My Neighbor Chavela
I am upset about the recent news that my 65-ish year-old neighbor, Isabel (Chavela, as we all call her), is being evicted from the house she has been living in for the last 20 years. On the block, Chavela claims to have lived for an additional 10 years.
In late August, Chavela says, her landlord's nephew gave her notice of his intentions of selling the property. Her landlord has not been around in the last year, as he has been put in a nursing home. Chavela is upset that the nephew never gave her an option of buying the house, which she has cared for and lived in for two decades. Last month, a couple who work as realtors, knocked on her door with papers claiming to be the new owners and giving her just a month to move out. I came into Chavela's house yesterday and saw most of her belongings in boxes. I could see that workers had already come into the property to make changes and fix things around the house. They couldn't even wait for me to leave, Chavela says. The realtors have also not shown their face at all since evicting her.
Chavela says she will be moving in with a relative in the neighborhood, but not really walking distance from the block she has called home for 30 years. She has no children. She will putting most of her belongings in that public storage place on Glendale Blvd. She says she will miss seeing me walking up our hill with my bookbag around my shoulders, heading home. I told her I will miss our conversations and will miss hearing her call my name to say hello.
Sometimes changes suck...
5 Comments:
that's so sad. I wish you guys could get together and warn everyone that the gentry are coming - and figure out whether there's something you can do about it. Maybe invite someone to speak on tenant rights, and then pass out a flyer with all the key points on it - how much notice is required when someone's being evicted for reasons other than not paying the rent, violating lease terms, etc.
all that wouldn't prevent chavela, or someone like her, from being evicted, but it might have given her more time to get her stuff in order. I think that - by law - landlords might be required to give people more than 30 days notice under those circumstances. Also, if the place is rent-controlled, relocation payments are required by law, but very few landlords pay if tenants don't ask for the cash.
That IS terrible. I have a fear that I will be in that sort of predicament someday because I don't have a career and education and it doesn't seem like I'll ever have children to take care of me (read: take me in). Poor lady- I hope it works out for her. It's sad that it's the nephew who took over and not the landlord she knew. He'd probably feel terrible about it if he knew...
Having decided long ago that I will never have kids, the traditional house and 3 dogs (or cats) people work hard for, I am going to save up to buy one of those motor homes and travel the country the rest of my days with hopefully enough time and cash to study chess, write comic books and scripts and do whatever else god intended for the rest of my relatively short life (relative to the cosmos that is)
Ariel: Your plans sound nice... But how do you feel about my neighbor's fortune?
i think she got a raw deal
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