A team of Los Angeles workers carried away Alejandrodias’ belongings when the Arroyo Seco Flood Channel waters smashed a home for the past five years Monday morning.
“It’s illicit,” said Diaz, 29, with tears ripping through his face in Spanish. “Cities don’t care about anything but destroying our lives, even though we don’t care about anyone. In all my time, none of us is bothering us. Not there.”
After sunrise, the city went to work along the parkway between the 110 highways and the flood channels that had existed there since the start of the pandemic. The shelter was demolished by city workers and scraped off the floodwater floor with pitchforks, shovels and bulldozers.
Diaz’s house on the channel went viral last year, and news articles highlighted the skills to add a garden surrounded by windows, bamboo fencing and bright yellow siding.
However, last week, people living along the channel received a paper notice warning that personal property could not be stored in urban parks and would be removed during scheduled cleaning. The shelter sat on the other side of the flood channel from the Arroyo Seko Bike Pass and the park.
Officials said the city targeted shelters to clean up as they were in high-risk fire areas. The cleanup was done by the city’s Recreation Department, but Councillor Eunisses Hernandez deployed Lahsa and an outreach team to contact residents before the event Monday.
Like many others who live next to the flood channel, Diaz was engaged in construction, but was unable to find steady work. He occasionally found work as a day’s worker in the local Home Depot parking lot, but he said he was protecting himself as much as possible.
He is among the tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County. The number of steady people within the county fell for the first time in five years in 2024, but the total for 2025 has not been made public due to a recent fire that delayed the count.
Los Angeles Recreation and Parks employees work to remove small communities that have installed sheds and other shelters along the lips of concrete aroyoseco washes in Highland Park.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
As the cleanup crew was run on Monday, Diaz kicked off the fence, destroyed the windows, and rolled large rocks from the yard into the flood channels. His girlfriend, Wendy, watched with the dog, a mixed-race German shepherd.
Frustrated, the Guatemalan-born immigrant punched the dog’s house until his knuckles bleed and cried, thinking about all the work he had put into the land he had called home for the past five years.
“They don’t know what they’re doing to him,” Wendy said.
Diaz asked someone to take a photo of his house before and after the cleanup to show that he was here.
“They won’t clean it the right way,” he said, holding the dog. Wendy and Papi were standing by him as he wept again.
Ahead of Monday’s sweep, volunteer supporter Elizabeth Gustafson, along with group Northeast Neighborhood Outreach, said that people living along the flood channels will work together to maintain their homes. I sent a letter asking to reconsider.
“As well as cleaning up the unlucky people who created communities, mutual support and neighbors along Arroyo for all possibilities, they are also an obscene waste of urban resources, and they have achieved nothing. No,” Gustafson wrote. “Angelenos is facing an incredible housing crisis and it makes little sense to destroy a home or community that has been crafted with stability in an unacceptable situation.”
As Los Angeles Recreation and Parks employees work to remove the small community they lived in along the laundry, Cesar Augusto crosses Arroyo Seco along with his dog Salome.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
At another shelter, Los Angeles police officers joined the Park Rangers and headed towards Cesar Augusto’s home. The officer knocked on his door and as the puppy, Salome, barked them, he went inside.
The officer told August to clean up as the cleaning crew began to dismantle the pile of items he had collected, including tools and cooking utensils. Augusto, 44, arrived in Los Angeles from Guatemala about 20 years ago. He struggled to find a stable job as a home painter after his employer passed away several years ago.
“There’s no shame in what they’re doing,” he said of the city’s cleaning operations. “God always sees. He knows what will happen.”
Cesar Augusto walks some of his belongings along the Arroyo Seco, where Los Angeles Recreation and Parks employees work to remove the small community they lived along the laundry.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
Augusto’s girlfriend sat nearby with her puppy. They didn’t know where they were going next and saw the bulldozer stomp flatten their belongings.
The park ranger cried out questions to Augusto about his belongings regarding the roaring of the heavy machinery.
“Do you want that?” cried the ranger. “I’m giving you plenty of time.”
Lorena Amador, 51, has awakened to the worker who tore one of her shelter walls and told her she had to leave, she said. Her goal for the day was to save her bedding and jacket, and the park ranger was helping her with her bag while she moved up and down the wall of the channel with the ropes. I did.
As the bulldozer approached the shelter, she moved to the Flood Channel to wash her hair. Arroyoseko was an ideal alternative to living in the city streets, she said.
“We all knew each other and we all got along,” she said.
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