Farm worker concerns ahead of El Nio

With El Nio looming, and all the rain it’s expected to bring, new concerns about farm workers on the Central Coast. A local community advocacy says it’s worried about the conditions of their housing.

The Center for Community Advocacy focuses on finding solutions to end inadequate housing for farm workers in Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties. The CCA been working with a local nonprofit group called Chispa to make sure all low-income families can find safe and affordable housing. One of Chispa’s developments is the Mountain View Town Homes in Salinas, which recently underwent a major renovation project.

“Reroofing of all the buildings, new gutters, new flashing, some stucco repairs, and some other exterior repairs to continue to weatherize the property,” said Chispa CFO Norm Kolpin.

The complex houses mostly working families who make under $40,000 a year. Many are farm workers and their families, but not all farm workers can call the townhouses “home.”

Ahead of the predicted El Nio storms, the executive director of CCA, Juan Uranga, says he has several concerns.

One of them, farm workers who live in units that are below code standards. These are apartments, mobile homes, even labor camps where there may be leaky roofs, broken windows or doors that don’t fit properly. Rain or wind could come into the units. Some homes could face even more problems in a flood.

“Some of the older sites like labor camps might have sewage systems that are not what they should be and in a situation where there’s a lot of rain and flooding,” Uranga explained, “Would put special stress on the sewage systems and the sewage systems would clog up and create a very unhealthy situation for the farm workers.”

He’s also concerned about tall trees that hang above mobile home parks in the South County. Severe weather could bring those trees down onto the units, possibly hurting someone. Farm workers who live in very rural areas on the Central Coast are also at risk in a dangerous El Nio.

“The other concern is isolation,” Uranga said. “Some farm workers tend to live in the outskirts, in the very rural areas that, by nature, are already separated from our cities. And if there is a lot of rain and flooding around those communities, those people would be cut off from the rest of us and cut off from the services that would otherwise be available to farm workers in flooding situations.”

Uranga says tenants may be afraid to speak up out of retaliation from their landlords. However, there are steps any tenant can take. The first would be to contact a city or county inspector to evaluate their housing. Another step, getting counsel from legal aides. In some cases, it helps to call the CCA.

“We don’t represent people one on one but we do represent people where a leader will organize a tenant’s committee and then we represent the committee and we negotiate with the landlord to get improvements to the units,” Uranga said.