An unseen dog yaps after hearing a stranger's footsteps crushing the dead leaves that coat Cornflower Lane's cracked pavement. At 6:30 on a Monday night, these, along with the whoosh of cars skating by on North Atherton Street, are the only sounds to be heard in a trailer park named "Enterprise."

The windows of the compact homes that line this quiet street emit a soft orange glow, some muted by frilly beige curtains, others obstructed by the tendrils of the potted plants hanging on either side. Wilting sunflowers lean, bowing their tired heads toward a darkened windowpane.

They are so big you would think they were fake -- if they weren't dying.

Most of the homes on this strip are unoccupied. Planks of plywood, flattened metal scraps and strewn vinyl siding lie in heaps between several of the vacant trailers, serving not only as relics of dwellers long gone, but also as portent of events to come.

The commercialism seeping out of the strip malls and fast food joints clustered on all sides of Atherton Street will soon conquer this place, too.

In mid-September, residents of the Enterprise trailer park received notice that they have three months to find another place to reside. The property they live on has been acquired and will be developed by six investors who form a development group called Park Forest Centre, LLC. Dan Hawbaker, president of Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc., a heavy construction company with a workforce of more than 800 central Pennsylvanians, is the group's primary negotiator.

By fall 2005, the living rooms and miniature gardens of the North Atherton lot will be displaced by a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts franchise, a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bank.

The investors who plan on building on the park's grounds are attempting to relieve the financial burden the relocation will place on residents by working with local philanthropic agencies, including the State College Area Interfaith Mission. They have also not charged residents for rent since acquiring the property in mid-September.

But the troubles don't necessarily end there.

The people who once called this place home now face a new challenge -- finding a new place to live. The problem is, most of the park's residents have very little money, or they're on welfare. Some of them don't hold jobs.

Officials, who are still in the preliminary stages of the construction, have been mum on physical details of the project.

"Our priority is truly on successfully relocating the people who will be displaced," Hawbaker said. "Right now we're focusing on the human aspect of the project."

Facing a stark reality

A few residents stand in the middle of the park and talk about their plans to move. A solid man in a Marlboro Reds sweatshirt joins the group briefly to interject an angry word into the conversation. His name is William Knepp and he lives in a trailer with his mother on the north end of the park.

The search for housing since the September announcement has been a tough one for the 39-year-old.

"It took me a month and a half to find a home to put my mother in. That's just not right," he says. "If Hawbaker's so worried about stores and stuff, and if they want to build State College up, they should worry about the places that are vacant already, not putting people out on the street."

Knepp paints houses and hangs drywall for a living. His family has lived in the area since he was 9 years old.

A Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise already sits a little more than two miles down the road from where the new fast food restaurant is slated to stand.

Knepp also points out the abandoned Ames department store south of the park, and the large empty building that occupies the neighboring lot. What comes next is a thought echoed by many of the others who live here.

"What's wrong with those properties?" he asks.

Hawbaker defends the development group's choice by pointing out that the property had been up for sale for a long time. The previous owner had stopped re-leasing his trailers months before in an attempt to ready the property for sale.

"It's really no longer zoned for the purpose it's being used for, and it's in an area where the traffic exposure is correct," he said.

The condition of the park, its commercial zoning and the owner's desire to sell made the eventual development of the site inevitable in Hawbaker's mind.

Searching for answers

The non-profit Interfaith Mission uses state funding and contributions from 28 local church congregations and several independent donors to assist State College residents in hardship.

Mission director Matt Hall said half of the park residents have already received aid from the agency.

The mission is responsible for helping all county residents who need financial help in meeting their housing needs. Hall estimates an additional $13,000 will be needed to help the park residents alone.

For his part, Hawbaker has contributed an undisclosed sum of money to the non-profit agency, Hall said. The Centre County Commissioner's office also recently approved an extra $10,000 grant to the agency, not all of which can be spent on the relocation of the trailer park residents.

Despite this, there are rumors circulating that some of the residents are planning on waiting until the last minute to move out in hopes that Hawbaker and the other investors will issue them payoffs.

Such actions, Hall cautions, could be costly.

"For those residents who feel that the developers are bluffing, they are not. They will be evicted," Hall said. "The process is in place to handle [residents who refuse to leave]. They don't want to go that route, but they will if they have to."

One of Hall's main concerns is the need for income-based housing in the area, so that people like the Enterprise trailer park residents can afford housing, even if their income level drops unexpectedly.

"Basically, there is some lower income housing in State College, but the type that is needed is where the rent is based on what the client makes, what the income of the household is," Hall said. "The actual name for these properties are housing projects, but that name concerns people. People have to understand that these are clean, maintained properties."

Community interest in income-based housing has grown, largely due to the attention the displaced trailer park residents have generated.

"People should not have to choose to live in unsafe housing because that's all they can afford," Hall said. "I'm hopeful that something can be done."

Barb Simcisko serves as the Centre County housing case manager at Housing Transitions, 217 E. Nittany Ave. She has provided many of the residents with referrals for housing that they can afford in State College and the surrounding area.

The process hasn't been an easy one for Simcisko, with the residents' "very low" income status being an obstacle. However, the agency has the resources to eventually provide most of the displaced residents with viable options.

"State College has a lot of affordable housing, but we don't have very, very low income housing," she said.

Other residents have very limited options as to where to move because of their limited access to transportation. For others with disabilities, it takes a lot of coordination to arrange for help with the physically strenuous tasks of moving.

"It's been a huge amount of work in a very short period of time," Simcisko said.

Most of the residents the agency has helped to relocate have been unhappy about having to move. Once in their new homes, however, they seem positive about the change.

"Many of them, their living standards have improved," Simcisko said. "A lot of the trailers had one family name, with four or five trailers under that name, with 15 people living in them. It was almost like a small project, where the people all kind of knew each other."

To further aid the displaced residents, Hall sits down and makes budgets with those who come to his office to be sure they are able to afford rent on their new apartments. Of those that have come to visit Hall, all of them have sufficient income to be able to afford the rent on their new apartments.

"As long as they are careful and don't do silly things with their budget as we all do, they should be OK," Hall said.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Knepp again joined a discussion on Cornflower Lane, his mood having taken a turn from the better.

"The Interfaith Mission is helping everyone who goes there, no matter whether they fall below the welfare limit or not," he says.

He has just come from Hall's office, walking away with a better understanding of the process residents can go through to get help with the transition. He takes a moment out of his lunch break to pass on this information to others, and to yell at a neighbor for trespassing on his fiancée's yard.

"My future wife lives there," he yells, partly joking -- but mostly serious.

A community reaches out

Cheryl Dawson, pastor of Healing Springs Community Church, 586 Rock Road, and members of the Calvary Baptist Church, 1250 University Drive, walked up and down the housing block Monday night, distributing donated groceries to some of the remaining park residents. Dawson has been doing community outreach work in the area for 15 years.

Some residents had contacted her to let her know that the forced relocation had put them in a time of particular need. Many of the park residents, she said, had been experiencing confusion and distress as a result of losing their homes.

"The last woman we visited -- she was so thankful for the food, but she was almost afraid to let us come in," Dawson said. "She seemed unsure of what to do or where to go."

Her work in the region has made her aware of a need that extends far beyond the residents of this trailer park alone.

On a visit to a park on the other side of North Atherton Street, Dawson noticed something odd when a little girl who normally rushes outside to greet her did not come out. She knocked on the door and found the girl's mother unresponsive.

"She was dealing with such a deep depression," Dawson said.

Dawson went into the house to try to locate the girl. She found her in a bedroom that had absolutely no furniture.

"She was asleep on dirty clothes that the cats had been using as a litter box," Dawson said, her light eyes heavy with sadness. "There is so much going on here that is deeper than we even know."

Dawson and her parish take their van out on missions like this every week. Every Tuesday they bus about 85 children from this and other parks in the area to participate in a children's program.

"It gets them out of this environment," she said, gesturing at the run down homes around her. "They can play games and just be kids for the night."

Coping together

On an icy Wednesday afternoon, a few of the park's remaining occupants are busy helping a friend load up a U-Haul.

Eric Snyder, a twenty-something-year-old with fair hair and a friendly smile, shivers intermittently in his short-sleeved shirt.

Snyder doesn't live here, but is close to many of the residents. He has spent the last month helping friend after friend vacate the premises. A good number of the residents don't have driver's licenses, so Snyder drives them and their belongings to their new homes.

He also recently took in a dog for a friend who was moving to an apartment where pets aren't allowed.

"I bring the dog down to visit him now, but he pretty much lost his best friend," Snyder says. "A lot of the people here had to give up their animals."

Larry Chronister moved out of the park and into a Park Forest Apartment a few weeks ago. He says he and many other tenants have already dismantled their own trailers for removal. That would explain the numerous empty lots and heaps of ruins wedged between the intact homes.

Chronister, 22, signed a new lease with the help of a security deposit and a single month's rent from the Interfaith Mission. Thin and dark-haired, Chronister gets by all right on supplemental security income, but he's worried about how his friends and neighbors will fare after the move.

His cobalt blue eyes shift under the brim of his black Chevy Racing hat. He points at a friend's trailer a few hundred feet up the road.

"She only gets $205 income coming in," he says. "She's not going to be able to afford rent somewhere else. Her husband's in jail. He works, but he's not going to be getting out for a while."

Finding hope

Many of the residents have expressed fear that all area trailer parks will soon undergo the same eviction process. Their sense of stability and permanence has diminished.

However, Hall maintains that the eviction was inevitable.

Many of the homes in the park were unsuitable for families. And for most, the move will mean a better quality of life, with better homes and nicer surroundings.

"This has been an opportunity to get them to more suitable housing," Hall said.

Between the development company's monetary contributions, and the funding and hard work provided by the Interfaith Mission and other local organizations, the trailer park residents have access to all the resources they need to safely make the transition to more suitable housing, Hawbaker said.

For the neighbors who will be separated by the move, for the residents who took turns cooking dinner for each other every night, and for the people who took pride in their homes and invested thousands of dollars in trailers they will lose, this knowledge provides little consolation.

"Whatever they put into their homes, more or less they're out of it," said Rex Baney, a resident of the trailer park on nearby Circleville Road. He just finished paying off his trailer, and now he fears he'll soon receive a notice to move out as well.

As for the friends whose homes will be replaced by the new businesses, Baney hopes their transitions are smooth ones.

"Maybe they'll move to a better place," he said.

Hall is optimistic that despite the temporary hardship the displaced residents would experience, the end effect would be positive.

"It's a business decision but the effect for the community and many of the residents there will be that they'll have better places to live," he said.