Brenda Mendoza is an Angeleno. Born and raised in the Koreatown neighborhood of central Los Angeles, she returned there as a young adult to begin raising her own family. Thirteen years ago, at age 28, she took a job as a uniform attendant at the JW Marriott L.A. Live hotel, about 10 minutes from home.
It was Mendoza’s plan to stay. But after nearly a decade of rapidly rising housing costs in her old neighborhood, the mother of two faced an unhappy truth: She and her family could no longer afford to live in the city.
The first move was to Downey, south of downtown and a 40-minute commute to work on most days. “But our rent just kept going up,” she said. When it hit $3,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, the family made a more drastic decision.
“I now drive 200 miles round trip daily,” said Mendoza, speaking from her home in Apple Valley, a town in San Bernardino County. “We wanted our own house to live in. We did what we had to do.”
The crisis of affordable housing in Los Angeles is hardly new. The metropolitan area has for decades been the most housing overcrowded in the country, the product of insufficient income and a chronic inventory shortage. Those living in overcrowded conditions face a variety of disadvantages and disproportionately poor health outcomes, and the pandemic illustrated the danger, with overcrowded people experiencing higher...
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