Meet the homeless LA immigrants who built their own home in a gentrifying area
LOS ANGELES — In a city of multimillion-dollar houses and celebrity estates, Cesar Augusto’s home stands apart.
The walls consist of discarded fencing and wood paneling repurposed by Augusto, a tarp serves as a roof, and the front yard is the industrial backdrop of a city’s flood channel.
Balanced on a thin slice of land between the 110 Freeway and the Arroyo Seco flood channel, the home — not a house in the conventional sense — is framed under a stand of trees by a white lattice fence and window shutters. The rectangular shelter appears above the channel like a section of a wood-paneled suburban basement, and a sign hangs near the entrance: “ Ponte trucha,” or “Stay sharp.”
Augusto climbs a ladder up the steep wall of the channel to reach his makeshift shelter, another example of the extreme measures taken
