Days before Christmas, María Vela was saying goodbye to the narrow one-bedroom apartment in East Los Angeles that has been the backdrop of her family’s lives for the last 30 years.
Vela looked at her wedding photo hanging in their living room. The couple hosted their wedding reception out on the driveway, Vela said, gesturing outside. They raised four children in the duplex near the end of a cul-de-sac in their historically Latino neighborhood.
Their kids enjoyed a quintessential East LA upbringing until one-by-one they left for college, except for Vela’s youngest girl, a high school junior.
Now the family is being evicted so their landlords, who live next door, can move in.
“It feels like someone is taking a part of my story,” Vela said.
Family evictions
Evictions are on the rise nationwide and in California. While most Los Angeles-area evictions happen because tenants struggle to pay rent, even tenants who manage to remain current with rent are at risk of eviction. These “just cause” or “no fault” evictions happen because landlords want to move into their tenants’ units, renovate a unit or leave the rental market.
No-fault evictions are contributing to the displacement of families from their longtime communities, along with other factors such as rising rents, too few affordable units, and expired tenant protections.
“Homeowner move-ins have been bringing about this exodus of Angelenos leaving their communities because they can no longer afford rent,” said Cinthia Gonzalez, an organizer at Eastside Leadership for Equitable and Accountable Development Strategies (LEADS). “It’s a heavy load.”
After state pandemic-era tenant protections expired, average monthly eviction filings surpassed pre-pandemic levels in a dozen of California’s most populous counties, according to court records obtained by CalMatters.
Counties that extended local eviction moratoria saw delayed, but still stark, eviction increases. That was the case…
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