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.
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