I’ve read a lot of stories about squatters over the years but this one definitely takes the cake. The City of Industry is located just east of downtown Los Angeles. There’s an RV storage lot full of new luxury trailers which over the past few months have been taken over by as many as 50 homeless people. They broke into the lot, then broke into the trailers and just moved in. The whole area is now full of trash and several fires have been reported.
A luxury RV company is trying to evict a group of squatters who took over a storage lot of campers in the city of Industry.
“We’ve noticed that several of the trailers have been burning,” worker Marilyn Martinez said. “There’s homeless here sometimes late at night. They’re coming in and out.”
Martinez, who works near the lot, said a city of squatters started taking over the overflow storage area months ago. Since then, they’ve piled up massive mounds of trash and debris. The company, Black Series RV, said trespassers are now living in at least 50 campers, which are worth anywhere between $40,000 and $100,000.
To be clear, that’s $40,000 to $100,000 per RV. The total amount involved could be as high as $6 million. Other businesses that use the lot say the problem has been getting worse lately.
“Homelessness keeps increasing and increasing and increasing since I’ve been living here and it honestly just comes down to our politicians who are doing nothing about it,” said Nissan employee Khaled Ghrewahti.
Nissan employees use part of the parking lot for inventory overflow and they say they’re fed up with the homeless stealing brand new car tires and gas from the tanks.
“At night it’s kinda scary to go to our cars. Every morning the sheriff’s department drives through the lot and then they just leave, but they told us they can’t really do anything because it’s abandoned,” said Nissan receptionist Kiki.
As for the homeless living there, at least some of them claim to be paying rent to someone. Who is collecting that money isn’t clear. Frankly, no one living there thinks they are doing so legally.
One of the people living in the RVs said they moved into the campers out of desperation, only after others broke into them. They said they thought the campers were abandoned.
Squatters will often have a bunch of bogus paperwork to claim residency to a home or even to show that they have been paying rent. But it’s always a lie designed to drag out the process to remove them in court. The company that owns the lot won a court judgment to clear out the area starting today and the camper company is looking to recover what it can by selling off the damaged RVs to another company that will refurbish them. No tally yet on how many, if any, will be salvageable.
Just yesterday another camper was set on fire and the fire department had to come to put it out. You can see video of that in this story about the site.
