Farmworkers are living 20 to a house in California's "salad bowl"
Some farmworkers sleep in cars, motels, garages, converted school buses, and
reportedly even chicken coops—which helps explain why 1 in 3 students in the Salinas school district are technically homeless. Many more share apartments with strangers, sometimes dozens of them, leading to public health concerns. The poor conditions have deterred some families from moving to the area or staying there, contributing to a worker shortage that has affected the ag industry’s bottom line.
Housing prices have skyrocketed in much of California in recent years, and the situation is dire for many of the 90,000 farmworkers in Salinas and neighboring Pajaro Valley, about 100 miles south of San Francisco. According to the survey of 420 workers, they earn an average of $25,000 a year per household, though a typical two-bedroom apartment in Salinas rents for $1,600 a month. Only 1 in 10 of them own a home or mobile home, and the rest rent, sometimes cutting back on food or medical care to cover housing costs. On average, more than seven people share a one-bedroom unit—though some apartments are more crammed: In one case, 40 people were lodged into a three-bedroom home with just two bathrooms, according to Ildi Cummins-Carlisle, a survey coordinator at CIRS.
And these aren’t all single migrant men. The survey found that most of the farmworkers are married immigrants who came from Mexico more than a decade ago and now live year-round in the region with their US-born children. Some parents teared up while describing their kids’ living conditions, like a father who worried about whether his daughters could safely use their home’s bathroom at night with dozens of strangers sleeping in the hallway and the living room. Kids sometimes have to wait so long for the bathroom they develop urinary tract infections, and when they get hungry, it’s often not possible to cook. One in five respondents of the survey didn’t have a kitchen.