A local housing activist has died in what appears to have been an unfortunate accident on state-owned property.
Benito Flores died last week after apparently falling from a tree house on a vacant property at 5459 Shelley Street in El Sereno, The Los Angeles Times reported. It comes six weeks after Flores and a group of supporters warded off sheriff’s deputies who had come to remove him from the property for illegally occupying the site.
Flores, a 70-year-old retired welder, lived in a van for 14 years before seizing the vacant, publicly owned property in El Sereno in March 2020. He did so with the support of the group “Reclaiming Our Homes,” a coalition of about a dozen others who took homes for themselves in response to the housing shortage in the city.
The California Department of Transportation seized the properties decades ago for a freeway expansion that never came to fruition. The properties have sat empty, save for the houses on them, ever since. The other “Reclaimers” who lived in the homes accepted settlements to leave or left when L.A. County Sheriff’s showed up to evict them, according to the Times.
“I am 70 years old with uncontrolled diabetes, I have sores on my feet and could lose them,” Flores wrote in a July 4 letter to the L.A. County Superior Court judge who ordered his eviction. “I am a strong candidate to die on the street alone and forgotten. That is why I choose to die here defending my house.”
To keep himself from being evicted, Flores built a 6-foot-by-3-foot tree house 28 feet off the ground in an ash tree in the backyard of the property. He even attached ladders to another tree to try to create a floating network of places to sleep. His body was found on the ground by a neighbor on Friday and paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.
The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, which held a lease at the El Sereno property on the California Department of Transportation’s behalf, reportedly tried to help Flores with other options, including offering a cash settlement of up to $20,000, a Section 8 voucher and more than two dozen referrals to other homes.
Florees purportedly turned these down as he believed they didn’t sufficiently guarantee permanent housing at a price he could afford. The Department of Transportation planned to sell the Shelley Street home to a nonprofit that would allow a low-income resident to move in.