Under an agreement recently brokered by the City of Boston, nine acres of the 13-acre park will be donated by its owner, James Clair, to a nonprofit affordable housing manager, the Community Builders. The remaining four acres of land will be retained by the Clair, who owns an adjacent Porsche and Honda dealership, and who will use the land for expanding his business. Clair bought the park in the 1980s and had wanted to use all of it to expand his dealership, but residents fought back vigorously for years, enlisting the aid of city officials to prevent the closure of the park.

TCB will take possession of the trailer park and make necessary infrastructure improvements while maintaining existing rents, which are typically $200 to $400 per month for each pad, in a city in which an average two-bedroom apartment runs about $1,700. Tenants will have six years to exercise an option to buy the land on which their homes sit at below-market prices. Boston Trailer Park tenants unanimously agreed to the land conveyance.

"This is the final step in ensuring that residents will continue to call the Boston Trailer Park home--and at rents that are affordable," says Mayor Thomas M. Menino of the agreement. The Boston Trailer Park, besides being the only manufactured housing community in the city, also has the distinction of being the last property in the City of Boston still governed by rent control.