Envy Apartment

Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston has 182 lots." />EXPAND The Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston has 182 lots. Stephen Paulsen Elizabeth Perez loves her trailer park . But if she's ever forced to move, at least she has a back-up plan. A chatty 45-year-old with a wide smile, Perez has lived at and managed the Trinity Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston since 2008. Used mobile homes here typically sell for $12,000 to $38,000, depending on their size and condition, she says. She remembers one woman buying a home for just $2,000, using her IRS refund. The Duval Mobile Home Park first opened in the 1950s. It was purchased last year by Trinity Community Group , a trailer park management company — and Perez worried about the future of the park. “I kept thinking, ‘Shoot, they're going to want to tear it down,’” Perez said. “I was kind of scared.” The company promised it would keep the park operational , according to Perez. Still, Perez accepts...

Just a couple of miles from the Mexican border, where approximately 200, 000 immigrants illegally cross every year, 14-year-old Guatemalan Byron Raxcaco came face-to-face with reality of life on this nearly 2,000 mile border. A local drug lord demanded that Raxcaco and his chaperone pay $800 for safe passage across the border, where criminal gangs ferry humans and drugs across daily, and where police presence is almost non-existent, he said in an interview with AL.com. Poor and desperate to reach the U.S., Raxcaco was detained in a hotel in the Mexican region of Senora for a day until his aunt in Semmes, Alabama, gathered the money for the drug lord. After paying up, Raxcaco was released and free to start a new life in the United States.  He approached a border patrol post , told them he was an unaccompanied minor and asked for political asylum. In the four years since crossing the border, he has moved in with his aunt, enrolled in school, learned English, and got himself a girlfri...

A teenager was unable to save her 5-year-old sister from their burning apartment Tuesday night when roaring flames turned the apartment into an inferno, making it impossible to get to the second-floor where the child was watching television, officials said. East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner Dr . "Beau" Clark identified the girl as Treasure Garner, although her family says her last name is Hadley. She died in the fire at the Cedarwood Apartments on Cedarcrest Avenue . The fire started around 7 p.m. and burned for more than three hours, spreading to more than 10 apartments before firefighters could bring it under control. Treasure's 18-year-old sister had earlier helped the child get ready for bed, then turned on a television on the second floor of the apartment for the little girl to watch while the teen went to the first-floor kitchen to prepare dinner, said Brant Thompson, chief deputy of the State Fire Marshal 's Office, according to accounts gathered by the F...

At the ribbon cutting this month for the Wesley Village affordable housing complex in Garden Grove, Laura Archuleta couldn ’t resist referencing Joni Mitchell ’s 1970 environmental protest “Big Yellow Taxi.” Built on underused land that’s part of the Garden Grove United Methodist Church campus on Main Street, Wesley Village offered Archuleta , president of the nonprofit community organization Jamboree Housing Corp ., a chance to riff on one of Mitchell’s most famous lyrics. Where Mitchell sang “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot,” Archuleta told about 300 people packed into the steamy church sanctuary on a hot afternoon that “Today we are going to learn how a group of dedicated organizations and individuals re-purposed a parking lot and put up a paradise.” Then she and others who spoke, including a single mom with six children who now reside at Wesley Village , told how the project became reality through a unique collaboration that involved the church, Jamboree and other...

Video tour of luxury Holywood home with beautiful views of Belfast Lough BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Tucked off the prestigious Church Road in Holywood with breathtaking views across Belfast Lough, Plas Merdyn is one of the town's hidden gems. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/house-home/video-tour-of-luxury-holywood-home-with-beautiful-views-of-belfast-lough-36061666.html http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/house-home/article36061664.ece/36eb0/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-08-24_lif_33975823_I8.JPG Email Tucked off the prestigious Church Road in Holywood with breathtaking views across Belfast Lough, Plas Merdyn is one of the town's hidden gems. Positioned at the end of the lane, Number 6 is a handsome, detached residence dating back to 1890. In recent years the house has been beautifully modernised retaining many of its original features such high cornice ceilings , decorative plasterwork, the original staircase and fireplaces. Beautifully presented it offers a generous 3,700 sq...

Budget- friendly fall home decorating ideas that will easily transition your home from summer to fall. *affiliate links used* Now that August is nearing the end… Ready or Not…Here Comes Fall and fall home decorating ideas . It doesn’t feel at all like fall yet around the lake, in fact as anyone who lives in the south knows…. the heat will stick around well through October, but my mailbox tells a different story as the first signs of fall have begun to arrive in the way of home decorating and fashion catalogs. :-) The end of summer is always a bittersweet time for me. I love the summer and don’t want to see it end, but the warm and cozy feeling of the fall season will draw me in soon and I want to be ready. I feel a teeny bit more of a pull towards it now that the house is empty of family and friends who stayed with us over the Total Eclipse weekend. We were right in the sweet spot and saw 100%. It was very cool to witness first hand – quite awe-inspiring and something I will never f...

Seventy years ago this month, my grandfather fled India to join millions of refugees in a new country to be known as Pakistan. He survived the ordeal across the still-unmarked border, but he lost family and friends in the killings, expulsions and unimaginable acts of vengeance that accompanied the making of India and Pakistan. These episodes still haunt the subcontinent. My grandfather died four decades later at his home in Lahore. He never returned to his village 20 miles away in what became a different country. I thought often about his journey as I packed up two years of life in Delhi in preparation for my own, very different, Indian departure. My partner’s job had brought us there, and we returned to Washington this month. But despite the privilege of my U.S. passport, I lived in Delhi with the painful echoes of my grandfather’s partition. For almost two years, I lived as a Pakistani-born Muslim in Narendra Modi ’s Hindu- nationalist India . I knew that the experience would be dis...

A drive down Main Street in Leicester becomes a trip down memory lane when you pass Joe's Drive-In Restaurant, a newly- reopened food joint that bursts with a retro 1950s vibe . Joe's is a slice of Americana, from its checkered floors and chrome detailing to its gourmet shakes and classic burgers and fries. But it's more than just that. Maria Joseph refurbished the restaurant and named it after her father, Hanna "Joe" Joseph, a lover of Americana who bought acres of land that ended up containing the restaurant and the Leicester Triple Drive -In. Joe's opened about five weeks ago. Sadly, Joe died less than two months before the restaurant reopened . "It's nice to see it come back to life, especially after my father passing. It's a nice, not intentional tribute, but it turned into a way of honoring him," Maria, 51, said Wednesday, sitting on the patio under a yellow umbrella. The restaurant was the first thing her father built on the land, Mar...

The Johnstown- area wrestling community lost a young legend on the very same day that it buried another. Gary Pfahler, 26, who became Chestnut Ridge 's first – and to this point only – state champion in 2008, died Thursday morning in Fort Pierce, Florida, according to J Edward Blackburn Funeral Home in Alum Bank, which is handling arrangements. Christine Weekes, administrative manager for the St. Lucie County Coroner and Medical Examiner's Office, said that an autopsy was performed but could not determine the cause and manner of death. A toxicology report is pending. Pfahler captured the PIAA Class AA championship in 2008, his senior year at Chestnut Ridge . A year later another District 5 wrestler – North Star's Nick Roberts – won the first of his three state championships . Roberts died on Saturday at his apartment on the Pitt-Johnstown campus in Richland Township. “It's been a rough week,” said Joe Kimmel, District 5's wrestling chairman . “I couldn...