Who’s the bad guy in the SeaTac mobile home park battle?

This is another story about affordable housing. But before you tune out, this one is slightly different.

I would invite you to imagine yourself on both sides of the front page battle going on at a trailer park in SeaTac.

The Firs Mobile Park is owned by Jong Soo Park. In the after-school special version of this movie, he would be cast as the greedy, ruthless landowner.

On the other side, you have the heartwarming, mostly Hispanic families that rent spaces in Mr. Parks facility for $500 a month. In the script The Seattle Times wrote, these families are clearly cast as the underdogs. There is a photo of happy children playing pat-a-cake in the street. Seriously, it says “pat-a-cake.” I checked my calendar, and it’s not 1950.

I guess these kids don’t have access to Xbox and Nerf guns, they prefer games from a bygone era, but I digress.

Now, any good story pivots around a conflict. And this one is that Mr. Park would like to develop his land and build a hotel. The current residents are protesting, saying they have built a community here and there’s nowhere else they can go for $500 a month. They have asked a judge to do something on their behalf.

Eviction notices were given a year in advance, and then the lawsuits began to fly.

This is a relatively straightforward problem, but the solution is very complicated. Surely everyone, including me, feels sympathy for these families. They have a good situation, and they want that situation to continue. I don’t begrudge them for that.

But hopefully, people can sympathize with Jong Soo Park as well. While I’ve never owned and operated a trailer park, I can imagine that it’s a lot of work. You would have to constantly maintain the infrastructure of the place. There would virtually be non-stop maintenance. I’m sure some people would be late on their rent, some would be in collections. You have payroll and management and taxes.

You get the idea.

So, Mr. Park looks at this asset he has, takes stock of the growth in SeaTac, and starts to run some numbers. He comes to the conclusion that the location would be better served with a hotel. Who knows what all his motivations are?

Oh, by the way, building a hotel is an expensive endeavor. There will be lots of permit fees and studies and labor and materials. Mr. Park will be pumping a lot of money into the SeaTac community.

OK, if you’re the judge and jury in this situation, what do you do?

Do you force Mr. Park to not develop his property? Would you compensate him in some way?

By the way, in that lawsuit the residents filed, the city attorney disagreed. Mr. Park followed the rules. The judge paused the evictions, for now.

So what do we do?