The Brief

Trouble at the small apartment on Vernon Avenue had been brewing for months by the time things came to a head this spring.

For Kevin Diaz Lopez, his housing problems began around October. That’s when his brother and two nephews moved out from the one-bedroom South Los Angeles apartment they all shared, moving to be closer to work in the Long Beach area.

That left Diaz, who works in a packing warehouse, stuck with $1,600 monthly in rent. By January, he was falling behind.

No rental agreement

Diaz says he promised the manager he’d pay within a few days. But he says when he came home one day, he’d been locked out. Some of his things were sitting outside. A neighbor called police, along with a tenant rights group, and Diaz was allowed back in.

But the message he got from the manager was this: “That I was not on the (rental) contract,” Diaz said in Spanish, “and I could not be here.”

Only his brother and nephews were on the rental agreement. Diaz says he tried negotiating, asking to be put on a new rental contract, but was told this would increase the rent. He started to get worried.

“Renting another place like this requires a lot of money,” he said. “I thought I’d have to end up sleeping in my car.”

Then, in what seemed like a stroke of luck, Diaz heard from two old friends from Guatemala via social media. The couple had arrived in the U.S. as asylum seekers last year. And now, they were struggling to stay housed.

Kevin Diaz Lopez outside the apartment where he lives on Vernon Avenue.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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One of his friends, Yamileth Mejicanos, said she and her husband had initially been bused from Texas to New York, where they knew nobody. So they made it to Southern California, where they rented a room from someone else as they tried to find work. So far, only she had found a job — at a restaurant, working just three days a week. It wasn’t enough.

“Covering the rent sometimes, to be honest, we did not have enough to cover food, the basics,” Mejicanos said in Spanish. “We would adjust for the rent but we would be left without food, sometimes two or three days without food. We either paid rent or we ate.”

Diaz offered to let them move in, and in February, they did. Her husband found work at the same packing warehouse and they all agreed to split the rent.

Diaz was optimistic: He would help his friends stay housed, and in turn, they could help him keep his apartment.

But the couple wasn’t on the rental contract either, and eviction attempts intensified.

A risky living situation

By March, things were getting ugly: At one point, they came home to find some of the plumbing torn out, including the toilet. Shortly afterward, police arrived early one morning; the tenants learned they’d been reported as trespassers.

Yamileth Mejicanos shows the interior of the apartment bathroom where the drain pipes were removed from under the sink.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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A neighbor, Denise Rivera, said she saw their things taken out of the unit “three or four times in total, from January to March.”

Rivera connected them with a tenant rights group, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE. One afternoon shortly after the toilet and other plumbing were removed, ACCE lead organizer Nancy Villanueva visited to survey the damage. She had seen similar situations before.

“This,” Villanueva said in Spanish, “is a good example … of how people wind up on the street.”

Villanueva’s group works with low-income renters, including many Spanish speakers. She said she started to see more families doubling up as they were walloped by the economic effects of the pandemic.

But even before the pandemic, doubling up was a common fallback in local Latino communities. A UCLA study released last December concluded that between 2016 and 2020 in L.A. County, Latinos made up 76% of those who self-identified as experiencing doubled-up homelessness.

Researcher Melissa Chinchilla, who worked on the report, said this represents a less visible side of the growing Latino homelessness crisis in L.A.

“I think part of the challenge is that for many years, because we didn't see Latinos entering the homeless service system at the rate that we would expect given their economic and social vulnerability, or at a rate comparable to other vulnerable populations, we kind of thought like ‘oh, OK, well, they don’t need as much support,’” Chinchilla said.

“But … oftentimes what tended to happen in these communities is that Latinos rely heavily on social support, which can be really great — and at the same time can also have negative repercussions in other ways,” she said.

‘The tip of the iceberg’

Doubling up can create additional financial stress for the host family, especially if they’re also low-income, Chinchilla said, along with other stressors like overcrowding and substandard living conditions. And this common problem: people who move in but are not on the lease. Studies have suggested those not on the lease are more likely to become unhoused.

“What are the risk factors? If you're doubled up and you're not a leaseholder, you have no rights,” Chinchilla said.

Chinchilla is a city-appointed commissioner with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA. In recent months, city and county officials have shifted greater attention to unhoused Latinos as their local numbers have grown.

According to LAHSA, the number of Latinos experiencing homelessness increased by 26% between 2020 and 2022; Latinos represented 43% of the unhoused population in LAHSA’s 2023 point-in-time count.

Chinchilla said as local officials try to better understand and serve Latinos experiencing — or on the edge of — homelessness, it’s critical to understand the precarious housing situations that doubled-up renters find themselves in.

“When we look at the homeless service system and we look at the point in time count, we're only really looking at the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot that's getting missed,” Chinchilla said.

‘I just want a place to live’

Fortunately for the occupants of the Vernon Avenue apartment, they’re getting help. Villanueva and her tenant-rights colleagues at ACCE learned that Diaz and his friends had not received a formal eviction notice, a necessary step. Villanueva reported the missing plumbing to the city as a code violation, and it was replaced.

Eviction is a legal process in which steps must be followed, Villanueva said, including tenants being given a formal notice.

“It’s not legal for them to lock you out just like that, without notice,” she said.

According to L.A. County’s Consumer and Business Affairs Department, it’s illegal for a landlord to lock a tenant out, remove doors or windows, change locks or cut off utility services.

Villanueva said renters like Diaz and his friends do have some rights in these basic protections against illegal eviction — and it’s important to understand them.

Tenant rights organizer Nancy Villanueva, left, and neighbor Denise Rivera, right, have been helping the tenants in the Vernon Avenue apartment.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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These rights “are few, but they are there,” Villanueva said, “and people have to learn how to use those protections and those laws that exist.”

Illegal evictions should be reported to police, she said. Villanueva also encourages renters at risk of losing their housing to seek out community groups that can help them, and to reach out before it’s too late.

“They don’t have to reach out when they are already in the street,” she said.

She said that as of this week, the Vernon Avenue occupants have not yet received a formal eviction notice. LAist reached out to the apartment manager, who didn’t want to discuss the matter.

Meanwhile, Diaz is still there. His two friends recently found a new place and moved out, but one of his brothers has now moved in. He says he still hopes he can negotiate a new rental contract.

“I don’t want any problems,” he said. “I just want a place to live.”