Editor's note: Spectrum News 1 reporter Itay Hod spent 24 hours in a homeless encampment in Hollywood, following the Velez family, homeless for seven years. Here is Part 2 of his story.
(Click here for Part 1)
It’s 6 a.m. after a cold, hard night in tents above the 101 and Judy Velez is headed to Tommy’s, a neighborhood fast food joint.
“If you want a burrito it’s $4.75,” Velez said. “If you add hash browns for another $1.85. It’s good."
Steep prices if you have no job and no home. But Velez is not here for the food. She’s here for the bathroom.
It’s one of the only places that will let her use it and for Velez it’s a godsend.
“She’s my customer,” Tommy’s manager Julian Sandoval said. “She’s homeless but she’s my customer.”
Judy’s family lives on an overpass just a block from Hollywood Boulevard. But they may as well be light-years away in a forgotten universe.
People walk by them but few actually see them, the nearly 9,000 homeless families in L.A., a number that’s grown by 8 percent in the last year alone.
Judy’s family ended up here after her husband Enrique was stabbed in a violent attack that left him mostly immobile. Judy has high blood pressure and diabetes and often needs a walker to get around.
Their son Henry was diagnosed with congestive heart failure after years of using meth. Another son, Gus, is homeless on a street nearby. Their dogs Ming-Ming and Bella live here too.
Enrique and Judy’s daughter Angel is in a hospital 13 miles away about to give birth.
I asked Judy what she’d do if she ever won the lottery.
“I’d buy myself a home for all my kids and my grandkids and donate the rest to homeless people,” she told me.
But the reality is her daughter, Angel, is going to need help with that new baby. And at 58, with no fixed address, they're in for a struggle.
“Jobs are too hard to come by,” she said. “Now just to work at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box, Burger King, you have to be a high school graduate and a lot of people ain’t high school graduates.”“Jobs are too hard to come by,” she said. “Now just to work at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box, Burger King, you have to be a high school graduate and a lot of people ain’t high school graduates.”
Even with Social Security and food stamps they can’t afford a studio apartment. The deposits are just too high.
In fact, their biggest assets are their phones, provided by the government to low-income families, which serve as their only form of communication and entertainment.
Those ubiquitous e-scooters on the streets? That’s where they get their juice.
Henry plugs them into a rental scooter to recharge his phone, a slow process that takes up to eight hours for a full charge.
It’s no secret the Velez family has had a rough go. Gangs, drug addiction, and prison have cycled through this family.
What they do have is time and today they’ll spend it crossing town to visit Angel and hopefully see their new granddaughter, Marlene.
It’s a rare moment of unvarnished happiness for Judy.
“I can’t wait to get to the hospital,” Judy said as she boarded a bus to Van Nuys, where her daughter was in labor.
Judy’s aware that bringing a child into the world under these conditions will be a challenge. But there are services for pregnant women living on the streets and her daughter Angel has been placed in a temporary home.
“It’s part of life,” Judy said. “There’s nothing we can prevent, other than I wish we had a home.”
Angel is excited too. Having lived on the streets, most of her life, she says she wants to break the cycle with little Marlene.
“I want her to come out already so I can spoil the heck out of her,” Angel said. “I just want what’s best for her, not to, like, to be in the situation that I was in when I was pregnant with her.”
But what should’ve been one of their happier moments, turned out to be one of their worst. A few days later, Angel had her baby but was not allowed to keep her.
Baby Marlene tested positive for meth and social services swooped in to protect her.
Angel is now back to living on the overpass with her family. Her baby has been placed in foster care.
“I have so many emotions right now,” Angel said. “The main one is I betrayed my daughter.”
Unless Angel can make some massive changes, she may not see that baby again.
To do that, she has to get clean and get off the streets.
Her boyfriend agrees.
“We got to prove everybody wrong, like, we’ve got to get clean,” Artie Rubio said.
No one has taken the news harder than Judy.
“I want to see her, I want to hold her I just look at my son’s phone, he has pictures of her,” she said.
Pictures of the baby are all they have right now and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
“I just picture sitting in a chair and watching Marlene in her swing or in her bassinet,” Judy added.
But that dream always disappears, every day that Judy wakes up in her cold hard truth.
UPDATE: Henry and Gus have found temporary housing and are off the streets, at least for now. Judy still hopes she’ll find her own place too and be able to keep her family together.