It’s a quiet Friday afternoon in El Sereno, a working-class suburb in Northeast Los Angeles, as Martha Escudero sits over a laptop to play games with her two young daughters. This is the home they’ve known for the last two years, with a holiday wreath now on the front door and a cat named Simba wandering the carpet. But their time here may soon come to an end.
In March 2020, Escudero was one of more than a dozen homeless or housing-insecure families who took over 11 vacant, state-owned houses in this neighborhood of charming, single-family bungalows. It was the early pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an activist group called Reclaiming Our Homes — or the Reclaimers — took possession of the properties, arguing it was immoral for them to sit empty during a public health emergency and the exploding housing crisis.
“I’m going to fight my hardest just to [stay] in this house. I don’t see any other option in the city.”~ Martha Escudero, Reclaimer
After months of tension and support within the community, a transitional program managed by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) was created, allowing Reclaimers to remain in neighborhood homes for two years. Escudero and her girls — Meztli, 10, and Victoria, 13 — were among the first families to move into houses prepared for the program, but her contract expired on Oct. 25. She received a three-day eviction notice soon after.
Escudero, like other Reclaimers facing eviction, wants to stay. “We like this house. We’ve established it, and we have a community here. It has changed our life on a lot of different levels,” said Escudero, 44, sitting at her dining room table. “I’m going to fight my hardest just to [stay] in this house. I don’t see any other option in the city.”
She is originally from Los Angeles but relocated to Chile for a few years. Upon her return, Escudero found rents skyrocketing and unaffordable. Now only sporadically employed, she spent the next year couch surfing in Boyle Heights and elsewhere with her children until she took a house as part of the first Reclaimers action.
The Reclaimers movement was inspired by Moms 4 Housing, a group of working mothers who took over a vacant house in West Oakland in 2019. In El Sereno, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) had bought up hundreds of houses, apartment buildings and empty lots through aggressive eminent domain since the 1960s for the now-canceledexpansion of state Route 710/Interstate 710. The sheer number of empty homes owned by the negligent state agency provided the Reclaimers an opportunity to make a statement about housing and poverty. The group quickly became a public symbol of frustration and need at a time of ongoing crisis for affordable housing in Los Angeles.
“I’m not looking for a free ride,” insisted Escudero, a former social worker who earned a degree in gender and ethnic studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. “Everyone should be able to find equitable rent in a neighborhood they feel safe in, and that should be a right for everybody,” she said. “That’s not the case here in California. It seems like everything is unaffordable, and even people with dual income can’t afford to live here.”
Soon after the Reclaimers seized the homes, state and local leaders ordered law enforcement to stand down, given the coronavirus crisis that required Californians to shelter in place. In the fall of 2020, eight of the families signed leases that allowed them to stay in the houses through the transitional housing program operated by HACLA. Reclaimers were asked to pay a small monthly fee (no more than $200) and were given free rent, utilities and internet, plus job placement and housing assistance, according to HACLA.
The agreements have begun to expire, and at least four Reclaimer households have received eviction notices, as Caltrans begins the process of transferring control of the houses to housing organizations that are bidding on the properties. Among those vying to take over the properties are HACLA and the El Sereno Community Land Trust, which is aligned with the Reclaimers.
“Caltrans is a slumlord.”~ Roberto Flores, member of United Caltrans Tenants
The Reclaimers situation is just one of the challenges El Sereno faces. The community was in limbo for decades as a result of Caltrans’ plans and inaction, with years of court battles and environmental impact reports delaying the proposed freeway expansion. Along the way, the agency inadvertently became a landlord, renting out many of the 264 properties there while awaiting the go-ahead to bulldoze the neighborhood.
Caltrans repeatedly showed itself unsuited for the role of landlord. While leasing many units to longtime residents, it allowed other houses to deteriorate. Multiple homes were boarded up for years. At least one sits with irreparable fire damage, according to Reclaimers. Other properties are just empty lots.
“Caltrans is a slumlord,” said community activist Roberto Flores, a member of United Caltrans Tenants and an active supporter of the Reclaiming Our Homes actions. In a statement, Caltrans spokesperson Lauren Wonder defended the agency’s work with the community. “To better address tenants’ concerns, Caltrans established a hotline and dedicated an email inbox for tenants to report maintenance concerns. Caltrans also works with tenants who need additional time to pay delinquent rent.” It’s through the state’s longstanding Roberti Act that Caltrans is now providing many of the homes as a path to low and middle-income home-ownership, she added. “Caltrans recently offered 37 properties and vacant lots in El Sereno to approved housing-related entities for use as affordable housing.”
The canceling of the freeway project, which would have stretched between Pasadena and Alhambra, now has residents grappling with community rebirth. Meanwhile, an unintentional side effect of El Sereno’s limbo period was that these quiet streets were preserved as a pocket of housing for working-class Angelenos, safe from speculators and house flippers. As long as the streets remained within the 4.5-mile corridor of the proposed right-of-way project, gentrification and redevelopment were not a threat.
So in 2022, unlike many other L.A. neighborhoods established in the first half of the last century, this part of El Sereno still has no McMansions, and no Mercedes-Benzes parked in driveways. Most of the small houses in the neighborhood are currently valued around $800,000.
The Reclaimers units represent only a fraction of the properties Caltrans is auctioning off. Priority is being given to longtime community residents who have waited years for a chance to purchase the homes as affordable housing. For state Sen. María Elena Durazo, who has lived in El Sereno for more than 30 years, keeping the area free from gentrification is a central concern. The Democrat sponsored Senate Bill 51 to help guide that process.
Without the legislation, signed into law last year by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the properties would already have been auctioned off to the highest bidders, she said.
“There was a lot of distrust in Caltrans,” Durazo said. “People were very upset about how the maintenance was not kept up. So all of this is what we inherited — a lot of distrust, the breakup of the community. Where were they all going to end up? But I saw a real enormous opportunity, and so does the community.”
The controversy now regarding the Reclaimers is about the homes they were contracted to leave after two years. Flores argued that they should be allowed to remain on the properties as the process plays out. But others said a waiting list for the same housing already exists. “The Caltrans properties represent a great opportunity to bring more to the neighborhood, but there’s a long line of people sitting there waiting for these resources,” said Steven Veres, district director for Durazo’s office.
“With the Land Trust, if they get awarded properties from the state, it’s because they had a good application with a good program,” he said, adding that the coming availability of Caltrans-owned houses is a positive development for the community and one to be celebrated. “We want to increase the affordability and the opportunities in this corridor because that’s what it deserves. It’s 50 years of fighting a freeway and the hope is to have a new future here.”
That process has begun, and the first announcements of which organizations will manage the properties are expected within weeks. Flores insisted the houses should rightly be controlled by the Land Trust and criticizes HACLA as a bureaucracy distant from the needs of people.
“We have to think this through long term, not just, ‘OK, I’ll take over this house, and it’s mine now for the rest of my life.’ You just can’t do that. We have to have some rules.”~ Sen. María Elena Durazo
“When the people take responsibility for a solution like this, bureaucrats have to stand back and allow that to happen,” Flores said. “That’s a higher form of democracy. Bureaucracy is not democracy.”
Durazo said the Reclaimers should not expect to be prioritized over others who have been waiting for an opportunity to move into these houses simply because they seized the properties. The Reclaimers “created a very unfair situation, not just for themselves, but for everybody all around,” Durazo said. “We have to think this through long term, not just, ‘OK, I’ll take over this house, and it’s mine now for the rest of my life.’ You just can’t do that. We have to have some rules.”
Flores warned that the community faces a potentially ugly scene if the families are forcibly evicted from the houses. “It is psychological terrorism to children to threaten the evictions again. The children are completely freaked out: They’re going to end up in a car again? This is not good optics for the city, for the state.”
The Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, Durazo and her adult son woke up to the noise of a small crowd outside their El Sereno house at about 7 a.m. The Reclaimers had come to protest, the state senator recalled with lingering outrage. “They pounded the doors; they went around the house,” she said. “They blasted a big speaker with music and were chanting. It was extremely intimidating.”
The family called police. The group left after Durazo spoke with one of the Reclaimers, Ruby Gordillo, a mother of three. Escudero said the group resorted to the morning confrontation after feeling the state senator had “ghosted” them. Durazo said the group’s lawyer was in touch with her office, and she was not unreachable.
“We’re not the enemy,” said Durazo, who has a long history of activism and civil disobedience prior to being elected to office. “They’ve created a situation that is extremely difficult. I’m willing to listen to them, but to pound on my house and to assault our home, I don’t see how that’s a way of resolving the issue.”
Even so, Durazo met with the Reclaimers for two hours on Dec. 15. But she said there is little she can do personally since she is not part of the body making decisions on where the homes will end up, nor should she be. “No elected [officials] should be involved in deciding who gets what,” she said. “That should be as transparent as possible.”
Emotions have run high over the more than two years since the Reclaimers arrived. In 2020, one longtime resident, neighborhood activist Marie Salas, hung a large banner in front of her house reading: “Squatting is not the answer.”
“We want to make sure that there’s civility and respect because there’s tension on the street, people at the point of having fistfights, throwing property,” Veres said. “All of that stuff has happened.”
That leaves the home life of Escudero in an unsettled place as her family faces the loss of its two-bedroom house. “The number one key to safety is having a home, and so many people can’t afford that,” Escudero said. “It’s really sad as a society that we’ve gone to that point where we dispose of people and punish them for being poor.”
For her, the ideal outcome would be to “transition in place” and be able to remain as a renter, a more likely outcome if the Land Trust is given control. Inside her house recently, as she shared a couch with her youngest child, both wearing matching “Death to Capitalism” sweatshirts, that outcome seems less than certain as the holidays approach.
“We all realize it’s a tough battle,” Escudero said. “We signed this contract, and I don’t think we realized how fast the two years would come.”
