The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is known for its’ meticulous maintenance of the state’s highways, bridges and roads managing more than 50,000 miles of California’s highway and freeway lanes, but that is not the case in the tiny neighborhood of El Sereno, where residents contend that Caltrans, who owns many of the houses in their area, is treating them like a slumlord.
Last week Hews Media Group-Community News, State Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, and State Senator Ed Hernandez got a firsthand look at the “slum like conditions” that an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 residents have been forced to live in at the end of the Long Beach 710 Freeway for more than a generation now.
A tightly bonded group of residents who call themselves the “United Caltrans Tenants,” took the group on a walking tour of their hillside neighborhood to see firsthand how they have been neglected and forced to live in “substandard living conditions” by their “landlord,” Caltrans.
The group visited around a half dozen homes in the pathway of the freeway showing a wide range of problems that residents claim were “directly caused by Caltrans workers.”
Broken pipes create backyard “Jacuzzi”-Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez [left]and State Senator Roger Hernandez [second from left] inspect the back yard of a home owned by Caltrans where a broken pipe has created what area neighbors refer to as the “Jacuzzi.”
Some of the homes had several gaping holes in their walls, cracked or totally broken windows, uprooted sidewalks, cracked foundations, garage doors that could not be opened, and broken water pipes. One house even had a hole in their living room where you could see dirt from the ground below.
Resident Carlene Ward held her newborn child of less than eight weeks in a blanket and told the group, “I am a breast cancer survivor and I have lived here for 17 years, and my house is in shambles.
My plumbing never works properly. I would be more than happy to make the improvements myself, but we are not allowed to do any repairs or alterations without having Caltrans do them for us.”
