This article was produced by the nonprofit newsroom Los Angeles Public Press. It is re-published here with permission.
On Jan. 7, as Santa Ana winds whipped across Los Angeles, Wendy Lopez was inside a downtown courthouse, trying to find out if her landlord had officially filed an eviction notice to boot her and her family from their West Adams apartment.
Lopez felt at home at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. She knew the women at Window No. 7 of the records department. Only a few years ago, she’d been their coworker, when she was employed in the court’s cafeteria and as a court cleaner.
Her landlord did file an eviction case against her, but on that day, there appeared to be nothing on file, and Lopez felt like she’d gotten a small respite. She had one less problem to juggle.
The feeling was fleeting. As Lopez walked out of the records department, and into the hallway of the courthouse, an LA Tenants Union comrade mentioned that a wildfire had erupted somewhere in LA. When she got home and turned on the TV, Lopez learned the fire was tearing through Pacific Palisades, where she worked as a support professional for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
As she watched footage of Pacific Palisades residents flee their homes, Lopez’s first thought was whether her client was in danger. Her employer directed her not to make contact, but in the weeks that followed, she would learn they were doing okay. Their home, however, was destroyed. For the second time in five years, Lopez – who is separated from her partner and raising two children by herself – is out of a job.
In 2020, amid the pandemic, Lopez had been let go from her position at the courthouse.
“I felt crushed,” Lopez said, speaking through an interpreter. As she spoke in Spanish, Lopez slammed her hands together to underscore how she felt flattened by the news.
Lopez said that while LA leaders are narrowly focused on helping those immediately impacted by the fires, they are ignoring the needs of those who were not directly in the path of destruction. Many service workers like Lopez may not have lost their homes in the fires, but they are losing work. They find themselves with less cash on hand in a city where housing was already scarce and unaffordable, and where a tight housing market may become even more untenable because thousands of people were displaced by the fires.
As Dan Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research institution based in Los Angeles, pointed out, many of those who lost their homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades were homeowners. “It’s a sad and uncertain time for them,” he said, but they are more likely to have substantial resources “for pulling their lives back together.”
Meanwhile, he said, renters and those with “low-wage service jobs in stores and restaurants that were destroyed by the fires, or worked in affluent homes that burned” will struggle to “regain what they lost.”
Tenant advocates, including those who organize with the LA Tenants Union and a coalition called Keep LA Housed, are trying to push for new laws to help renters in the aftermath of the fires. In doing so, they are drawing attention to the fact that the wildfires erupted after and amid other local crises – and may compound them.
Each crisis is, “making it impossible for so many families to ever actually recover,” said Lupita Limón Corrales, an organizer with the LA Tenants Union.
Lopez’s experiences are “one example of an acute and an ongoing crisis coming together to make somebody’s life extremely difficult,” Corrales says.
But reception from LA leaders has been lukewarm. Advocates have successfully pushed for individual council members to sponsor legislation, such as for a pause on evictions and a freeze on rent increases, but the proposals have yet to win majority support.
Last month, organizers intentionally interrupted an LA County Board of Supervisors to call for a countywide moratorium on evictions and a freeze on rent increases.
As the supervisors began taking public comment, tenant advocates who weren’t in the queue to speak, stood up in their seats to read aloud a letter: “At a moment where we need our local government to respond swiftly to disaster, no adequate protections or relief have been extended.”
The supervisors responded by getting up and walking out.
The advocates had wanted to “win over” the supervisors’ hearts, said Maria Esther, another member of the LA Tenants Union who is also facing an eviction. Supervisors, she said, have “a lot of power …. They could help so many, many people.”
In 2020, when courts started closing because of the pandemic, Wendy lost her job in the cafeteria. Then, she was called in to work as one of four cleaners at the courthouse. Then, while working as a cleaner, Lopez contracted Covid and was sent home. The company that employed her at the courthouse then called to simply tell her: “We have no more hours.”
She said she really enjoyed working in that building. She knew the lawyers and the judges there, including the types of foods they loved. They greeted each other warmly.
That crushing feeling — “aplastada” — that Lopez felt upon losing her job in the Palisades was also tied to the fact that she had to “return to the place where I used to work to face an eviction.”
She said she felt she had been wronged. But she did not have the capacity and financial resources to challenge the decision. Her son had also gotten sick, and she was worried about others in her family. She was hearing reports about Covid’s immense death toll.
That period was difficult, Lopez said, and she would cry as she cooked, and also, as she folded her laundry.
Lopez, who joined her local branch of the LA Tenants Union in November, said she feels like a stronger person now. She is more informed. She has a take-charge attitude and likes to volunteer to do things, such as drafting letters for others. But that is also a habit of many LATU members. She calls it, “LATU busy.” Members also accompany each other to file papers in court or visit the housing and building safety departments to get information, much like Lopez was doing when she went to research her own case.
She says she has been caught up on rent, and feels her landlord’s eviction case against her is unjust. This time she isn’t standing down.
Lopez says she has learned from working at the courts that people like herself “are not small.” Even if they don’t have the respect that lawyers and judges get, it does not mean that people like herself “don’t have rights.”
“I can see with clarity that if I keep on informing myself about my rights … there may be a situation where we may have to fight. And I’m going to fight. I’m going to fight for myself. I’m going to fight for my rights. I’m not going to let them bully me,” she said.
Now, after the wildfires, Lopez needs to make ends meet as an eviction hangs over her head. She estimates she lost half of her income from the wildfires and will have to make her dollars stretch twice as much, while she works for other clients. The process to get reassigned to a new client, she said, usually takes two to three months.
“We are working,” Lopez said, pointing to her W-2 tax income state. “We are workers … we are not asking for something that is like, ‘Wow, gift me your house!’ No. We are asking for something that will allow us to be able to breathe. Give us a chance. Give us a chance.”
Language interpretation for the interview was done by Nancy Meza.
*Elizabeth Chou is a reporter for LA Public Press and has been on the local government beat since 2006. Visit lapublicpress.org for essential reporting aimed at creating a healthier and more humane L.A.
