How Grassroots Activism and a Lifetime’s Worth of Vintage Are Helping a Beloved Los Angeles Local Stay Housed in Echo Park
A rack of vintage dresses flutters softly in the breeze as friends, neighbors, and members of the LA Tenants Union (LATU) pack the front yard of 1553 Ewing Street, a pale green Queen Anne Victorian with a cedar tree out front in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
That house is where 68-year-old Lupe Breard was raised, where she eventually raised her own three children, and where she has been fighting to remain since real estate investment company NELA Group bought the house in 2018, after Breard’s mother’s death, and attempted to evict her and her 73-year-old sister, Sarah Padilla, in 2022.
This past Sunday afternoon, the scene on Ewing Street could be mistaken for any of the many tchotchke-studded yard sales that Breard—a longtime collector of antique and retro items—has held over the years with the LATU to raise money both for her eviction case, and to have the Ewing Street house designated as a historic-cultural monument. The key difference is in the spirit of celebration in the air, thanks to a judge’s ruling that Breard could, indeed, stay in her longtime home.
“Things have been so crazy in LA, with the recent ICE raids and in our organizing, that we have to be really intentional about having days like today where we celebrate,” LATU member Lupita Limón Corrales tells me. “There’s so much work ahead, but it’s really sweet to see everyone together.” As we speak, children race by shouting for more carne asada and Jarritos in English and Spanish, while LATU volunteers silk-screen T-shirts and help to sell Lupe’s clothes. Nearby, a shrine to housing activist Benito Flores—who died last week while fighting eviction from his home in El Sereno—glows softly from Breard’s porch.
A self-described “autonomous housing movement” established in 2015, the LATU is committed to helping longtime Los Angeles residents like Breard remain in their homes amid the city’s rent hikes and mass evictions. On June 27, one of the many long days that made up Breard’s eviction trial at downtown Los Angeles’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse, Limón Corrales testified on behalf of the LATU. She explained to the jury that she’d first met Breard as a neighbor before they started organizing together and became close friends. When, in one tense moment, the attorney representing NELA Group’s co-CEO and chief financial officer, Marissa Solis, barked, “So you think housing is a human right?” Corrales replied, calmy and simply: “Yes.”
The strain of the court proceedings has undoubtedly taken a toll on Breard, who is known around Echo Park for her sociability and generosity. (Indeed, when I interviewed her for this story, I had to regretfully decline to take one of Breard’s many vintage purses home with me, despite her urging.) Living with a disability that makes her unable to find traditional work, she has been forced to constantly strategize merely to keep a roof over her head.
“My mom is not materially empowered to take control of her home or really have any kind of security in it, and it’s like she’s been under siege throughout this whole eviction process,” says Breard’s 32-year-old son Wesley, who was also called to testify during his mother’s trial last month. “It’s been so invasive and disempowering.”
Still, when I speak to Breard at the Ewing house, in a room upstairs lined wall-to-wall with trinkets she’s amassed over the years, she is joyful, walking me through narrow entryways crammed with a rainbow of books and pointing out special pieces—a ceramic poodle statue, a framed photograph of her family—in what she affectionately calls “the mess” of her children’s former rooms.
