Reclaiming Our Homes

This is Latino USA, the Radio Journal of News and Kurturre Latino USC Latin Latino USA. I'm Maria in no Hossa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of Black and Latino Studios United Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of

Today.

What happens when you're moved out of your house for a highway in Los Angeles and then your neighborhood becomes a ghost town. We follow the families who are reclaiming these empty homes. In twenty twenty, as the state of California was issuing a statewide mandate to shelter in place during the COVID pandemic, about a dozen unhoused families began to occupy vacant homes in Elsino. In Northeast Los Angeles. Producer Huiarocha is going to pick up the story from there.

We found this house and we were so excited. We were screaming and like just overjoyed. We had community over that came and played music. We had some harocho, we had trancheas.

That's MARTA's sculero. She's remembering the day she moved into her new house. It's a two bedroom on Sheffield Avenue and in Sereno, a residential neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles. Martha's living room is filled with books and on one of the walls is a banner that reads housing for All.

This is the first room we walked into, and when we walked into obviously it was empty, and now it's filled with furniture and.

And him on my art and my rocks.

That's Messi, Martha's eight year old daughter. Before Martha and her two daughters got to this house, they'd been CouchSurfing for a year and a half because of skyrocketing rents in the city.

It was just really bad for us. I had to live in places that were cramped, even though family and friends tried their best to help us.

Martha struggled to find affordable housing for months, but when the coronavirus pandemic began, finding her own place to live became even more urgent. So on March fourteenth of twenty twenty, Martha, with the help of community organizers, decided to occupy one of the many vacant homes in Elserno.

A few neighbors there were really unsupportive. They would call us squatters.

But Martha doesn't consider herself a squad. She calls herself a reclaimer because this house she's occupying actually belongs to the government. Today, the state owns about one hundred and forty vacant properties in this area alone.

The state is literally hoarding these houses that are empty while people are suffering on the streets. How is this even possible?

To me?

That really became important to expose that and to let other people know, like this is not right and we shouldn't let this happen.

Martha moved into the house on Sheffield Avenue in twenty twenty, but the story of these vacant homes goes back many decades.

In this century, America has become a nation on wils. We ride on wheels to work, to shop, to play, to go about any place we want to go. And therein lies the challenge building highways and roads and streets fast enough to keep up with a knee.

Back in nineteen fifty six, the United States undertook the largest infrastructure project of its time, building a forty one thousand mile system of highways that would unite the entire nation.

These new highways will have a far reaching economic impact on the entire nation. They open up vast new areas for suburban living, and they encourage industry to disperse out of city congestion.

Historically, in Los Angeles and all over the country, freeway construction has had a massive impact on housing. While this web of freeways allowed the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles to grow, entire neighborhoods were demolished in order to construct those roads, and it was usually black and brown communities that paid the price. One of those communities was in

Driving on a freeway in Los Angeles will get you from point A to point B, but if you take the scenic route, you get to see the personality of each neighborhood. The East Side of LA has been a historically immigrant and LATINX area, intersected by almost every major

My first impressions were, this is what a neighborhood looks like. On TV.

That's Michelle Chavis. She was thirteen years old in nineteen eighty six when her family was looking to move into a bigger home. Michelle's mom was a file clerk and her dad was a construction worker. At the time, Michelle, her parents, and her younger brother Jamie were all living in a one bedroom apartment in rose Hill, a residential area just a few miles northwest of Et Serno.

A pretty bad neighborhood and originally grew up in. You stayed in your house and made sure your doors were locked because it was not safe.

A single family home had never been an option until Michelle's mom heard about an affordable rent program in the neighborhood of Essida. It was run by the California Department of Transportation, better known as Caltrans. Back in the sixties, Caltrans purchased hundreds of homes in En Serno, Alhambra, and Pasadena in order to demolish them and construct the seven ten Freeway. The freeway began at the port of Long Beach, one of the nation's busiest sites of international trade, and

No bars on the window. That's the first thing I think my brother and I noticed, just walking through and seeing grass. There were people sitting on their porches. Nobody sat on their porches where I grew up.

After the tour, Michelle's parents picked out the house they liked best, a two bedroom on Sheffield Avenue.

Moving to the Sheffield House was actually like an amazing dream because I was getting my own room. We had a living room, we had a separate dining room, and then we had a fenced yard. It was like we hit the jackpot.

Michelle remembers walking through the house with her brother the day her family moved in. She recalls how a little narrow area by the kitchen caught their attention.

We were like, oh my gosh, what is this for?

You know?

My dad was like, it's for a washer and dryer, and we're like, oh my god, does that mean we don't have to go to the laundromat anymore. I think that was my brother and my dream.

But soon their honeymoon phase came to an end.

What we started noticing is when bigger things would break, something with the electricity, something with the water. My parents weren't getting the response you're supposed to get when you're in a rental, and the sentiment was echoed through many houses. They're like, Oh, don't even bother calling because they'll either take a month to fix it, or they won't get fixed at all, or they're going to tell you they lost your report.

As the months went on, the family noticed there was no ventilation in the kitchen. There was a leak in the plumbing, the garage door didn't open, the phone jacks broke. Michelle says, they tried to file a report.

Each time they're like, oh, well, you have to call this number, call that number, leave a message, and that would go on for like a couple of weeks.

Michelle was only a teenager back then, but it was becoming clear that something was wrong.

I mean, bottom line, Caltrans they were slim lords. They did not know how to be landlords. There were business people working in a government office.

Then one day, when Michelle was in high school in the early nineties, she went to debate club and the topic was Caltrans versus the neighborhood in the battle to build the seven to ten freeway. It was that day that she understood why her landlords were a transportation agency.

I started learning in school about the Caltrans' homes and about the seven to ten extension freeway debate and the fight between the neighborhood, and I'm like, wait, that's my neighborhood. I didn't know that.

The two sides went something like this. Caltrans wanted to finish the freeway because the residential areas along the seven ten were booming and traffic was worse than evers of Etceerino South Pasadena and Pasadena didn't want a highway running through their neighborhood. For the debate, Michelle took the side of those against the extension and argued that destroying people's homes was too high a price for improving the flow

I brought that home to my mom, and she wasn't familiar that we would be evicted maybe soon for this freeway extension.

You know.

It was kind of eye opening to even some of the neighbors are like no, like this isn't going to happen.

In her neighborhood of mostly low income Mexican American and immigrant families, Michelle realized that many of her neighbors didn't know that Caltrans was still planning to move forward with the freeway project.

Sadly, a lot of older people that lived in the neighborhood. It was parents who were not highly educated and couldn't read, so their kids were the ones reading things.

Because Michelle's mom couldn't read very well, she didn't know that the housing contract she signed gave Caltrand's the legal power to evict the family if the seven to ten extension was approved. Michelle wondered if there was a way to ensure that they would be able to stay in their home.

So I wrote the assembly member at the time, and he wrote me back and he informed me of some marches and he thanked me too for volunteering my time to fight against this freeway extension. The first rally we went to it was in South Pasadena. We started marching down the streets and people started joining with just signs that had like the seven to ten and the line across it. It was very empowering.

Looking around the rally, Michelle was surprised to see that she and her friends were some of the only Latinos and also some of the only cal Trans tenants.

There was a lot of Caucasian people from the more pricier houses up in South Pass because the homeowners around there didn't want a freeway, you know, for them, it's going to bring down their housing prices.

Michelle was beginning to understand One of the biggest reasons as Sereno hadn't been bulldozed was because the residents in South Pasadena and Pasadena knew that if construction went through as Serino, their communities would be next. And even though as Serno would be the most impacted by the extension, it was the interests of wealthier homeowners that carried the most weight and that really left a mark on Michelle.

I feel it helped me in really deciding what I wanted to major in in college, because I wanted to help people like my parents, like my neighbors. And I do believe that Caltrans know that the people that they ran into in the eighties nineties, they were low income families who were looking for a better life for their kids, and they took advantage of that.

Coming up on Latino USA, El Serno's battle with Caltrans continued, stay with us, not hey, We're back, And before the break, we were listening to the story of Michelle Chavez. Her family was renting a house from the California Department of Transportation. Since she was a teenager, Michelle had been advocating for her family, protesting the construction of a freeway that threatened to demolish her entire street. But this was only the beginning of her family's fight to stay in their home.

After seeing the disparities her community faced, Michelle left ear said I Know in nineteen ninety one to study political science. She went on to work in local guy and in two thousand and seven she moved to Washington State, where she lives today. Although she no longer lived in Los Angeles, Michelle never stopped helping her mom fill out the cal Trans paperwork. Then, in twenty twelve, Michelle got a desperate call.

She would send in the affordable rent application and then they would say, we're missing some information. It was denied. Your rent's going up. And then my mom would send in again and then they're like, well, we never received your paperwork.

Michelle's family wasn't alone in struggling with the bureaucracy of the application. In twenty thirteen, a collective calling itself United cal Trans Tenants came together to help residents navigate the agency's dysfunctional housing program. One of the lead organizers Iroerto Flores. He runs a community center in Esserno called East Cafe, and despite its name, it's not a hip coffee shop, it's actually a Sapatista inspired cultural center, an activist hub.

We set up the east Side Cafe maybe eighteen years ago. Is a space that developed out of the inspiration from the Sapatistas to create sustainable structures so that the communities can be much more involved in constructing their own future.

Roberto himself was a Caltrans tenant who had been forced out by the rent increases. He and other organizers were holding workshops at the east Side Cafe to help their neighbors with the affordable rent applications. Roberto told me that just a few months before Michelle's mom started receiving these notices, Caltrans was being audited for possible mismanagement of public money after a tenant noticed an invoice for a roof repair

There was obvious corruption going on in the Caltrans' maintenance structure.

On top of that, they hadn't verified the income of the tenants on the affordable rent program in years, but Caltrans put the burden of the lost revenue on the tenants by making residents continually reapply for the affordable rent program. If their application was denied, Caltrans would increase their rent.

They made things so complicated that their own agents didn't know how to fill out these forums or help people out, and so there were years of delays where people were forced to pay market rents when they should be paying affordable and market rents that were going up at ten percent every six months. All these things piled up and led to people leaving an evictions.

It was clear to Roberto that Caltrans was trying to force people out, but the question was what incentive did Caltrans have to vacate the properties. When I asked him, he told me that Caltrans never wanted to be landlords, and their end goal was to demolish the houses.

They were going to prepare the corridor for a freeway, so they preferred to deal with empty houses than with tenants that were increasingly demanding rights.

Years passed and more and more Caltrans tenants began to leave their homes because of the rent hikes. At this point, Caltrans was still fighting to build the extension. Then, in November of twenty eighteen, after a sixty year legal battle, the state of California finally ruled the car couldn't build the freeway.

It was a major milestone today in the now defunct plan to extend the seven to ten freeway. Cowtrans just sold the first of hundreds of homes that were purchased decades ago in preparation for the project, which is now never going to see the light of day.

Now the Coltrans wasn't going to build the freeway, the agency said they would begin to sell the homes.

They still made empty promises. They started making it seem like, in the next two years, all these houses will be sol and you residents who've been living in them for more than two years, you get first DIBs.

The promise that Michelle's family and many others in INCIDENTA were given was actually more than a promise. Back in nineteen seventy nine, the California legislature passed a bill known as the ROBERTI Law. It found that highway construction contributed to a shortage of affordable housing, so when a state agency like Caltrans no longer planned to use the homes for construction, it legally had to offer the property to

My mom's like, Wow, I'm a little nervous, you know, I hoping I'll be able to purchase this house because we've never been a homeowner.

The problem was that in order to one day buy your house, you had to stay in your house. But residents were being forced out by rent hikes and complicated applications, and even tenants who could pay their rent weren't receiving sale offers from the agency.

There are one hundred and three vacant homes in Elserino, Pasadena and South Pasadena, as the need for affordable housing in La is on the rise, ACCOUNTRANS representative said homes have remained vacant partly because the cost to maintain and rent them would have cost more than the revenue collected.

When tenants moved out or passed away. The houses were boarded up. Today, there are dozens of homes on Sheffield Avenue with signs that read warning state property trespassing, loitering forbidden by law.

When I would go home every year, I mean, you could go down my mom's block and maybe ten properties on her block alone are vacant. This is just one piece of Sheffield.

Michelle's childhood neighborhood was becoming a ghost town.

I didn't realize what my parents went through until I started fighting for them. Until my dad was just getting too sick, and he's like I'm done, you know, I just I can't, and my mom was busy taking care of him.

Michelle's dad had been having health complications for years, and then in twenty eighteen, he passed away. At a moment when Michelle's mom was grieving the loss of her husband, she also started receiving notices that she had to once again reapply for the Affordable rent program. Michelle's mom went to one of the United Caltrans Tendants workshops at the east Side Cafe, where she met Roberto.

I remember miss Montoya coming in after her husband had passed and asking us for help.

Proerto helped Michelle's mom properly fill out the application, but the same scenario played out.

He sent it in and they said they didn't get it, sent it in again, said they never received it. Months later, they said that my mom's rent was being raised again and if she wanted to try and get affordable rent, that she had to fill out an application.

After decades of fighting to stay in their home, Michelle started to convince her mom to move out and live with her brother Jamie.

We started telling her, I don't think it's safe for you to stay in this house the way they're treating you, the way they're always losing the paperwork for the affordable rent, and my mom it was very difficult for her because she feels my dad's spirit in that home. She started crying because she's like, you know, he's not going to leave this house, and we're like, mom, he's going to be wherever you are.

Finally, Michelle's mom agreed, and Michelle went back to her childhood home to help her mother move out.

So my mom sat in the empty living room and she started crying, and then we all started crying, you know. And my brother he's a jokester, and he's like, look mom, and he opened a fresh apple pie, and my dad loved fresh apple pie, and he's like, okay, Fred, in order for you to have a piece of this apple pie, you got to come with us.

You know. We were just all cried and hugged her.

After thirty four years on Sheffield Avenue, Michelle's mom left the Caltrans house, giving up her dream of one day owning a home.

You know.

It just went through the house one last time and we took one last picture on the porch. My mom used to be a feisty little lady back in her day. She's like, fuck you, Caltrans, you know, and like flip the camera.

In February of twenty twenty, the house that Michelle grew up in was left vacant. When I reached out to Caltrans for comment about the staggering vacancies in Encerino, they put me in touch with Eric Menhivad. He's a public information officer at the agency. I asked him what Caltrans plans to do with the houses they own.

We are very aware that there is a housing crisis throughout California. Our goal is to sell these homes and provide a pathway for first time homeowner shit for our tenants and the affordable Sales program will very much play a large role in meeting.

The school Menhiwad gave me cal Trans's official statement that they intend to sell the homes to the families that have been living in them. Throughout our interview, I struggle to reconcile the agency's official statements with their actions which have driven out hundreds of tenants, making them ineligible to purchase their homes. And then at the end of our interview, Eric.

Told me this, Ultimately, when these homes are ready to be sold, Caltrans is obligated to make lender required repairs once selling a property to a current tenant who participates in the Affordable Sales program. So if that home needs a new roof and the lender requires us to repair it, well, we will do it.

I was beginning to understand that in order for Caltrans to sell the homes, the agency would have to reckon with their decades long neglect. So instead of paying for costly repairs, is holding onto the properties even if they're falling apart. With the vacancy rate rising in the neighborhood, tenants wanted to find a way to hold Caltrans accountable and force them to do something about all these empty homes. One of those tenants was Angela Flores. She's the daughter

Me and my dad thought we got to do something about this. We got to shake them up a little, like, what do we got to do?

How do we got to protest them?

To Angela, it was shocking that you could walk a few minutes from a street of empty homes onto Huntington Drive at Satano's main street, where dozens of unhoused people were sleeping in tents they pitched on the meridian. Angela wanted to do something to get Caltrans's attention and force them to negotiate.

We went ahead and started thinking more and more about the possibility of occupying a few houses.

Then, in November of twenty nineteen, Moms for Housing, a group of unhoused mothers from the Bay Area, made national headlines and caught Angela's attention.

And men called Moms for Housing are reclaiming vacant homes so that homeless women can live in them. The group wants to take back properties owned by investors that are vacant in neighborhoods where the mothers grew up but can't afford to live there.

By occupying vacant homes, Moms for Housing was pointing out that the housing crisis is not actually about a shortage of homes.

We have a crisis.

Come on, it is an epidemic.

People are dying housing is.

They According to twenty seventeen census data, there are approximate one hundred thousand vacant homes in the city of Los Angeles. That's nearly twice the number needed to house the estimated sixty thousand people that are homeless in the city. Part of the problem is real estate speculation. As cities begin to gentrify, developers buy up properties and keep them vacant

I was in my bedroom and I was looking on Facebook, and then I saw the article on the Moms for Housing in San Francisco, and immediately I thought, this is it.

Feeling inspired by the movement, Angela shared the Moms for Housing ste on her Facebook page.

I said, I've had it with all of this. Who's down to do something like this? And I didn't hear from anyone except Martha.

That Martha is Marta Escudo, who we heard from at the beginning of the story. At that moment, Martha and her two daughters didn't have a stable place to live.

When I first heard about Moms for Housing, we were at a friend's house. We were sleeping on the floor. We were living off of our bags pretty much.

Martha lived in the East Side neighborhood of Boyle Heights until twenty sixteen. She's the primary caretaker of her two daughters, and I was working as a case manager at a maternal and child wellness clinic at the time. One of the things she remembers most about her job was a feeling of helplessness as she saw the way that not having housing impacted the mental and physical health of mothers who came into the clinic.

These women were suffering a lot, and I couldn't help them, and it was like causing me burnout. I couldn't even sleep at night sometimes knowing that these women and their kids were on the streets or in the cars or in shelters.

Exhausted from her job, Martha needed a change of pace. She had always dreamed of showing her daughters a different way of life, away from the stress of the city. So even though Martha was born and raised in la she made a big decision and left the US.

We always wanted to get out of the US for a little bit and sure our daughters what it was to live somewhere else, And we have friends in Chile, so we figured that'd be the best place.

But when Martha came back to the US just two years later, she says rents and boil heights had tripled.

Coming back was actually really traumatizing. We couldn't find affordable housing, we couldn't find jobs.

In just two years, Martha found herself facing those same struggles that she saw countless mothers at the clinic and do, and as a mom, housing was more than just a roof over Martha's head. It was about the health and education of her daughters too.

It was really obstructing my daughter's learning. I'm a homeschooling mom. It's just not adequate with having children. They really do need their own space.

After eighteen months of living out of a suitcase and going from sofa to sofa at her friend's apartments, Marta was ready to take matters into her own hands.

When I saw a mom for housing and I was like, Wow, these women are badass, their moms, they have kids, and then they took over these homes like they're really fearless, and I was like, oh, you know, if they could

Martha was immediately on board, but Angela says when she encouraged her neighbors, and they said eno to take up the strategy. They were reluctant other tenants, they weren't saying much, and the kind of feedback that we got was like, well, I'm not sure because I don't want to get arrested or I don't have my papers. The stakes were high.

In a pre dawn rate, heavily armed sheriff Stampanese moved in on the vacant home where women and children had been living illegally. Four people were arrested after a fifty day standoff.

I'm trying to live.

I'm trying to get my kids.

Are you sentimated?

Marta knew that what she was planning to do was illegal, but it was a risk she was willing to take.

I had a lot of fears, Okay, what if my daughters get taken away from me? But also I want them to be healthy and have their own homes. So I needed to take that risk, knowing that I couldn't do it alone, and That's why it was really important for me to establish who am I going to connect with to help me.

To support people like Martha on the front lines. A coalition was forming, and with the help of two advocacy organizations, more and more people were joining the movement. By February of twenty twenty, they were having almost daily meetings at the East Side Cafe.

They were letting us know the history of these houses and how Caltrans has neglected them and abandoned them. And to me, it was so mind blowing because I know there's a housing crisis.

Marta and the other people who wanted to occupy these houses declared themselves the reclaimers. Some reclaimers were former Caltrans tendants who had been living on the street after they'd been evicted. Others were mothers like Martha who were urgently looking to provide housing for their families. They were getting ready to occupy the houses in March, and then COVID nineteen hit.

We had already planned to do the take on Friday, March thirteenth, but then COVID came and people were like, should we still do it? Is it dangerous to do it? Around this time, a lot of us were like, no, this is even more urgent. We need to do it now because we wanted to keep our family safe.

Although Marta had known the other reclaimers for less than a couple months, she had to trust that they had her back, that they had her daughter's back. On March thirteenth, Martha was getting ready to put the strategy in motion. For the first time. She and another reclaimer were able to open the door to an empty house on Berkshire Avenue, but only a few hours after they got into the house, they heard someone at the door.

Cal Chance still had the keys and they were able to unlock it, and Caltrans with the police, were able to walk in then pull us out, and we just went voluntarily like there wasn't any resistance. And then the girls were crying and shaky, and they thought that I was going to get in trouble.

In that terrifying moment, the other reclaimers immediately came to comfort the girls. The coalition had organized a team of legal observers who were able to document the actions of law enforcement and de escalate the situation. In the end, the officer chose not to arrest Martha.

That's when I was like, oh cool, Like I can trust these people, you know, I can do this again.

After getting kicked out by the police, Martha immediately went back to the Eastside Cafe and they began to plan how they could occupy another house.

We you know, talked about what had gone on that night, and then we just really were urgent to find another home. We were running out of options.

But there was still one option left because Angela and Roberto had a backup plan.

My dad had said, if in the case it doesn't go down and worse comes to worse, we have a key to one of the houses.

That key was the key to Michelle's old house on Sheffield Avenue. The house had been left vacant since February when Michelle's mom moved out.

I said, hey, Martha, I have the key to this house. Should we do it? She said, yes, let's do it.

Let's do it.

On March fourteenth, just as the sun was beginning to rise, Martha and Angela were standing outside the house on Sheffield Avenue and.

I didn't even know if the key was going to work or not, you know, like or if we were going to get in.

I remember we were both really nervous.

I got out the key and I was like, oh my god, like, I mean, all you have to do is twist and off, but like we were shaking.

So we were like, okay, we could do this, like take a deep breath.

So Martha was like, it's all right, calm down. She was the one calming me down. I opened the first door, and then we opened the wooden door, and once we were in, it was a big like, it was a big relief.

And then my daughters came in and I was really tired and happy and overwhelmed and just like so many mixed feelings just being able to be inside the house.

And right away the girls were like, I love this room. Oh it's beautiful. It's so beautiful. I'll never forget that.

I just remember looking out the window and just saying, I'm gonna stay here and see what happened.

The reclaimers were all over the news.

Publicly owned houses that have been vacant for years are now becoming sheltered to the unhoused in El Serno, where they're reclaiming our homes.

Movement is in full effect.

Eventually, Michelle saw the news too.

I saw the pictures of the little girls like at the window, and I'm like that was me. That was like thirteen year old me. That's why I think it was bittersweet. I'm happy for them, you know, I'm sad that my mom's doesn't have her own place. I'm sad that my dad is gone. You know, it's just all these little emotions. But you know, it's time to move on. It was safer for my mom to move on.

It may no longer be Michelle's home, but she's happy that her old house can be a home to someone else.

Our thanks to producer Jujia Rocha for bringing us that story in Since the story ran, Martha and twelve other reclaimers are living in the once vacant Caltrans homes. Through their civil disobedience, they were able to negotiate temporary housing with Caltrans and the City of Los Angeles. For now, the reclaimers are allowed to legally remain in their homes for at least two years under a transitional housing program, but their fight continues as they push for a more

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