For many years, Duroville was a crumbling desert slum. The former trailer park in Thermal, California, maintained a long-held reputation for its poor living conditions. It struggled with everything from widespread poverty to packs of dangerous, free-roaming stray dogs. It wasn’t until receiver Mark Adams stepped in that the park’s fortunes finally began changing.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson appointed Adams as a temporary receiver of the trailer park and its once-lost community in 2008. The California Receivership Group founder had already helped to clean up more than a dozen other slums across California in the preceding years.
However, at the time, he remarked that Duroville would be his biggest challenge, having never taken on a more daunting prospect. The situation in Duroville was so severe that stories detailing conditions at the park had made the pages of The New York Times.
The following is a look back at Adams’ efforts to breathe new life into the community at the crumbling Coachella Valley desert slum, starting with mandatory drug testing and tackling Duroville’s hundreds of problematic, largely stray dogs.
A New Sheriff in Town
February 2008, and there’s a new sheriff in town in Riverside County’s infamous Duroville, as Adams put it. And he wasn’t taking the responsibility lightly. The receivership specialist’s efforts to transform the crumbling California trailer park began with mandatory drug testing for all park employees; Adams fired three employees who declined to participate.
Next, the receivership expert focused on tackling Duroville’s stray dog problem, instructing residents to keep their pets secure or see them picked up by the pound. Only days later, he began looking at ways to deal with the community’s long-standing issues with loitering drunks.
Elsewhere, Adams had soon hired a full-time security force to patrol the park, addressing this and other issues that had long plagued Duroville and its thousands of residents.
Duroville opened in 1999 on the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation, adjacent to a smoldering garbage dump. It got its name from the property’s owner, Harvey Duro, a member of the Torres Martinez tribal council. Conditions at the trailer park quickly deteriorated, and receiver Mark Adams replaced Duro as the individual responsible for the park on the government’s orders less than a decade later.
Dire Need of Repair
Duroville housed roughly 300 trailers when Adams took over. Staggeringly, as many as 6,000 individuals—primarily farm workers—were believed to be living there at any time, especially during the harvest season. The California Receivership Group founder and his team promptly deemed around 30 of Duroville’s trailers—some 10 percent of the total—in desperate need of repair or demolition.
His team’s immediate goal was making the trailer park and its homes habitable for the first time in many years. That included addressing dangers like aggressive stray dogs and drunken loiterers. Meanwhile, and equally pressing, were emergency electrical repairs and remediation of fire dangers, as well as regaining control of the park’s spiraling finances.
Before appointing Adams as receiver, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had sought to entirely shut down the 40-acre park, citing, in no small part, the truly dire living conditions on offer. However, U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson refused, namely for fear of making thousands of people homeless. Instead, he tasked Adams with turning around Duroville’s fortunes.
He also appointed Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former U.S. overseas ambassador, and Jack Shine, First Financial Group’s president and CEO, to investigate matters in Duroville alongside receivership specialist Adams.
A Positive Outlook
Mark Adams’ work at Duroville rested on him securing an initial credit line of $150,000 to finance repairs at the former trailer park from a consortium of banks. The park’s owner, Harvey Duro, would then be responsible for repaying whatever Adams spent to turn the property around.
Within weeks, conditions at Duroville had improved significantly. Crucially, Adams remained sympathetic to the park’s residents’ plight, reassuring them of his hopes of saving their community. Looking back, he credits his Catholic upbringing and education for fueling his passion for this and other similar projects across California.
Despite the receivership specialist’s efforts and with federal district officials retaining jurisdiction, Duroville ultimately closed in 2013 by court order. Many residents resettled nearby in Mountain View Estates, a new mobile home park built to replace Duroville.
Over $25 million in federal, state, and private financing helped to establish Mountain View Estates. Former Duroville residents who did not move to Mountain View Estates relocated to subsidized or market-rate apartments and homes elsewhere.
Receiver Mark Adams
Receivership industry innovator Mark Adams founded California Receivership Group back in 1999, focused on health and safety-led receivership remedies for nuisance properties across the Golden State. Over a quarter of a century, CRG has become California’s leading choice to rehabilitate fundamentally problematic properties via receivership powers.
Georgetown University Law graduate Mark Adams, president of California Receivership Group, and his team have thus far tackled over 330 projects, ranging from homes to hotels and commercial properties. The CRG team, under its president, includes a diverse roster of receivership law, real estate, public safety, operations, and construction professionals.
Duroville in Thermal, California, remains one of Adams’ and California Receivership Group’s toughest-ever challenges. Yet, CRG founder Adams recalls that through it all, the once-infamous crumbling desert slum enjoyed a real sense of community despite countless difficulties throughout its short but eventful history. Duroville itself is now just a memory, and the vacant land that once was Duroville is a testament to the power of the receivership remedy to work for the public interest.
