A year after four of his colleagues were killed in the largest mass shooting in San Mateo County history, Juan Flores Lopez still sorts through the mail for the man who shot them. The envelopes are posted to an address that no longer exists: a tarp-covered shack at the mushroom farm where Chunli Zhao lived before police say he went on a rampage that eventually killed seven a year ago this Tuesday.
The dead were his neighbors as well as his co-workers, farmworkers who lived together with their families in flimsy trailers steps from the sheds where they harvested shiitake mushrooms by hand. The roofs leaked, and heat and running water were no guarantee. At another farm three miles south, where Zhao is suspected of killing three people, workers lived in mold-infested rooms inside mushroom-growing warehouses.
Usually hidden from public view, the massacre brought the squalid living conditions to light. A year later, the uninhabitable trailers, including Zhao’s, at California Terra Garden have been condemned by the county and demolished. The housing at Concord Farms was vacated. Workers at both were relocated to temporary housing.
Under pressure to ensure other farmworkers wouldn’t have to endure similar conditions, county officials created a task force in February to inspect all farmworker housing in the county. The inspections are voluntary.
Both state and county dollars are targeted for new housing, but none have been completed yet.
How much has really changed in Half Moon Bay?
While living conditions for the victims have markedly improved, advocates say farmworkers across the county and beyond are still living in overcrowded, substandard housing.
“People have been fighting for farmworker wage increases and better housing conditions forever,” said Belinda Hernandez Arriaga, executive director for ALAS, a Half Moon Bay-based nonprofit that provides counseling and other services to farmworkers. “What’s really sad, when I stop and think about it, is just how long these have been the same discussion points — how is this still continuing?”
A hidden housing crisis
Coastal Half Moon Bay is an idyllic town, attracting tourists to its pristine beaches and fall pumpkin festival. Away from the coast, on acres of agricultural land, some of the county’s poorest, most vulnerable residents live together in close quarters.
Isolation is a familiar feeling for many of the workers who migrated from small, rural communities in Mexico, Guatemala and China. But that isolation — from not only the surrounding community but also supportive services — combined with decrepit living conditions also breeds conflict.
Six months before Zhao allegedly shot his colleagues at California Terra Garden, another farmworker threatened to kill Flores Lopez over a workplace dispute and fired bullets into a different co-worker’s trailer. Flores Lopez suddenly found himself confronting violence he could not have imagined in Guatemala.
“Not even in my country has anything like this happened to me,” he said in an interview in Spanish.
Flores Lopez paid the farm $1,000 a month for the trailer he shared with his wife, their four children, his sister-in-law and her two children — nine people squeezed across two bedrooms and one bathroom. Rats and roaches scurried across the floor. The kitchen stove seldom worked, so they grilled outside, supplying their own gas tank. When it rained, they hung a tarp.
“I told the owner I would be willing to make repairs to the trailer on my days off, and he always said, ‘Later,’” Flores Lopez said. “But later never arrived.”
On Jan. 23, 2023, Zhao — upset at a $100 repair bill his supervisor said he owed for damaging a forklift — reportedly entered a barn where three of his co-workers were finishing a shift and gunned them down. He headed to the trailers next, where several workers had just sat down to rest after finishing their shifts. There, he killed another worker and severely injured another, before driving to his former employer, Concord Farms, and killing three more people, police said.
In a jailhouse interview conducted in Mandarin by NBC just a few days later, Zhao admitted the killings and expressed remorse, saying he wasn’t in his right mind at the time. Held in a Redwood City jail without bail, Zhao has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. A preliminary hearing is set for March 18.
After the shooting, the county moved Flores Lopez and 40 other shellshocked workers and their families into a hotel. Many had never stayed in one before. They left the bathroom soap untouched, and eyed the continental breakfast in the morning without eating. They worried they would be charged.
City officials checked in on the families throughout the week, bringing meals and emergency supplies. After a few days, they asked the nine children if they were ready to go back to school. Many were, but felt embarrassed — they were all wearing the same clothes from a few days earlier. Their belongings remained behind at the farms, part of a crime scene.
After a week, the families were moved into short-term housing for a month, then into long-term rentals around Half Moon Bay and Moss Beach, a few miles up the road — paid for with about $1.2 million in state and federal funding. Many of the workers returned to their jobs just days after the shooting.
California Terra Garden and Concord Farms paid $121,970 and $23,404 in fines, respectively, to reimburse the cost of relocating workers and fees related to code enforcement violations for the poor living conditions.
Although California Terra Garden, which declined to comment for this story, promised it would build new housing for its farmworkers on site within a year of the shooting, a visit to the farm this January revealed no such housing. Abbey Chan, daughter of Concord Farms owner Grace Tung, told this news organization no more workers were housed at their farm, but declined to speak further.
For many of these farmworkers, this past year is the first time they have lived outside the shadow of their employer since they arrived in Half Moon Bay. A farmworker earning minimum wage — around $17 an hour — may have no option but to rent from their employer. But the relationship makes it difficult for farmworkers, beholden to the company for their wages and work visas, to complain about living conditions.
“There’s a lot of things the farmworkers are afraid to speak up about because they could lose their housing,” said Half Moon Bay Mayor Joaquin Jimenez. “We need an alternative.”
Advocates for workers are pushing state and county officials to build more housing for workers away from farms.
The state has allocated more than $6 million to help build nearly 50 planned farmworker homes near California Terra Garden. A 40-unit affordable apartment complex for senior farmworkers is also in the works in Half Moon Bay. And county officials recently agreed to a $9 million purchase of a 50-acre former commercial property in Half Moon Bay that could be developed into 100 more units.
Together, the projects will serve to bring the workers closer to the community that they work so hard to feed, said Hernandez Arriaga, the farmworker advocate.
“Why are we only thinking about farmworkers living on farms?” she asked. “Why don’t they deserve to live in downtown and thriving areas?”
Inspections reveal previously unknown farmworker housing
Flores Lopez, 35, now commutes from his temporary home in Moss Beach to California Terra Garden. Each day, he passes the vacant lots where his colleagues were killed.
“It’s sad to see it empty here because we lived here for so long,” he said. “It’s like remembering another life.”
At the time of the shooting, county officials couldn’t explain why the poor living conditions for so many farmworkers were allowed to persist. The county said it was only aware of 16 agricultural properties with permits to house laborers. It has since identified 110 total farms housing hundreds of workers in single-family homes, campers and small cabins.
Inspectors have so far visited around 80 properties, finding problems at about 20% of the individual units they’ve examined, county officials said. The county intends to visit every farm within the next few months and wants to work with the owners to make the unlivable units habitable. County officials said they’ve so far identified about 290 workers living at local farms. A Half Moon Bay planning document from December indicated 68 farmworkers lived in units that required corrective action.
While the task force has yet to release its full findings, officials said most issues have been relatively minor, such as missing smoke detectors or waste management issues. County inspectors mainly look for serious safety concerns, including mold or exposed electrical wires. Inspectors then return to properties to ensure any problems are resolved.
Farm Bureau president BJ Burns is among the 16 farm owners in the county who has already secured the proper permits to house workers at his family farm in Pescadero, and he supports the county’s efforts to scrutinize such housing.
“I think they should be inspected — that way, we wouldn’t be in the predicament we’re in here today,” he said.
But not all farmers were so willing. The county’s efforts sparked fears among some farms that the inspections would violate property owners’ right to privacy. After a brief pause this summer to hear those concerns, the county continued with its inspections in August on a voluntary basis. Most farms have agreed to the searches.
Farms typically offer workers housing because there are so few affordable options elsewhere. After decades of coastal communities blocking new development, housing scarcity has pushed rents to over $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom. The last time the county built any affordable housing for farmworkers was in 2001.
But with an immediate need to rehouse the 19 households displaced by the shooting, the county is working to gather $20 million in funding to build 49 small, manufactured homes just up the street from California Terra Garden. The workers could move in by early 2025.
“We are far from where we were a year ago,” said San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, who pushed hard for the new housing after viewing the squalid living conditions at the two farms immediately following the shooting. “We have made big strides this year in terms of building a better future for farmworkers in San Mateo County.”
Yingze Wang, 69, and Jinsheng Liu, 68, are finally getting a taste of that life after six years in a single room at Concord Farms. In the week before the shooting, heavy rainwater from January storms flooded their floors. To sop up the water, Wang bought diapers to line the seams of the walls.
For the last year, the county has provided the couple with a modest two-bedroom duplex in El Granada. It’s a short bus ride from the Half Moon Bay Senior Center, where on Thursdays they meet for choir practice and, afterward, a free lunch. The program from their choir’s performance earlier this month hangs in a frame on their bedroom wall. Neither of them have gone back to work.
“I like it much better here,” Wang said in Mandarin through an interpreter. “I want to stay here and live here.”
But the El Granada home is a temporary one until the county completes the new manufactured home site. To keep workers in their current leases until then, the city of Half Moon Bay is trying to raise $1 million. So far, the city has contributed $300,000, most from its development impact fee fund, and has raised about $250,000 in private donations.
Recently, Flores Lopez and his co-workers visited the site of their future homes at Stone Pine Cove. Sometimes at work, they remind each other: “We’re going to be neighbors again.”
For Flores Lopez, it doesn’t matter if he’s in a big house in Moss Beach or a new county-funded manufactured home on Stone Pine Road. He’s just grateful to have a roof over his head so he can keep working and providing for his family.
“As long as my wife and children are comfortable,” he said, “I will be, too.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com