LA family’s dream home turns into a nightmare over neighbor’s makeshift junkyard: ‘We are trapped here’
A Los Angeles family’s dream home has slowly become a cluttered nightmare as their next-door neighbor has morphed his sprawling, six-acre property into a hazardous junkyard.
Elena Malone said she and her husband had “fallen in love” with their three-bedroom home in Sun Valley when they purchased the $1.2 million property in 2021 — finding it the perfect spot to raise their two children, KTLA reported.
However, the place she once believed was “safe” for their kids changed when their next-door neighbor’s junk collection “multiplied,” with “burnt car batteries, bags of trash, debris, moldy clothes” and even medical waste piling up outside the family’s front gate.
An aerial video of the property taken by KTLA shows dozens of vehicles, large appliances like refrigerators, and even a shipping container cluttered together so densely, it appears impossible to navigate through them.
The area’s proneness to wildfires most worries the mother of two — especially with fire season approaching.
“If there is a fire and we can’t get out our front gate, we are trapped here,” Malone told the outlet.
La Tuna Canyon, a hiking trail within Sun Valley, has notoriously been prone to wildfires.
The 2017 La Tuna Fire spread over 7,000 acres (11 square miles), making it the largest Los Angeles wildfire in the last 50 years.
Oddly enough, that fire may be responsible for the Malone family’s problem with their hoarding neighbor.
The property owner, Mary Ferrera, whose son David Ferrera lives at the makeshift junkyard, told the LA Times that when fires destroyed most of the property in 2017, her son’s hoarding turned into the mess the neighborhood is dealing with today.
“He began scavenging metal to survive, which may have triggered or worsened his hoarding,” the 80-year-old retired school teacher told the outlet.
His issue only worsened in the years to follow as the property endured more fires than mudslides.
“We think that the trauma of all this, and possibly some unresolved past trauma, led to his acquisition of more and more ‘things’ to replace what was lost,” Mary Ferrera wrote.
Prior to the Malone family moving in next door, an anonymous tipster in 2020 accused the property owner of running an unlicensed junkyard, according to the LA Times.
That year, multiple government agencies conducted surveys of the land, especially since one claim accused the Ferreras of “dumping chemical drums in the stream,” the LAPD told the outlet.
The EPA counted 114 vehicles on the property that year, five of which were deemed “of interest” by the California Highway Patrol and could have possibly been stolen or involved in a crime.
Even more concerning, the EPA found the soil had high levels of arsenic, lead, cobalt and other substances that exceeded federal safety standards.
They declared the makeshift junkyard contained “high levels of hazardous substances” during their assessment four years ago.
A 2021 EPA report called for excavating and disposing of the contaminated soil, but Mary Ferrera told the outlet that the agency “dropped us like a hot potato,” and they haven’t heard from them in three years, according to the LA Times.
David Ferrera, 50, has lived rent-free at the makeshift junkyard after his mother took over the deed in 2014 because he wasn’t making payments on the land.
Mary Ferrera says she understands she’s “an enabler,” but she can’t force him to leave because she loves her son too much to kick him to the curb.
“It’s an addiction,” she told the LA Times about her son’s hoarding problem. “It’s one of the hardest mental illnesses to help.”
However, for Malone, the addiction is affecting her family’s life and was made worse when her husband, Josh, was diagnosed with cancer.
“My husband just finished treatment for cancer,” she told KTLA.
“I was stuck behind this gate when he was undergoing chemotherapy, vomiting, and I couldn’t get out to go pick him up because there was a car here.”
Malone said that after that incident, she turned to city officials to resolve the issue but has yet to see any real progress.
“LAPD says, ‘We won’t go on the property because it’s hazardous waste.’ EPA says, ‘We’re only concerned with what’s under the property, but we can’t go on it because there’s too many vehicles. So until LA city clears it, we won’t go on the property,’” she explained.
She worries that progress on cleaning up the hazardous clutter will only come after something tragic happens.
“All of those agencies have failed our family and the whole community. I mean, it feels like at this point they’re just waiting for the next fire,” Malone said.
