It’s hard to image a celebrity living in a trailer park. But at the Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park, that’s exactly the case.
In Malibu, California, stars like Sarah Paulson, Matthew McConaughey, and Stevie Nicks have bought properties in the park, where some trailers can sell for as much as $5 million, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. But the trend is changing the character of a community that’s existed since the 1950s.
“It was paradise before it sold out,” the longtime former resident Ted Silverberg told the WSJ. He lived in the park starting in 1980, before selling his property in 2019 to the member of the Johnson & Johnson family. While he wouldn’t say how much he originally paid for the mobile home, Zillow recorded the 2019 closing price at $2.4 million.
Across the trailer park, wealthy homeowners are buying up property and creating mini-mansions. Big-name architecture firms are tasked with drawing up the exteriors, while high-end interior designers curate the inside. In just one example, a Marmol Radziner–designed mobile home is currently listed for $4 million, while about 30 trailers have sold in the past three years for up to $5 million, according to Zillow data cited by The Wall Street Journal. Agents, however, have heard of off-market deals stretching to $7 million. On top of that, residents have to pay rent on their parcel of land, ranging from about $1,500 to $4,000 a month.
The cushy, well-designed homes have attracted a specific type of person to the mobile-home park, which some see as a “double-edged sword,” Ryan Addison, who’s lived there since 2009, told the WSJ. Wealthy residents and the work they do on their houses increases the value of trailers across the board, but it affects the neighborhood in other ways, too, making it less community-focused than it used to be and less accessible to the everyday people who have long called Paradise Cove home.
“We got lucky,” Addison told the newspaper. “There’s no way we’d ever be able to move in now.”
Despite some of the downsides, Addison and his family are planning to stick around. But someday soon an A-lister might offer an ungodly sum for their mobile home, too.
