How a supportive housing project stirred conversations in Chatsworth, california.

Chatsworth, with its mountain backdrop, may be a typical American suburb. Single-family homes are a common sight – and one may even see a horse or two. Chatsworth is also an industrial hub, with offices and warehouses standing alongside the train tracks, where supplies and rush-hour commuters travel. But beside the tracks and industries are the homes, families and lives of a drastically underrepresented homeless population. However, in recent years, disputes between the homeless and Chatsworth homeowners, known by some for a reputation of NIMBY-ism, has been growing tense as talks of housing divided the neighborhood. 

Brooke Carrillo, one of the many who reside in the streets of Chatsworth, stands on behalf of the homeless. The daughter of a Vietnam War veteran (who has also experienced homelessness but has currently been given a hotel room as part of L.A. County’s Covid19-inspired Project Roomkey) Carrillo has become a leading figure on her block to the rest of the neighborhood. As of late, she and others in her community, along with homeless activists, have been paying attention to the news of a housing project that could transform a neighborhood that has not been kind to them.

“The view of Chatsworth is a historical view, like the Hollywood sign,” she said. “So if you’re looking down (from) those mountains upon the valley, you see a sea of lights. (The view) from like here to Simi Valley, it’s beautiful at night and a lot of people have gone up there and many, many people run up there and having the sight of these mountains and seeing that. Well, to see this apartment complex in the twinkle of lights, it wouldn’t fit. That’s why they didn’t want it there because they didn’t want it that high because the view was historical. I think it shouldn’t be there just simply because it’s in the wrong place.”

The site of the “apartment complex,” as Carrillo calls it, lies at a now-closed auto repair shop on Topanga Canyon Boulevard near its intersection with Devonshire Street. This development would become Topanga Apartments, a supportive housing project to assist the homeless, first proposed in September 2019. The proposed five-story building would comprise of 54 units designed to house the unhoused of Chatsworth. This development has ignited a debate between Chatsworth homeowners, who feel as if the presence of homeless people disrupts their way of life, and the homeless and their advocates who argue that Chatsworth is the only neighborhood in Los Angeles that lacks assistance and services for the homeless.

Despite being homeless herself, Brooke doesn’t see Topanga Apartments, which she views as an ‘apartment complex,’ to be the panacea to solve the homelessness crisis in Chatsworth. She’s in support of building housing in Chatsworth, but not at the auto repair shop.

“I believe it should have been a community center, an educational center, some kind of center for the elderly and the vets and the homeless, and make it more of a safe haven kind of place,” said Carrillo. “I don’t believe that an apartment complex right there on Topanga and Devonshire was a proper place for them to put an apartment. There’s no apartments on Topanga like that, except for farther down. So why did they have to put it right in the middle of a gas station and a nail (salon)?”

Pilar Schiavo, a Chatsworth resident, has been a supporter of Topanga Apartments since its initial proposal. Although she moved from the San Francisco Bay Area a little more than four years ago, she noted that the rising cost of living and a housing shortage contributed to the rise in homelessness both in the north and south of the state.

“Last September, I get a call from our school about the proposed development of Topanga Apartments and that’s really the first (spark),” said Schiavo. “I went to the parents’ Facebook page where they directed us to go get more information and found that there really wasn’t any information. It was just a lot of fear-based statements that didn’t really talk about any specifics of the project, and people were planning to protest.”

From there, Schiavo and more than 20 others formed West Valley Homes Yes, an organization which has backed the Topanga Apartments project, as well as advocated for solutions to help the unhoused. As the months passed, Topanga Apartments became a hot-button topic in Chatsworth, while Affirmed Housing, the developers of the project, met with the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council in December, where the council’s concerns prompted a change of plans.

Among other concerns, homeowners are worried that the project could hurt property values while posing a danger to their neighborhood. But activists have pointed to Chatsworth as the only neighborhood where no housing to assist the homeless has been built. Paul Read, who serves the homeless residing in Chatsworth, takes it a step further, claiming that all of District 12, not just Chatsworth, is the only City Council district where no assistive housing projects have been built.

“Especially right now with all the fear of the coronavirus. . .this is not the time to make people’s lives worse (pushing) them around. . .to where they’re susceptible to EVEN more sickness (and) more illness.”

“This (district) has none,” says Read. “The sad thing is you go right over the hills into Council District 11, and Mike Bonin is gonna have three (projects) built before we have one built here, and he may even have more. He’s kicking butt there. Now, why can’t right over these hills (over Topanga Canyon Boulevard), (why) don’t we have stuff here?’”

Loraine Lundquist challenged council member John Lee for the District 12 seat in the City Council in March. The results as of March 27th, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, report that Lee leads Lundquist by a little over one percent.

Schiavo, Read and Carrillo attended a Chatsworth Neighborhood Council meeting on March 4th, where a candidate forum was being held. Yet when the candidates were asked about alleviating divisions between the housed and the unhoused, the presence of the homeless and supporting housing were constantly brought up by the candidates as the atmosphere turned tense at times. It got to the point where an argument broke out after one of the candidates appeared to address those who claim Chatsworth being a NIMBY neighborhood while wishing to help the homeless should “take a homeless person into your backyard and get them back on their feet.”

“Until people stop walking out of Ralphs with their hands full of goods and not paying for them, it’s just not gonna happen, I’m sorry, it’s just not,” said Cher Bentley, another candidate. “I treat everybody with respect, and as long as they treat me with respect, they don’t, I don’t. That’s just the way it goes. And until that stops, we’re not gonna stop fighting.”

One candidate running for the Chatsworth Neighborhood council is Rita Dunn, who is unhoused herself. Given her frustration with the atmosphere surrounding the discussion of homelessness, she aimed to convince everyone in the room that the homeless have a say in their neighborhood’s affairs, too:

“In working with the community, I think you would be surprised to find how many people in the homeless community have the exact same feelings that you do, that they hate seeing people walk out with food, they hate seeing needles on the ground, they hate seeing trash everywhere and we work actively to try to pick it up. If we are willing to listen to you, you should be willing to listen to us and we can come to (some) sort of adult conclusion on that.”

Despite Chatsworth being labeled by some as a neighborhood inhabited by NIMBYs, there were some candidates who support a shelter, just not in the proposed site on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Some of them suggested establishing a shelter in the industrial areas of Chatsworth, away from the residential areas.

“What I would do is (that) I would try to get our homeless committee to go to our elected officials and ask them the hard questions,” said Nick Montano, another candidate. “Why are they spending money the way they’re spending money when we can really do things in a practical way. I don’t know why they chose that location – it’s needed, but it’s not needed there.”

According to Schiavo, it can be argued that some of the candidates, regardless of their stance on homelessness, envision preserving the ‘old Chatsworth’ by maintaining single-family homes and “keeping a very suburban-rural kind of feel to the area.”

“I think educating the community (is important), because a lot of people do not know what permanent supportive housing is,” said Schiavo, hypothesizing that Chatsworth residents are hesitant to hear information about the project. “They don’t know that it means that you have full-time case managers supporting the residents, to get help with their resumes, help with job training, help with getting interviews, help with counseling, drug treatment or health care, you know whatever the resources are that they need, they have that full-time support there. (They don’t know) that it’s a locked building, that they have 24-hour security, they have rules that they have to follow to be able to live there, they sign a lease, it’s a permanent home, it’s not a shelter, it’s not transitional housing, it’s not bridge housing. So, I think there’s a lot of misinformation and I think that outreach is critical to get that good information in people’s hands.”

Carrillo also sees misinformation may have led to opposition to the project. But she views that both the housed and unhoused of Chatsworth were misinformed.

“Everybody thought it was just going to be a shelter, homeless and the residents,” said Carrillo. “Everyone just thought it was going to be a typical shelter, and that’s how it was going to be. It’s just permanent housing. These are each individual people who have each individual places, their own place. It has a lease. Every year, they would have somebody come in and make sure everything is up to par, just like every landlord. It was going to be permanent housing, not temporary, not transitional and not sober living. It was going to be permanent housing like a (typical) apartment.” 

While Brooke would like to see housing built as she views the Topanga Apartments site ideal for a community center, she sees an empty site along Lassen Street and Owensmouth Avenue, adjacent to the Chatsworth train station, as the ideal place to build housing while using existing funds.

“They could have put tiny houses there and made a little tiny house village,” said Carrillo. “If now they want to take that money and start (building at) another site, like the one on Lassen, yeah. There’s so much land out there that’s not being used, and this is where the government has to jump in and say, ‘Hey, if after two years you haven’t sold, leased or attempted to, you have to sell it to the government at its base rate price. There’s no jacking up the price, you get your base price. You had two years to try.’ And that’s when the government needs to take over the land, and they’re not doing that.”

Yet at the same time, going indoors can pose challenges as some unhoused residents would not be willing to go indoors.

“They’re just gonna sit there and do what,” said Carrillo. “What are they going to do? They can’t go outside and recycle? They can’t go outside and hang out with their friends? Their friends can’t come over and hang out with them? So they have a bed and a shower, well out here on the street, you have a bed and we figure out how to shower. So what’s going to keep them alive, moving them in there?”

Echoing what Dunn said at the candidate forum earlier that week, Read believes that unhoused communities, not just activists, can band together with a force that can challenge city officials.

“When you turn on the news or go online or even in documentaries and (TV) shows or whatever, so much of the stuff right now is, ‘Oh, look at what they’re doing in Chatsworth, look at what they’re doing in Echo Park,’” Read says as he looks back on their efforts. “They’re standing up to this bullying mentality and they’re telling them to back off. ‘We know our rights, you’ve come in here and you fooled us for long enough, but not no more. You’re gonnna leave us alone and you’re gonna let us survive unless you can provide beds and services.’ If they provide beds and services, we’re all going to be like, ‘Okay, you finally did your job, we’re working together, we’re gonna get into these beds, we’re gonna get into these services.’”

Days after the candidate forum, the conversation began to change. 

News of the COVID-19 epidemic, which at that point had already infected China, East Asia and parts of Europe, was already circulating, with the United States having less than 500 cases at the time. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic on March 11, but by the end of the month, the United States surpassed China in the number of cases in the world, with 85,000 cases confirmed according to the CDC. But as March became April, as everyday life in the United States and around the world came to a standstill, more than 350,000 Americans became infected. Johns Hopkins University would report on April 10 that the United States had the most COVID-19 deaths, surpassing the previously hardest hit country, Italy.

“Especially right now with all the fear of the coronavirus, among so many other diseases, this is not the time to make people’s lives even worse, by (pushing) them and spreading them around to where they’re susceptible to even more sickness (and) more illness,” said Read weeks before the havoc that COVID-19 would create began. “It was really cold (here) for a while and it still gets kind of cold at night, but it’s getting really warm here now. And when you’re pushing people around (when) it’s still flu season and that they don’t have water, you’re just adding all of these extra things that they don’t need to deal with.”

Brooke, on the other hand, saw the pandemic and the ensuing ordinances implemented stoking fears. One night as she went to a gas station, she saw a man wearing a black bandana entering the gas station’s mini-mart, only for the two to be told that one person can enter at a time.

Schiavo became aware of the challenges that the pandemic poses among Americans, including among the homeless. While hand washing stations and shelters has been set up to assist them, crowding could pose a challenge to their health as fears that the virus could spread.

“There are no bathrooms available, I mean, how do you expect people to have good hygiene and not provide showers and bathrooms,” said Schiavo once the pandemic became an American concern in late March. “And we’ve actually tried just privately to find access to showers and have not been able to because they are basically on backorder at this point because there is such a need right now. So, it’s a really, really challenging time and the best situation is to get people in motels because you have a shower, you have a bathroom, you have a sink to wash your hands, you have access to basic hygiene.”

While seeing motels as the best alternative for the unhoused during the pandemic, it could be difficult for them to follow ordinances enacted in hopes to contain COVID-19.

“You share tools, you share bicycles, you share food and supplies, and so it’s not like you can just go into your tent and sit there all day long and be self-contained,” said Schiavo. “You have to go find food, you have to go find a place to go to the bathroom, which is increasingly hard for both of these things. And just social distancing, everybody is on a sidewalk, basically. So the sidewalk is six feet wide, so you can’t even stand on the opposite side of the sidewalk and be six feet apart. I would say it’s very challenging, even for people who are trying.”

Should the number of cases in the United States reduce, along with American society returning to normal, whether or not the housing debate could take a different turn or continue its pre-pandemic intensity is up in the air. Once the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council resumes session, it is unknown if the effects of the pandemic could change their positions on the project. As for the unhoused and their allies, the pandemic may serve as factor to prompt change, and Topanga Apartments may be the start.

“There’s all kinds of things that we can do to (help), there shouldn’t be any homeless,” said Carrillo. “Nobody should be on the street.”