Editor’s Note: MLK50: Justice Through Journalism offers anonymity to sources in select circumstances where revealing their identity would risk their safety. Four sources in this story have had their names altered to protect them. We adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which can be read here.
Alfredo Jimenez is soft-spoken, his eyes usually lowered beneath the brim of his baseball cap. But he’s quick to crack a smile and joke around with those he knows well — including his neighbors at the Wheel Estate mobile home park in Memphis’ Whitehaven neighborhood.
Jimenez, who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity, takes a community-minded approach to the issues that have plagued Wheel Estate for the two years he has lived there.
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In October 2024, he helped deliver a list of residents’ maintenance demands with over 200 signatures to the property’s management office. It was the first major effort to improve common areas in the complex by Vecinos Unidos de Wheel Estate, a makeshift union of the park’s predominantly Spanish-speaking residents.
But Jimenez didn’t expect the myriad issues in Wheel Estate’s shared spaces — from broken streetlights and water leaks to road damage and shuttered common areas — to get resolved overnight. That’s why, in November, he took the initiative to refresh the yellow paint on the faded speed bumps outside his home.
“There was a fast car that almost hit a kid, so I began painting the lines in the color yellow,” Jimenez said in Spanish.
On other streets that wind through the complex, remnants of yellow paint are still visible on some of the speed bumps. A longtime resident and organizer who is using the name Silvia Gutierrez for this article, says that the roads have been repaved once during her five years living at Wheel Estate, but haven’t seen maintenance in at least the past two years.
Just days after his impromptu paint job, Jimenez received a letter threatening him with eviction for the work he did to make his street safer.
“Please have all of the yellow paint in street [sic] removed by the above date or your rent will be refused for December!” the complex’s former property manager wrote in red pen on the violation notice, which Jimenez shared with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.
“You had no authorization to paint our property,” she added at the bottom of the form. Jimenez had one week to comply — so he used a power washer to undo his handiwork.
“She made me erase the lines, she said, because it was vandalism,” he said in Spanish, adding that the entire experience cost him more effort than money. “The paint (didn’t cost) too much, but it was more trouble to get rid of the color.”
The incident was just one example of the setbacks Wheel Estate residents have faced in their attempts to get Roots Management, which has owned the property since 2023, to improve the conditions in its common spaces. Nine months after residents first articulated their demands, many of the property’s safety and maintenance problems still haven’t been resolved.
Organizers targeted
Roots Management has largely denied the issues that Wheel Estate residents have raised.
On July 18, company spokesperson Christine Bachman wrote that all but four of the complex’s streetlights are fixed — which a recent visit confirmed — and that it has had contractors “completely upgrade” a water system that was causing leaks on the property.
“We’ve been working on the roads and are currently speaking with another company to fix them at one time,” she added.
But Bachman did not respond to questions about the company’s broader approach to maintenance concerns, including management’s treatment of resident organizers. She told ABC24 News last October that community rules “are applied uniformly to ensure fairness and safety for all.”
Organizers say that’s not true. Citations for minor issues like parking violations and overgrown lawns aren’t handed out uniformly, they say. Instead, management seems to enforce community rules more strictly for some residents than for others.
The porch of Maria Hernandez’ yellow trailer serves as a makeshift meeting place for Vecinos Unidos organizers. But since the group presented its demands last fall, she says she has been targeted by management.
The former property manager recently issued Hernandez two warnings — one verbal and the other written — about a work trailer illegally parked on her property.
“Please have your utility trailer removed from the property by the above date,” she wrote on a notice on May 23.
The problem: Hernandez doesn’t own a trailer, leading her to believe that she is being singled out for her organizing work with Vecinos Unidos.
“Sometimes they use (the rules) only against certain people,” said Pablo Herrera, another organizer who has lived in Wheel Estate for two years. “They pick and choose how to enforce the laws.”
Infrastructure issues
Despite the complex’s name, the homes lining Wheel Estate’s winding streets aren’t wheeled. The slim buildings are permanently affixed to the ground, occupied by a mix of owners and renters who take great care to maintain them.
Visitors to the neighborhood will spot meticulous pocket gardens and covered porches overflowing with plants. Some homes have makeshift sculptures, decorated mailboxes and other adornments on the outside.
Nevertheless, as they walked the narrow streets this spring, Vecinos Unidos organizers pointed out issues that they’ve tried for months to get fixed. One neighbor has several sinkholes on her property that drop into darkness below ground. The largest is just feet from her driveway, and she says the soil she packs into it washes away whenever it rains.
Homeowners in the complex are required to keep their land well-maintained. But common spaces, including some grassy areas where trailers once stood, are the responsibility of management. Overgrown grass and cracked concrete dominate these spaces, as well as the land around some of the property’s vacant rental trailers.
Dead trees and branches can be seen throughout the property and have already caused damage to some homes. Organizer Camila Aguilar, whose name has been changed, recently had to repair her home’s roof after a dead limb from a tree on Wheel Estate’s land fell on it two years ago. Removing the limb and repairing the damage cost her more than $3,700 out of pocket.
Water and sewer leaks are also a major problem for residents like Carmen Veracruz, whose name has been altered to protect her identity. She has had a pool of stagnant sewage in the crawlspace under her home since late last summer. Management has told her they will send someone out to fix the problem, but no one has shown up.
“They can’t use the restroom because (the sewage) is going up instead of going down,” said Herrera.
In another part of the complex, water flowed steadily out of the grass from an unknown source and pooled in the road before reaching a storm drain. While Roots Management repaired one water main following Vecinos Unidos’ petition last fall, residents said they have seen no ongoing maintenance or fixes to other water leaks — some of which cause high water bills that residents have no choice but to pay.
Other promises like repaving the roads have also gone unfulfilled, with the former property manager instead stuffing potholes and road cracks with gravel from a pile by the leasing office.
‘They told me that they were not responsible’
Resident organizers have tried repeatedly to get the city to step in and address the issues with Wheel Estate’s infrastructure.
Receipts shared with MLK50 show that they filed at least six tickets with the city’s 311 system in 2024 for issues including potholes and other hazards. But these tickets are all missing from the city’s online 311 record search system. The city did not return a July 2 public information request for documentation related to these six tickets by the time of publication.
The ticket receipts show that two of the organizers’ 311 requests were closed by the city almost immediately with the comment “Contact MLGW.” But residents say the utility company won’t make repairs to the community’s broken street lights, road damage or water leaks because they are on private property.
“I’ve called Memphis Light, Gas and Water several times, and they told me that they were not responsible,” Herrera said of the broken streetlights on Joyce and Josibpet lanes.
Organizers say that city officials, including councilwoman Yolanda Cooper-Sutton, have visited Wheel Estate to see the disrepair residents live with every day. But even with their intervention, infrastructure fixes have been partial or temporary.
The city and MLGW have each told residents that Roots Management is ultimately responsible for repairs on the property.
Community spaces in disrepair
Infrastructure, like roads, streetlights and sidewalks, isn’t the only aspect of Wheel Estate in disarray. Roots Management advertises a variety of amenities in the complex’s common spaces — almost none of which are usable.
“Whether you’re looking to score a goal on the field, make a splash in the pool, or simply unwind at the playground, there’s always an opportunity for adventure and relaxation,” the complex’s website boasts.
The field is an overgrown soccer field that residents say they are no longer allowed to use. Roots Management itself stated last fall that it bears no responsibility for the field, since the land is owned by a neighboring property.
Although advertised on Wheel Estate’s website, residents say the community pool has been closed for over four years. A glimpse through its gates shows it less than half full with stagnant black water. Residents remember it closing during the COVID-19 pandemic and never reopening. When they set up their own small above-ground pools in the summer, they say management issues them citations.
The playground is also in poor condition. The plastic roof of a small jungle gym structure is still crumpled from where a tree limb fell on it about three years ago, sending a resident to the hospital. The tree in question still has multiple dead branches looming above the children who play there.
Wheel Estate’s front gate has also been broken for around four years, posing safety concerns for residents. The gate remains permanently open, allowing anyone to access the complex regardless of whether they live there.
“Before, the community was much better,” Gutierrez said in Spanish. “When I moved here, I would enter with a key card, but then it stopped working. Now they’ve changed the front gates, but since [the former property manager] has been here, they haven’t worked.”
Vecinos Unidos organizers recalled a recent incident in which an unfamiliar red truck followed a woman and her child along a street within Wheel Estate, causing them to rush to a neighbor’s house for protection.
In a community with quiet streets where kids often walk and ride bikes independently, the incident left some residents shaken — and there’s often no one on site to turn to for help. Another of Wheel Estate’s listed amenities is an on-site management office, but it is not staffed during predictable hours. Instead, residents say property management staff will come and go seemingly at random.
‘This is not a public space’
Behind cracked windows at the center of the complex, a locked room is all that remains of what used to be Wheel Estate’s communal laundry room. Longtime residents like Gutierrez remember when it served as a useful resource in a community whose trailers generally don’t contain washing machines or the space to install them.
But in 2023, the laundry room closed without warning, and management began removing the washers and dryers from the building. Now, all that remains are water and electric hookups emerging from bare walls and dirty floors.
Roots Management claims that they are not responsible for closing this common area.
“The laundry room was not operational when Roots took ownership, so we never closed it — it was already deemed inoperable,” Bachman wrote. “Roots does not list ‘laundry facilities’ in any agreements or as an amenity.”
Many residents have now had to buy laundry machines or make regular trips to the nearest laundromat, where organizers say a single load of laundry costs $4-$5 to wash. Some households hang wet clothes to dry on clotheslines or drape them on the railings of their front steps. Others get creative — Jimenez, for example, does his laundry at his sister’s house in Mississippi.
‘Your home for a better future’
Roots Management, headquartered in Addison, Texas, owns over 200 housing complexes across the country with a focus on manufactured housing. The homepage of its website bears the tagline “Your Home for a Better Future.”
In a 2021 corporate overview presentation, Roots Management claimed to “invest in improving the overall look and feel of the communities we manage.” But Memphis area residents haven’t seen much of this investment. Shady Oaks Mobile Home Park in Millington, the company’s only other property in Tennessee, is also beleaguered by reports of poor maintenance and unsanitary conditions.
In 2021, Roots Management was the sixth largest owner of manufactured housing units in the U.S. and reported profits of $75.7 million, according to its corporate overview presentation.
But residents say the former property manager, who worked at Wheel Estate for about two years, would often tell them that management had no money to make necessary repairs to common areas or damaged infrastructure.
Herrera recently tripped and nearly fell on the concrete path leading to his trailer — tree roots growing underneath had cracked it, making it dangerous to navigate.
“I sent a message to her, and I never received an answer,” he said on May 19. “Today I went to talk to her, and she told me that they don’t have funds to fix it.”
He has removed the broken pathway with Jimenez’s help and hopes that management will pour fresh concrete. If not, he says he’ll have to pay for the repair himself.
Bachman didn’t respond to questions about the company’s financial situation or whether Roots has budgeted money for future improvements to Wheel Estate’s common spaces.
What’s next for Wheel Estate?
As dusk fell in the Wheel Estate complex on May 19, five Vecinos Unidos organizers strolled back towards Hernandez’s trailer under the irregular points of light that lined the road. Some streetlights had flicked on, but others remained dark, including one filled with a black substance that residents guessed was stagnant rainwater.
Despite the property’s ongoing issues, the residents say there are still things to love about Wheel Estate.
“I like that (the neighborhood) is calm,” Herrera said in a mix of Spanish and English. “Apart from the problems we have had, it’s very quiet — most of the time.”
The tight-knit community within Wheel Estate and memories of better maintenance under previous management are part of what motivates organizers to continue their fight for better conditions.
One by one, they begin to split off from the group to return home.
Herrera departs for his trailer, still missing a front path.
Aguilar points out the newly repaired roof over her kitchen as the group walks past her home.
One of the last to depart is Jimenez, who has taken up a new project: grabbing every leaning street sign he passes and pushing them back upright. It’s a futile effort — erosion and deferred maintenance will soon have them sagging again. Nevertheless, he holds them steady and stomps at the dirt around the base of each one, helping them stand a little longer.
Kelcy Ramirez of Memphis 4 Revolutionary Socialism and Pablo Herrera of Vecinos Unidos de Wheel Estate contributed translation assistance to this piece.
Natalie Wallington is the housing reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at natalie.wallington@mlk50.com.
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