Global Courant
Four days a week, Leticia Ortega de Ceballos sleeps in her car so she can afford a house more than 100 miles away.
Her work week begins with Sunday night shift at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, where she cleans the hallways and lobby. When she finishes exhausted, it’s only an hour before she starts her second job cleaning hotel rooms at the Hilton in Glendale.
Then she has six hours to shower, eat and sleep before starting all over again. Loews, Hilton, shower, eat, sleep. The 56-year-old sees the California City home and family in it over the weekend.
Gladis Ávila, 39, can spend more than two hours in traffic to commute to work at the W Hollywood Hotel from her new home in Victorville, 90 miles away. Some evenings she comes home just as her youngest children are getting ready for bed.
“At the end of the day, when I go home,” Ávila said, “I wonder if it’s worth it.”
The women, both hotel employees, struggle with all the difficulties of the current California housing market, the high prices that drive starters further and further away from work, the scarcity of everything they can afford.
Housing concerns were at the forefront of contract negotiations for hotel employees. Thousands of workers recently went on strike for three days demanding higher wages and better benefits. It was the first wave of strikes expected this summer after contracts expired.
A security guard stands at the entrance as hotel workers protest outside the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica on July 3.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
But Ortega de Ceballos and Ávila are looking for more than just shelter.
Of course they now want a house to live in. But they also want to give their children the financial basis they never had themselves. The key is more than just hard work and a savings account with laughably low interest rates. The key is a home, the kind of investment that can grow over time.
Investing in a home is their way of building the kind of generational wealth that has long been out of reach for black and brown families in the United States. In the 21st century, the typical white family has five times the wealth of the typical Latino family and eight times the wealth of the typical black family, according to the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance.
And while homeownership represents an important component of wealth, there is a significant gap in who can reach it. In California, the Latino home ownership rate in 2021 was 45.6%, compared to 64.5% for white families. The black homeownership rate was 35.5%, according to census data analyzed by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The typical route to owning a home is to rent first and eventually save enough for a down payment. But with rising rents and disproportionate wages, that dream has become increasingly out of reach.
“Traditionally, owning a home is how most families accumulate wealth,” said Marisol Cuellar Mejia, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “That’s been happening for many years, and that was, in a sense, a manifestation of the American dream.”
Leticia Ortega de Ceballos starts with a job at 11 p.m. and ends at 7 a.m. Then she goes to her next job at 8 a.m. and quits around 4 p.m.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
Ortega de Ceballos, who emigrated from Mexico in the 1980s, began working two jobs, in part to help her sister study at a university at home. The two were orphans. Ortega de Ceballos wanted her sister to follow her dream.
She started a family while living in North Hollywood but as it grew she moved to Sun Valley to find a bigger place. She then moved even further afield to Lancaster, where she rented a house for ten years and raised her three children. Then she started sleeping in her car to save time and money on gas.
Ortega de Ceballos has been combining both jobs for more than 20 years. At the Hilton, rooms can go for over $200 a night. At Loews, they go for about $300. Ortega de Ceballos makes $22 an hour.
It wasn’t until four years ago that she was finally able to fulfill her dream of buying her own home. The only catch: this time the house was even further north, in California City, about 100 miles from her work in Hollywood and Glendale. Although it has about 15,000 inhabitants, for Ortega de Ceballos it is a “pueblito‘, a little city. The typical home price is less than $300,000, compared to nearly a million in LA
She shares the three-bedroom house with her husband, who is disabled, and her youngest son, who is 29 and studying nursing. The house, badly damaged when the couple bought it, has now been renovated. When Ortega de Ceballos is at home, she takes care of her trees in a garden in the back.
Striking members of Unite Here Local 11, a hospitality workers union, gather outside the JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on July 3. hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
Owning her own home helped Ortega de Ceballos secure a better future for herself alongside her children. She knows that the retirement income she receives will not be enough to pay the rent in LA
“When I retire, I don’t worry about all those costs. I’m not worried that I will have to rent and be without money to eat or something to live on,” said Ortega de Ceballos.
The trade-off to achieve her dreams was relentless. The grueling, nearly three-hour commute home would be impossible, so she doesn’t return from Sunday to Friday. She sleeps in her red Kia more often than in her own house. She has endured heat waves and sometimes feels like she is homeless.
Sometimes she goes out to eat, but often she depends on food she can get at the hotel, wherever she showers. She drinks hotel coffee morning and night to keep her going.
On Friday, her husband drives to Lancaster and then takes a train to his wife so he can drive her home and prevent her from falling asleep at the wheel.
“It cost me a lot of sweat and tears,” Ortega de Ceballos said, her voice filled with tears. “Everything requires sacrifice. I had to make sacrifices to get where I am today.”
“The most important thing is that my kids feel safe that they will have something one day,” she added. “For their future.”
Ortega de Ceballos has thought about looking for work closer to home, but it would pay much less. It’s a cruel irony, where income is better in LA – just not enough to live there without spending most of her salary on rent.
That fact has become a major focus as the Unite Here Local 11 hotel union attempts to negotiate new contracts for its members. Thousands of workers at hotels across Southern California took off from work over the busy July 4th weekend.
In a Unite Here Local 11 survey, 53% of employees said they had moved within the past five years or will move in the near future because of housing costs. Hotel workers reported commuting hours from Apple Valley, Palmdale, California City and Victorville.
During contract negotiations, the union proposed setting up a housing fund for catering staff, in addition to better wages, health care benefits, pensions and safer work. The hope is that an additional tax on hotel bills can be used to build staff housing for hospitality workers, said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11.
“I think every working person in Los Angeles struggles to afford to live in Los Angeles,” Petersen said. “Our position is that those who work in the region’s most important and prosperous industry — tourism — should have the opportunity to live in Los Angeles.”
On July 4, about 30 people, including housekeepers and cooks, gathered outside the W Hollywood Hotel, where rooms go for more than $300 a night. They spun noisemakers, banged pots and pans, and used megaphones to amplify their chants. Sometimes spectators threw eggs at them.
Gladis Ávila with her three children, Chester, 9, Joe, 17, and Alondra, 7, in Victorville. Ávila commutes five days a week to her job at the W hotel in Hollywood, where she has worked as a housekeeper for the past 11 years.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Ávila was one of the Protestants. She usually commutes from Victorville to Hollywood from Sunday to Thursday. She has been a housekeeper at the W for 11 years, but she has not worked at the hotel for the last few months because as a union executive she helps organize her colleagues.
When Ávila first arrived in LA in 2009, she squeezed into a studio apartment with her parents, sister and young son. After starting her own family, she rented a bedroom in Hollywood for $1,700. She, her husband, Armando Guzmán, and their three children shared the room, divided into bunk beds.
A year and a half ago, she and Guzmán found a five-bedroom house in Victorville where her children—ages 17, 9, and 7—could each have their own room. They pay $2,000 a month for something of their own.
The two-storey house has a swimming pool, where the family spends the weekends. She has room for exercise equipment, which saves her money on a gym. Though her oldest son had reluctantly left LA, she said, he was glad to have a room of his own.
To stay awake during car trips that can sometimes last up to three hours, Ávila keeps candy and chewing gum in her car. She rolls down the windows and calls other hotel employees while commuting.
Guzmán, a construction worker in LA, sometimes sleeps with his mother or sister on days when the sun is down and he’s too exhausted to drive home.
Ávila thinks about how much she struggled in life and how she wants to ensure a better future for her children.
“I know that one day, when I’m not there,” Ávila said, “my children can have this house and know, ‘My mother made a sacrifice for us.'”
