The pandemic killed Anne Bergstedt’s jobs as a yoga instructor, DJ and radio show host, leaving her unemployed and awaiting those sectors to be reopened. Since then she’s burned through $27,000 in savings to keep up with her rent and bills. Last month, her father died just months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
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And now, she faces losing her home over a battle to keep her emotional support pig, Olive Garden, on the premises.
The 34-year-old Bergstedt has lived in her Hellman neighborhood home for about seven years, the last year and a half with a 6-year-old, 95-pound Vietnamese pot belly pig that she named after her [Olive’s] favorite restaurant.
The city of Los Angeles has not received millions of dollars in federal aid it may be owed for housing homeless people in hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic because, nearly a year into the crisis, Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration hasn’t asked for the money yet.
Local, state and federal officials say the city hasn’t requested reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for portions of the estimated $59 million it has spent on Project Roomkey, which has been sheltering homeless people in hotel rooms since shortly after the pandemic began last year. The city has sharply scaled back the hotel program in recent months, leading advocates and lawyers for the homeless to say the Garcetti administration is showing a lack of political will to protect some of L.A. s most vulnerable residents.
Wednesday, March 3. Here’s what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
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When the coronavirus began spreading in earnest last March, states issued stay-at-home orders and asked residents to stay inside, avoid large crowds and regularly wash their hands. If they were exposed to or infected with the coronavirus, they needed to quarantine or isolate in their homes immediately.
“The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets.
We say that at home, we can ‘be ourselves.’ Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.”
From Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
In their mid-pandemic search for a three-bedroom home, Denise and Greg Townsend found rental listings for three apartments that appealed to them. Located in their longtime community of Santa Monica, all three apartments featured rents low enough so that the math penciled out with the Townsends’ budget and Section 8 housing voucher.
Lam Nguyen Ho is the Executive Director of CALA (Community Activism Law Alliance), which he founded with a Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund seed grant. He is currently an Echoing Green Global Fellow and will serve as a 2016-2017 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow.
Prior to founding CALA, he was a staff attorney at Equip for Equality, where he defended the civil rights of people with disabilities. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2008, Lam joined Chicago’s Legal Assistance Foundation (LAF) through a Skadden Foundation Public Interest Fellowship. During his time at LAF, he established and ran 10 community-based clinics providing free legal services to youth and their families on the west side of Chicago. He experienced firsthand the challenges of community lawyering and civil legal services, and was inspired to innovatively confront these challenges through the creation of CALA.