By Liam Dillon
Los Angeles Times Dec 25, 2020
Dec 25, 2020
LOS ANGELES â Weary after months of sleeping on other people s couches, Martha Escudero walked through the broken door of an empty home in Los Angeles El Sereno neighborhood and started bringing it back to life.
She fixed the garbage disposal, turned the garage into a classroom for her 11- and 8-year-old daughters and harvested squash and sweet potatoes from a vegetable garden she planted.
Her homesteading, part of an organized effort by tenant activists in March, was illegal, but it worked. The Los Angeles Housing Authority this fall granted occupancy rights to the family of Escudero and others who had seized numerous homes that the state acquired as part of now-abandoned plans to extend the 710 Freeway.