SUMMIT COUNTY - In late July, three days before his home at the Peak 8 Trailer Park was demolished, Todd Ghorai sat on the tailgate of his old, rusty Ford Ranger XLT and reminisced. The mobile home park surrounding the 36-year-old was eerily desolate, all of its trailers flattened save for Ghorai's and a few others. The only movement was the occasional flight of a piece of trash on the breeze.

"I actually had the vision years and years ago of me being the last one here," Ghorai said, cracking a smile. "Me and Early sitting on the porch, maybe with a shotgun in my hand."

Early is Ghorai's dog, the part-lab-part-shepherd who was looking at his owner worriedly, as if he knew something was about to change, just not what. Ghorai patted Early on the back and encouraged him to go sniff around the bulldozer parked just a few yards away. Ghorai continued on about his life in a mobile home - about the trailer park stigma, about the cost of lot rent and utilities and about the dream home that surviving here for a decade had allowed him to build in Alma.

"Living here helped me achieve all the things I'm doing now," Ghorai said, "which in the long term is great, but how I did it was really hard."

It's a difficult path that many of those living in Summit trailer parks choose to follow. During the past two months, many residents of the six mobile home parks in the county have described a story similar to Ghorai's: They live in admittedly less-than-ideal housing, trading in a better shelter for a bigger savings account, until one day a dream home hopefully floats within feasibility.

But the demolition of Peak 8 Trailer Park, which until last month stood across from the 7-Eleven north of Breckenridge, has cast a threatening shadow over that aspiration. With land values in Summit continually on the rise, redevelopment has become an ever-more lucrative alternative for the owners of trailer parks in the county.

"Let's be honest, it wasn't much of a trailer park," said Kurt Ave, one of the two men responsible for the demolition of Peak 8 Trailer Park. "Seven of the trailers were willfully decommissioned because they were uninhabitable, so we had only six units that were livable and only four people actually paying rent ... And if we don't get paid and we've got interest on the land, we're effectively losing money."

Ave and his partner, Kirk Mickelsen, plan on erecting two commercial buildings at the front of the lot along Highway 9. Once that phase is complete, they will most likely build townhomes at the back.

"We're trying to make this a nice project," Ave said. "It was kind of an eyesore. It's an important entrance to Breck."

The prospect of pursuing a similar course of action in a different location - at the Cottonwood Court Mobile Home Park in Silverthorne - has crossed the mind of its owner, Alan Siudzinski. Known simply as "Suds" to most in the community, he is a bulky man who looks uncannily like Hulk Hogan, albeit with thinning, gray hair. When he speaks, he does so with the same gruff, unyielding voice as Hollywood Hulk, too.

"This is a business," he says, swiveling in the chair of his third-story office in Frisco. "It's economics. When the value of the property gets to be more than the value that it's operating at now, I'm sure it'll become some other kind of business, whether it's me developing it or selling it. It's capitalism. It's like anything else. Once it makes economic sense, things change."

How soon that might be Siudzinski declined to say, but "I don't think it'll take 20 years," he confessed.

Likewise, Mark Gage, the town of Frisco's community development director, acknowledged that Frisco has considered purchasing the CDOT trailer park on Granite Street and redeveloping it. Although Gage stressed that the talks between CDOT and Frisco have been only "general and conceptual" thus far, the current flurry of construction on Granite Street makes the outcome seem more like a question of when, not if.

"That's pretty dang valuable land beneath these trailer parks," Gage said, "and the owners are realizing that they can capitalize on it by going the land redevelopment route. You worry, whether it's a trailer or some of the smaller cabins we've been losing here in town, they all serve a purpose."

Which is why some owners aren't ready to redevelop just yet. Rob Rosenfeld is co-owner of Kingdom Park Court Mobile Home Park near the Breckenridge Recreation Center. He lives in St. Louis and earns his keep as an investor in trailer parks - not only in the land beneath them, but also in the communities themselves.

"One of the reasons I got into the business of mobile home parks is that all over the country there's this phenomenon of ever-increasing pressure against affordable housing," Rosenfeld said. "It seems to me that if you are an investor in properties that offer affordable housing, you have something that's increasingly needed."

From Rosenfeld's point of view, just because property values are increasing doesn't mean he's losing the value of his land by keeping it as a trailer park. Furthermore, the zoning for trailer parks allows for a far more condensed layout of homes, which in turn brings more rent into the landlord's pocket.

"As far as long-term prospects, I think mobile home parks in areas like (Breckenridge) are going to be increasingly good investments," Rosenfeld said. "We don't expect to see the property converted to any other use. We just think it will be valuable as a mobile home park for a long time."

Glenn Couch, whose company Uniprop owns Swan Meadow Village Manufactured Home Park in Summit Cove, said the residents of his park can expect a similar commitment in the years ahead. The owner of D&D Mobile Home Park in Silverthorne, Dave Schneider, suggested the same. And Lori Cutunilli, owner of Farmer's Korner Mobile Home Park, declared that she didn't have any plans to redevelop in the future, either.

But when asked if Farmer's Korner, which has been in her family since 1977, would definitely still be a mobile home park in 20 years, Cutunilli answered with characteristic uncertainty.

"I think as far as we're concerned, we're committed to keeping it how it is," she said. "We're bringing in new homes. We're planning on upgrading to all natural gas soon ... But the property is valuable. And eventually someone will offer enough money."