Lives in Upheaval After an Eviction, in “Last Days on Lake Trinity”

In March, 2022, the people living in Lakeside Park Estates mobile-home park, in Hollywood, Florida, learned that they were being evicted. The park’s owner, Trinity Broadcasting Network, had decided to shut it down. In many cases, tenants owned their homes, but they didn’t own the land they sat on. The residents—most of whom were low-income, many of whom were elderly—had until the end of the year to figure out where to go next. “Last Days on Lake Trinity,” Charlotte Cooley’s patient yet enraging short film, follows three women—Nancy Sanderson, Nancy Fleishman, and Laurie Laney—as they navigate the subsequent months of uncertainty and upheaval. It’s an intimate portrait of the downstream effects of corporate greed and the housing crisis, made more acute by the fact that the landlord in this case is the largest religious-television network in the world.

Early in Cooley’s film, one of her subjects invokes a common stereotype of trailer parks—that they are trashy places filled with trashy people. The film, which is lit by soft seaside light, paints a different picture: residents tend their small yards, ride bikes with their friends, and watch ibises fly low over a lake. For Laney, a free spirit with long hair, the park signifies independence; she scoffs at her evicted neighbors who opt to move into condos. For Sanderson, a sweet-natured woman who struggles with her memory, the park is a source of care and community, and somewhere her friends can keep an eye on her. Fleishman worked for Trinity on and off for two decades; now the company she credits with saving her soul is putting her out. “They said they were going to help us relocate and they haven’t,” she says. “And when I call them for assistance they don’t respond.”

The spectre of homelessness looms as the women petition Hollywood’s city council for help and get quotes for apartments they can’t afford. They remain remarkably hopeful in the face of setbacks; you get the sense that this is not the first time these women have faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. “Maybe I’ll love it,” Sanderson, who is facing a potential move to Pennsylvania, says. “Being in the snow, making a snowman.” But her eyes betray her fear at leaving behind her routines and relationships; one of the great sadnesses of the film is watching Sanderson’s bright smile dim as the months progress and her options for escape narrow. The three women’s struggles stand in for a much larger problem: the housing-affordability crisis has been particularly hard on older Americans—people older than fifty are the fastest-growing unhoused age group.

As the months tick by, demolition crews crowd the park and Laney sells most of what she owns at a swap meet. She tells Cooley about a dream she had, months earlier, about a ficus tree. “All these branches with all these leaves and all these birds had been cut off,” she said. “All the branches and fingers of life were gone.” She woke up from the nightmare in a sweat. That day, the eviction notice arrived.