Serving Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Los Cerritos, Wrigley and Signal Hill with 30,000 issues every Friday
VOL. XLII NO. 34
Your Weekly Community Newspaper
www.signaltribune.com
HOUSING
‘They could no longer keep me’
Long Beach Tenants Union raises money for local woman displaced during pandemic Karla Enriquez Digital Editor
A
t a time when the public is being asked to stay home due to the pandemic, some renters worry about eviction while others are being pushed out of their housing in the City of Long Beach. As the pandemic continues, many have lost their jobs and face economic hardship. According to the Employment Development Department’s Labor Market Information, the unemployment rate in Long Beach was 20.4% in April of 2020 and increased to 20.8% in May. Preliminary information regarding the unemployment rate for June 2020 states that it has decreased to 19.5%, in comparison to June 2019 when the unemployment rate was 4.5%. In order to help those who have been financially impacted by the pandemic, the Long Beach City Council approved an eviction moratorium for lack of payment in late March and that was extended recently until the end of September. With the community in mind, The Long Beach Tenants Union
Image courtesy of Long Beach Tenants Union via Instagram
Rosa Marina Lima, 67, was displaced from her home during the pandemic.
created the BIPOC Housing Rescue Fund. The Long Beach Tenants Union was launched in Dec. 2017 by organizers who wanted to create a collective tenant voice in the city of Long Beach. The union lay dormant to restrategize for a good portion of 2019, but due to the economic impacts of the pandemic ailing the community, organizers
and activists reconnected under the Long Beach Tenants Union, according to Michael Belous who is part of the union. The rescue fund was created on GoFundMe on July 14 by Belous and Maria Lopez, director of community organizing for Housing Long Beach, a local non-profit working to “improve, preserve and increase affordable housing,”
according to the organization’s Facebook. “[The fund] was created due to the life-threatening impacts of the pandemic and widespread unemployment that has many Long Beach renters now more than ever on the verge of being pushed out,” Belous said in a statement to the Signal Tribune. According to Belous, the fund is meant to combat renters being pushed out of their housing by using grassroots tactics to raise funds. These funds will go directly to tenants who connect with the Long Beach Tenants Union. The money donated to the fund is intended to be used for the following: rent, security deposits, utilities, clothing, furinture and hygiene supplies. “These tenants are either currently fighting eviction or have recently been pushed out,” Belous said. “Funds raised will be distributed to all community members with a focus on marginalized voices. It was created by LBTU organizers and Housing Long Beach staff who are tenants and part of the union.” One such tenant is Rosa Marina Lima, a 67-year-old Long Beach resident for over 17 years, whose primary job has been as a child care provider and has been displaced at least two times during the pandemic. According to Lima, she cur-
During its Aug. 11 virtual meeting, the Signal Hill City Council agreed to allow a company working for Verizon Wireless to install a new cellphone tower at 1320 E. Hill St. in the parking lot of an office-and-warehouse complex near the intersection of Hill Street and Orange Avenue. The council conducted a public hearing on the wireless-communications facility (WCF) before granting a conditional-use permit (CUP)
to Sequoia Deployment Services to install the tower for Verizon. Associate Planner Ryan Agbayani said the tower will look like a fake palm tree, or “monopalm,” and will expand Verizon cell service for the surrounding area that includes both Signal Hill and Long Beach. “Nearby uses include the Zinnia workforce housing, Signal Hill Elementary to the east, and Long Beach residential dwellings to the south and west,” Agbayani said. The area already has two other monopalms across the intersection, owned by AT&T and T-Mobile,
Agbayani said. The new Verizon Wireless facility will have 12 8-foot panel antennas, 12 remote radio units, three surge protectors, a 4-foot microwave dish, three equipment cabinets and a 15-kilowatt standby generator, Agbayani said. All equipment will be contained within a 16-square-foot space enclosed by a guard rail. The CUP also requires the owner to mark 21 parking stalls near the site, based on the size of the office-and-warehouse property, Agbayani said. The property owner will have to pave and stripe 9 additional
112-page equity report proposed, budget scrutinzed by the public Emma DiMaggio Production Manager
stalls than it already has and remove storage that blocks some of them. The project has been in the works since 2018, when Verizon Wireless saw a need to increase its 4G cellular coverage in the area, Agbayani said. However, its initial proposal to install a WCF at a nearby site was dropped because it couldn’t ensure the required parking. A year later, Verizon selected the current site for a tower and polled neighbors and made sure its 83-foot tower didn’t obstruct property see SH CITY COUNCIL page 4
see LB CITY COUNCIL page 6
see EVICTION page 7
New cellphone tower in Signal Hill will expand coverage Senior Writer
LONG BEACH CITY COUNCIL
On June 9, the Long Beach City Council approved the creation of a racial reconciliation framework. Yesterday, Tuesday, August 11, just two months after the initial motion, city staff presented a 112-page racial equity and reconciliation report. The report and subsequent framework is the product of over 1,500 voices utilizing four town hall meetings, fifteen listening sessions for community members and two for city employees. The framework laid out four goals for the city, which come with corresponding actions for improvement: 1. End systematic racism in Long Beach, in all local government and partner agencies, through internal transformation 2. Design and invest in community safety and violence prevention 3. Redesign police approach to community safety 4. Improve health and wellness in the City by eliminating social and economic disparities in the communities most impacted by racism “These patterns of disparity, they don’t happen by accident. They’re a result of systems and systems are laced with values based on race and gender, values of policy-makers and influencers,” Councilmember Rex Richardson said. “This moment demands we take a critical look at the persistent health and economic disparities within our city and understand how public institutions perpetuate inequity so that we can lead meaningful system change.” Conversations about reconciliation were born out of civil unrest in the city and throughout the nation. The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers catalyzed a nationwide movement against police brutality and, more fundamentally, racial inequities within the country. As George Floyd’s death served as a catalyst for change, Coun-
SIGNAL HILL CITY COUNCIL
Anita W. Harris
August 14, 2020