationalize banking, and guarantee home ownership for Americans. It is frankly enraging how badly Americans are screwed over by finance capitalism.

I believe these students have a sense of community at our school, and eviction will traumatize them and further impoverish their parents. A 3rd grade kid named (something like) Tiny Tony told me his dad is now working everyday of the week to try and make enough to pay the hiked rent and stall off the eviction. He is so stinking cute, and he loves school. I don’t want him to be swept away.

major edit: the money is going through Homes of America LLC, not Homes FOR America (the nonprofit).

Update 3 Oct. 15, 2022

This update is an image of OP handing out flyers, telling residents who is responsible for this situation. What's important is the secrecy behind this Tom Del Bosco:

Alright so this isn't the first time I've heard the and seen the name "Tom Del Bosco", nor is it the first time I've looked into it, nor is it the first time that name had been used for public affairs, and yet, it never really leads me anywhere. I think the name Tom Del Bosco is mostly used as an alias or coverup name to help hide a person or people. Or it's all hardcore scrubbing. You can look up Tom Del Bosco and you'll find random people from random parts of the world. Look up Alden Global and you'll find it's a hedge fund, that's it, no real history, no clients, no employees... But you might find that they just so happen to be the owners of many several news outlets. I highly fucking doubt it's coincidence. Not the first time this has happened and it's not gonna be the last, I wouldn't even be surprised if local, state, or national news says literally nothing about this purchase and eviction of people. It's all super fucking shady, but what I do wonder now is. How did OP get this sheet of paper notifying them of who to contact and who to seek aid from? I personally don't think it was someone that they know. What I do know is that everyone in the area will leave, sooner or later, for some reason or another.

Basically, if you search up Tom Del Bosco or Alden Global, all of the search results have been bogged down, you can't even find a picture of this man's face. He might have paid people to scrub him from the net.

Update 4 Oct. 15, 2022

I typed a flier on my phone about the mass eviction happening at the trailer park where my students live. When I went to print it out at FedEx, the chick working there asked if she could share it on social media, and I said yes.

I parked at my school and walked along the highway past dead deer and haunted places. I reached the park and started talking to the families that were outside or who had their cars parked in the driveway. Every single person was kind and grateful I was doing something. I had been afraid park management would bounce me because it happened to me before but nobody has seen management in days.

Things I learned:

-An elderly man was being evicted over $12

-The mobile app they’re being required to use is tacking on crazy fees

-HUD (housing assistance) vouchers are being returned to sender, and the tenants who use assistance are now in thousands of dollars of rent debt

-a few days ago, the new manager left a hundred page packet on the tenants’ doorsteps, outlining all the new rules that could cause the residents to incur new fines. One particularly dark rule is that everyone can only have one pet now.

-A man invited me into his trailer where he lives with his young son. They showed me the floor in their bathroom had collapsed.

-The tenants were told if they didn’t pay these new fees by October 28th, they would have 3 days to move out before they would be evicted.

-Over half the tenants had been there less than a year, so there’s high turnover. Pretty much everyone said this was the only place available immediately that they could afford.

-The tenants pay between $400-$800 in rent.

-Some of the trailers are from the 1970s.

-All the notices that were eviction-related had simply been taped on peoples’ porches.

-I saw how the payment app they were now being made to use didn’t work and didn’t have any contact information about who was managing the park.

-Someone showed me that they were being charged fees with dates occurring before they moved in.

-One woman showed me how electricity didn’t work in half her trailer.

-Three men I talked to work grunt jobs at the weapons plant. One worked at Walmart. One was in construction. Only half the people I talked to were white. Three people mentioned disabilities.

In all, I was there for three hours and talked to a bunch of people. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any of my students. I walked back down the highway after dark. I had put my number on the flier but nobody has called me yet. I’m going to go back on a different day at a different time and try to talk to more people. I’m exhausted and I typed this from the bathtub.

This is an ongoing saga, OOP seems bent on not backing down from her activism. I thought this deserves to be spread around for awareness. Let's all signal boost the hell out of this

This email belongs to someone that can relay this story to John Oliver's show, we should let her know. Any more emails linked to the media will be helpful: yoonie.yang@warnermedia.com

MSNBC/Rachel Maddow: Rachel@msnbc.com