MIAMI — On a Friday afternoon earlier this month, Marisol Sánchez dropped to her knees and sobbed outside the Sweetwater trailer that she and her late husband, Diego Valdes, once called home. The front door was broken down, some windows smashed — the place had been ransacked.

Six weeks earlier, Sánchez, 55, had left behind the trailer in the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park. In November, the property owner announced the park would be closing to make way for a new affordable housing complex and offered residents a $14,000 buyout if they left by Jan. 31.

About 15% of Sweetwater’s population, roughly 3,000 people, lived in Li’l Abner at the start of the new year. It has since become a ghost town. Only 250 of the park’s 900 households remain. They’ve rebuked the ownership’s buyout offers and are staging a legal battle against the terms of their eviction, currently set for May 19.

The rest have taken the payout.

To numerous Li’l Abner home owners who had purchased their trailers for multiple times the buyout sum, the $14,000 was peanuts. For them, the eviction represents an enormous and unjust loss of both wealth — their homes were their primary assets — and community. Many have struggled to find new, affordable housing around Miami, recently ranked the second least affordable American metro area for renters. And a statewide trend of shuttering trailer parks has left the mobile home owners — whose homes, cemented into the ground and movable only at a five-figure cost, aren’t actually all that mobile — with few alternatives.

So, armed with in some cases just $14,000, hundreds of families have set out into South Florida’s increasingly costly housing market to rebuild, in many cases leaving behind fully furnished trailers — ghosts of their material pasts.

“They’ve taken my life,” wept Sánchez, her sobs echoing unanswered off the walls of the derelict mobile homes in what had been her neighborhood.

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It was 2013, and Sánchez was ringing up customers at a Sabor Tropical when she met her husband-to-be. He was polite, gentlemanly, said Sánchez, recalling that it was raining that day and that Valdes offered to drive her and a mutual friend of theirs home so they wouldn’t have to walk. The two married five years later.

Valdes, 76, had lived in Li’l Abner for 32 years. According to Sánchez, her husband was deeply unsettled by the November announcement that the park’s owner, CREI Holdings, had decided to shut down Li’l Abner to make space for multifamily affordable housing.

CREI Holdings had already built one such complex, called Li’l Abner II, on the property. In Sweetwater, where the median household earns $4,600 per month, rent for a 1-bed, 1-bath apartment at Li’l Abner II starts at $2,194. Another multifamily structure on the property, Li’l Abner III, is under construction. It promises workforce and affordable senior housing as early as 2026.

That’s of little consolation to those who live in Li’l Abner, the park being one of the few remaining places in Miami-Dade where they could afford to own a home.

CREI Holdings offered trailer owners who leave by April $7,000, while those who leave by May get $3,000. Either way, all residents must vacate by May 19, says Urban Group, the development management company that’s overseeing the park’s conversion.

The notice of the park’s closure provoked outrage among residents, who have protested the terms of their compensation packages. In some cases, they’ve been arrested for doing so. David Winker, a lawyer representing the mobile home owners, said he himself has been banned from Li’l Abner at the threat of arrest and therefore has to meet with his clients in a park near FIU.

Many of the mobile home owners saw their personal wealth and housing security evaporate overnight.

Most of Sánchez and her husband’s savings were tied up in their largest asset — their home. In December, the couple along with 185 other mobile home owners in the community, filed a class-action lawsuit against CREI Holdings as well as Miami-Dade County and the city of Sweetwater.

Arguing that the evictions weren’t conducted in accordance with Florida law governing mobile home parks, the plaintiffs are seeking more time to find alternative housing as well as more money — $50,000, plus lawyer fees, for each home owner.

Winker, the lawyer for the trailer owners, is optimistic about his clients’ prospects.

“The laws are very clear about the procedure for evicting mobile home parks. And we feel it’s very clear they haven’t followed the rules,” he said.

Sweetwater and Miami-Dade reject the assertion that they’ve acted improperly. CREI Holdings, for its part, said that it fully complied with Florida law in clearing the park.

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Winker’s legal confidence notwithstanding, the notice to vacate has taken a heavy emotional and sometimes physical toll on some of Li’l Abner’s residents.

Soon after the eviction announcement was made, Valdes’ health began to deteriorate, said his wife.

“He was depressed,” Sánchez said, at the prospect of having to leave behind “his whole life,” and he was increasingly stressed about the couple’s financial future. Valdes, who was retired, suffered from hypertension. Sánchez had become his full-time caretaker.

Compounding the stress, said the widow, was the repeated outreach from Urban Group reminding residents of the buyout deadlines. To Sánchez, the followups amounted to a pressure campaign.

“They frequently sent us letters. The calls came while eating lunch, while lying in bed at night. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing,” she recalled.

In a statement to the Miami Herald, Urban Group confirmed that followups with remaining residents, many of whom have decided to participate in the lawsuit, are “ongoing.”

“We want to ensure everyone is aware of the resources available to them,” it read.

Eventually, Sánchez said, the uncertainty was too much for her husband. He turned in the keys to their trailer on Jan. 31 to collect the $14,000 payout.

He died early the following morning of a heart attack.

“He left his life there,” cried Sánchez. The $14,000, she added, just about covered the cost of her husband’s medical expenses and funeral.

What it didn’t cover was the cost of moving, something Sánchez’s adult daughter has helped her pay for. Having nowhere to take her belongings, Sánchez left almost all her worldly possessions in her trailer.

At the end of January, many residents who needed the $14,000 did the same. They handed over to Urban Group the keys to fully furnished trailers.

That’s when the pillaging began, according to the residents who have stayed.

The Sweetwater Police Department, which has two off-duty officers stationed at Li’l Abner on the park ownership’s dime, told the Herald that it hadn’t seen an uptick in reports of looting or vandalism in the community.

The state of the park tells a different story.

Personal effects of little value to thieves — mattresses, clothes, photographs, children’s toys — litter the park. Abandoned trailers sit exposed, their windows shattered and doors busted down. Purebred cats, once family pets, wander up to the remaining inhabited trailers in search of food, struggling to adapt to their new lives as strays.

“It looks like something out of a zombie movie,” remarked Miguel Herrera, a decade-long resident of the park, as he walked around his neighborhood, where, days later, an abandoned trailer would go up in flames, cause yet to be determined.

Asked by the Herald about the ransacked park, the Urban Group stressed its commitment “to the continued safety of our community” but made no direct reference to looting or vandalism.

Gladys Arias, 72, lives across the street and two doors down from Sánchez’s old trailer. She’s decided to stay in her home and await the results of the lawsuit.

“I live in constant fear,” confessed Arias.

“Just yesterday, at around 2 p.m., someone broke into that trailer,” she reported, pointing down the road. In the neighborhood group chat, another resident reported that a thief had broken into their inhabited trailer, Arias said.

She worried her home could be next.

Herrera solemnly shook his head at his neighbor’s concerns.

“When you’re scared,” he responded, “the moment comes when you’ll say, ‘Fine, I’ll go, too.’”

“This,” he grumbled, “is all calculated.”

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