The DOT’s empty homes
Fof perfectly good houses in El Sereno and nearby areas have sat empty, even as California’s housing shortage has grown more and more dire. The houses are owned by Caltrans, the state’s transportation agency, which began acquiring them in the 1950s to make way for the 710 Freeway extension. But the proposal to connect the 710 to the 210 Freeway was finally killed in 2017. That left more than 400 properties in the control of the government, including 87 vacant single-family homes.
Last week, a group of mostly homeless families started moving into some of those empty houses. The occupations are both a plea for help for struggling families and a protest against the state’s failure to move faster to solve the housing crisis — an even greater concern when Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered people to stay at home to slow the spread of the coronavirus. If you don’t have a home, that order is meaningless.
Are the “reclaimers” breaking the law? Of course. Meanwhile, there’s no utility service in many of the houses. And some of them have black mold and pest infestations, so they may not even be safe for habitation.
But to this extent the activists are right:
In the middle of a public health emergency and an affordable housing crisis, it’s unconscionable to allow so many empty, decaying homes to sit idle. Caltrans has sold only 10 of these properties since 2016.
This is part of a larger struggle underway in California to make sure housing doesn’t sit vacant. A group of homeless mothers called Moms 4 Housing drew national attention when they took over a house in Oakland that was owned by a company that flips properties. They were evicted in January, but after local officials got involved, the owner agreed to sell the house to a nonprofit and the mothers were expected to move in permanently. Their protest also inspired Senate Bill 1079 by Sen. Nancy Skinner (DBerkeley) that would give cities the power to fine corporations that let their properties sit vacant for more than 90 days, or in some cases, to seize them.
There are legitimate debates to be had over how much the government should infringe on private property rights during a housing shortage. But the protesters in El Sereno have targeted a much-easier-tosolve problem: The state cannot allow its own vacant houses to sit unused in a housing and public health emergency.