The Other Hollywood

by Rob Rooke

The nine letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign up on the hills are visible for many of Los Angeles’ rich and poor alike. While the working poor of East Hollywood can always see the sign, Hollywood Inc, it never looks back at them like it does for the rich.

Hundreds of thousands in LA live in housing with rats, roaches, broken windows, mildew, leaking roofs, insufficient hot water, faulty electricity. Many of these people make up the millions of working people that propelled themselves into the headlines on the recent May Day marches. These are the same people that scared Capitol Hill’s Congressmen into retreat in their attempts to isolate and crush America’s undocumented. These same families, with or without papers, continue to live in the slum conditions that LA landlords’ impose.

One slum-like building stands on Lockwood Avenue in East Hollywood. The eight-unit building is divided into one bedroom apartments that are smaller than 700-square feet each. The squeeze of high rents and low pay can mean up to 3 generations sometimes living in one small unit. For years, broken windows here have been duct-taped, while the landlord promises to ‘get back’ to tenants. Roaches vastly outnumber all other species in the building. The proliferation of cucarachas are so normal for the children that they have invented games revolving around killing them.

During the winter, children in these units got sicker than their school friends. Tenants were expected to buy their own space heaters, but with the electrical wiring so ancient that microwave and television-use can’t co-exist it is usually only luck that prevents deadly electrical fires in these apartments.

But on the day I visited this building, the past was getting pushed aside and the future was rolling in. Angelica, from the Campaign for Renters Rights walked me around the buliding. There was every sign of an active construction site. Brand new windows ready to go in, cans of paint, sheets of plywood and workers walking back and forth.

Angelica introduced us to Marta and her two daughters. Marta works what she describes as a very low paid childcare job. She has held onto this apartment because of Rent control. She proudly showed us her brand new wall-mounted heater. All 8 units now have these same heaters. By law, a landlord must provide one, but for the last 12 years of Marta’s tenancy her landlord evaded this minor detail. They’ve also remodeled Marta’s bathroom, slightly haphazardly, but it has been somewhat improved.

The landlord put in a new sink and counter top and painted. I looked under the sink to see where Marta showed me they had attached the new counter to mold-ridden wood: a gang of cockroaches scurried out. Marta was very impressed with the improvements and very grateful for the help in organizing. Another tenant made it clear to me that much still needs to be done and the repairs are far from over; however, he also, was both pleased and surprised that the landlord, after years of inactivity, was doing repairs.

Julia, Angelica and Arturo, over recent months, spent many, many hours talking to the tenants, eating with them, detailing all their housing problems. Arturo’s folks have lived there for years. They put flyers up around the neighborhood. They took tenants down to the City. They did their best to embarrass our public servants. And shy tenants, used to getting second best, or worse, rose up and demanded a voice. Their collective voice and their courage is currently transforming their slum conditions.

The landlord, Alfredo Alvarado, is a major shareholder in a factory in Peru and the owner of a number of apartment buildings. He has done his best to resist spending any of his money. He tried to scare tenants with evictions. He told them they could be fined for complaining. He called the police on the organizers and reminded everyone that he has “big lawyers.� But his old tricks did not work this time around.

On leaving the neighborhood, Julia walked across the street and took a yellowing flyer off the windshield of a dust covered old van. SE BUSCA – Alfredo Alvarado: WANTED – to do repairs, with the landlord’s picture on it.

This great drama between the poor and those intent on keeping them poor will continue in all of the world’s “other Hollywoods�. And as that tide gathers steam and people continue to raise their collective voice, all that has been stolen from us - will be taken back.