It’s a quiet Friday afternoon in El Sereno, a working-class suburb in Northeast Los Angeles, as Martha Escudero sits over a laptop to play games with her two young daughters. This is the home they’ve known for the last two years, with a holiday wreath now on the front door and a cat named Simba wandering the carpet. But their time here may soon come to an end.
In March 2020, Escudero was one of more than a dozen homeless or housing-insecure families who took over 11 vacant, state-owned houses in this neighborhood of charming, single-family bungalows. It was the early pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an activist group called Reclaiming Our Homes — or the Reclaimers — took possession of the properties, arguing it was immoral for them to sit empty during a public health emergency and the exploding housing crisis.
