ROSSVILLE, Ga. - The rats twist and slide through the holes in Danny Ray Mooneyham's manufactured home. They enter through the living room wall, the bathroom floor, the kitchen floor and a small opening in the hallway closet.
They're up to a foot long, with patchy gray hair. They squeak. They chew whatever meal they can find. They eat dog food, uncooked macaroni, hot sauce, Cocoa Puffs, blood pressure pills and muscle relaxers. They nibble holes in Mooneyham's wife's clothes. One ran into the shower with their 7-year-old son, Edward.
"I can hear them in the walls," said Mooneyham's mother-in-law, Janice Wells, who spotted three rats in her closet last week.
The Mooneyhams live on Lot 75 of Stoney Pointe Mobile Home Park, located on Schmitt Road. It's Danny; his wife, Vanessa; Edward; Wells; and Marshall Wilson. Wilson is Vanessa's father. He's also Wells' ex-husband. He has five stents in his heart, he said. Vanessa is blind in her right eye. Wells gets seizures. Danny, a newspaper deliveryman, is in Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
The family came here in October 2014. Wilson's apartment had recently burned down. Vanessa had gotten into an argument with Danny's family, whom they had been living with.
"We looked a lot of places," she said. "And this was the only place we could afford."
They signed a four-year contract with Tom Lackey, the owner of the park, paying $211 a month to rent the singlewide trailer and another $180 a month to rent the lot. That does not include utilities.
The contract is a lease with an option to purchase. It is a real estate instrument in which tenants get the opportunity to buy the home outright at different points during the life of the rental. The price varies over time, and the rent payments do not apply toward the purchase.
In the Mooneyhams' contract, the family had to pay Lackey $1,000 up front as an "option" to purchase the home. The money could go toward the final purchase price. It is also non-refundable. The contract states they could purchase the trailer for $7,100 after the first year, $5,000 after the second year and $2,700 after the third year. Built in 1995, the trailer is appraised at $6,300, according to county tax records.
Often, seller-financed deals such as these appeal to families with low incomes or bad credit scores, said Heather Way, a University of Texas law professor. While they can't qualify for a traditional mortgage, a lease with an option to purchase opens a door to home ownership.
But the deals usually lack the protections of a traditional mortgage. While there is a forgiveness period for homeowners, allowing them to catch up on payments, a tenant in a lease-with-option-to-purchase deal can be evicted without notice.
Multiple tenants at Stoney Pointe and Blue Ridge Estates, another Rossville park owned by Lackey, told the Times Free Press they thought they were buying their manufactured homes.
"None of these documents are straightforward," Way said. "If you don't know real estate laws, it's very hard to follow."
A tenant can face eviction even while keeping up with their rent. At Stoney Pointe and Blue Ridge Estates, county workers put notices of seizure on 18 trailers earlier this month. Combined, the homes had $20,500 in back taxes owed.
Through Friday, Lackey had paid the taxes off on 10 of those trailers, Walker County, Ga., records show. The other eight are scheduled to go to auction Tuesday. Lackey did not return multiple calls or an email seeking comment last week.
While tenants don't get the protections of a mortgage, they carry the burdens of one. The Mooneyhams' contract requires them to buy insurance for the property and to perform all repairs. Four other contracts of tenants at Stoney Pointe and Blue Ridge Estates showed the same requirement.
Sarah Bolling Mancini, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said a clause like that is illegal in Georgia. Renters cannot be forced to handle the repairs on a landlord's property. In seller-financed contracts, she said, some poor tenants have invested more than $10,000 to fix properties.
"I have seen this practice take a severe human toll on the lives of low-income people who want to become homeowners," she said. "Oftentimes, people end up living in very poor conditions because they're trying to keep up with their monthly payments. And at the same time, they're being asked to maintain the water heater, maintain the roof. And at the same time, people are not living in habitable conditions."
Last year, Mancini filed a lawsuit on behalf of 16 Atlanta residents against a company that sells rent-to-own homes. Such arrangements are similar to leases with the option to purchase. A tenant's rent goes toward the purchase of a home, though the lease can last decades. The homes are sometimes old and run-down. The renters have no protection from sudden eviction.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau launched an investigation in 2016 against the same company, Harbour Portfolio Advisors, which purchased 6,700 homes after the housing crisis from Fannie Mae, the government-backed mortgage firm.
In October, a Milwaukee County, Wis., circuit judge banned another rent-to-own company from leasing properties in that state, after the Milwaukee Department of Justice argued the company intentionally deceived renters, who thought they were purchasing the homes outright.
At Stoney Pointe, Wilson told the Times Free Press his family has repaired plenty of problems with their trailer. They replaced a leaking water line, a faucet and a rotted front door. The kitchen floor rotted, too. Vanessa Mooneyham's foot fell through the flimsy wood one day. Danny replaced it with a plywood cork board.
But Wilson said they don't have the money to fix the holes where the rats squeeze through. Only two people in the family have income: Wilson gets $826 a month from disability, and Danny Mooneyham gets $630, after creditors take a cut of his paycheck in the bankruptcy case.
"We have to do the best we can," Wilson said.
Six other current or former tenants of Lackey's parks told the Times Free Press that their homes were damaged. Three said leaking roofs and windows caused black mold to grow. One man said rats chewed through a wire in the wall, temporarily cutting out electricity in parts of the house. His front door doesn't seal, allowing a cold draft inside in the winter.
One woman said the park's maintenance worker told her he fixed a mold problem before she moved in. But her daughter's room started to smell musty, so she pulled a dresser away from the wall. The carpet at the edge was dark and wet. She called an inspector. On the other side of the wall, in the bathroom, the worker poked the Sheetrock. It felt like a sponge.
"It's a joke," said the woman, who requested anonymity out of fear that she would get evicted. "But it's apparently on me."
Sarah Mattoon, a former renter at Stoney Pointe who moved out in 2016, said workers nailed pieces of wood to the floor to cover holes. The wood got soft over time, and her 9-year-old son's right leg fell through. She stopped paying rent, demanding they fix the problem. Nothing changed.
The edges of the roof leaked when it rained, she said. Mold grew in her bathroom and her son's bedroom.
"You could smell it," she said. "When you peeled the wall back, you saw nothing but black mold."
Ashley Bowman, who also moved out of a Ringgold park owned by Lackey in 2016, said sewage backed up in her home because of a problem with the pipes. It seeped out of the toilet and bathtub. One day, while washing dishes, sewage rose from the sink.
She sopped it up with old towels and blankets. Every week, she bought a new mop.
"It was just ridiculous," she said. "I don't see how any landlord can do that to anybody."
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.