Victor Rodas had been self-employed most of his adult life. The native of Guatemala earned a university degree in communications in Mexico, where he met a young woman named Gladys. They married and had three children: Victoria, Hugo and Natalia.

He worked hard selling and installing satellite dishes, making a good living until the nation suffered an economic downturn in the early '90s. So the family moved to Southern California in 1995, with the immigrant dream of living a better life.

The industrious father became a telemarketer, selling English, mechanic and computer video courses for awhile, at the same time continuing to install satellite dishes. He built up a solid Latino customer base with the dishes until the mega-companies started marketing Hispanics with installation discounts he couldn't compete with.

"So I lost my job," the 53-year-old Rodas recalls, sitting outside at a lunch table behind Blessed Sacrament School and Church, where he is a eucharistic minister, lector and adult catechist. "And my rent had increased in 2004 from $1,100 to $1,600. All of a sudden, I found myself with no job and no way to pay that rent any more."

Victor went to the city's housing department, but the person he talked to said there was nothing they could do. His apartment building, like most in Hollywood today, wasn't old enough to qualify for rent control. (October 1, 1978, is the cutoff date for most buildings in L.A.)

As the family's meager savings dried up, his first thought was to find a place to stay for his wife and two teenage kids still living at home. The only solution was for wife Gladys and Natalia to move in with oldest daughter Victoria, while son Hugo could stay with a friend's family.

Victor would have to make do in his 1996 Dodge Caravan, along with the family's pet shihtzu, Gypsy.

During the day, he tried to find a decent tree to park under that would block part of the broiling September sun. But at night he often found a spot in Blessed Sacrament's cracked asphalt lot. Then in the morning, he'd avail himself of a shower the parish's social service center provided for the homeless.

This went on for four weeks until Jesuit Father Michael Mandala, pastor of Blessed Sacrament, found out and offered help in locating temporary housing for the down-and-out parishioner.

"I didn't want them to know and cause problems, 'cause I wanted to solve the problem myself," Victor confides. "But, eventually, I couldn't make it by myself, so the help they gave me was really at a very important moment of my life. My homeless time was hard - very, very sad. It was such a disgrace.

"But I knew that something good was going to happen to me," he adds in a different voice. "I saw this bad situation as something that I needed to pass through. Because I believe that sometimes we need to pass through all these hardships in order to be better people and grow internally, spiritually."

On December 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Victor dared to ask the Virgin for a favor. Lamenting how her son had seemingly forgotten him, he asked that she find him at least a "very, very humble job."

A few hours later in the parking lot where he'd sleep for a month, the struggling father met a man in a van who desperately needed a driver to take people to the airport because his license had just expired.

That job led Victor to using his van under contract to pick up expired cable equipment from homes to the job he has today - both selling and installing cable and internet services and equipment for Time Warner Cable.

"My job for me is a dream job," he says, grinning and shaking his head.

But Victor believes he's just as blessed to have found a rent-controlled apartment only two blocks from Blessed Sacrament. "I pay $600 a month for a one bedroom," he says, still smiling. "You know, most managers keep those apartments for their friends or families. The landlord didn't even know me.

"So I consider that a miracle," he adds. "Because before I had looked for a year and couldn't fine one. It was a miracle."

A 'broken' system
At a July 16 town hall meeting in Blessed Sacrament Church hosted by LA VOICE-PICO, an interfaith organization of 25 congregations across Los Angeles, Victor Rodas and others reported their housing horror stories. After, members called on City Council President Eric Garcetti, who represents Hollywood, Deputy Mayor Helmi Hisserich, Housing Department General Manager Mercedes Marquez and other city officials present to jump-start efforts in educating tenants about their rights plus increasing access to affordable housing.

"We got promises that were made, and we are expecting they're going to be kept," said Polo Morales, communications and development director of the grass-roots organization. "We're very optimistic that they are going to hold to these promises, and we'll make sure that they are held accountable."

But promises about increasing affordable housing in Los Angeles have been made before. On October 25, 2005, with great fanfare, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at a housing summit announced an initiative to raise funding in the city's Affordable Housing Trust Fund to $100 million.

The official press release by the mayor's office that day proclaimed, "The City's commitment lays a solid foundation for increased production of affordable housing and will be augmented by private funding. The effort represents a promising new partnership between the City of Los Angeles, the philanthropic community and the private sector."

Recently, the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger & Homelessness pointed out that of the 2,127 units financed by the Housing Trust Fund during the last two years, only 8 percent have been awarded to people who earn less than $15,000 a year (30 percent of area media income).

This is in spite of the fact that the first two target categories in the Trust Fund are permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless and poor, and highly subsidized housing for families earning 30 percent of area media income. The other two categories are workforce housing for those earning up to 150 percent of area median income and "market rate" housing.

The local hunger and homeless coalition concluded, "Clearly the mayor's priorities have been on the latter [two categories], rather than creating permanent housing to prevent and end homelessness. Thus, although the Trust Fund is creating new units, it pales in comparison to the 32,000 high-end units being constructed, mostly expensive condos and lofts."

Housing California (HCA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to meeting the housing needs in the state, simply calls the housing market in Los Angeles County "broken." Not surprisingly, it reports that wages aren't keeping pace with housing costs, and the variety of affordable home choices is small.

HCA stresses that "key contributors" to the local economy can no longer afford to rent a place to live. Last year, a resident of the county had to have an annual income of $50,760 to afford a two-bedroom apartment. On average, social workers, pre-school teachers and mail carriers earn less.

Meanwhile, home-ownership is simply out of reach for most Angelenos. While median household income in Los Angeles County is $56,200, a first-time buyer must earn $141,340 to afford a median-priced home ($494,690).

"Today's housing market is the equivalent of a supermarket that sells [filet] mignon and caviar, but no hamburger or macaroni and cheese," Housing California observes.

Gentrification has led to more and more rent-controlled apartment buildings being gobbled up by huge firms of property owners and transferred to "market-rate" units - either for sale as lofts and condominiums or for rent as luxury apartments.

Since 2001, well over 11,000 of these city apartments that have been lifesavers for low-income and working class families have disappeared, according to the Los Angeles Housing Department. Thousands have been converted to expensive condos priced at $500,000 for a tiny studio and more than $1 million for a two-bedroom. Meanwhile, rents, especially in recent trendy locales near Metro stations, have jumped dramatically.

And with its ongoing renewal, no place is hotter right now than Hollywood.

Harder for families
Father Mandala has been pastor of Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard for the last nine years. The Jesuit and former community organizer in Santa Ana, Fresno and Oakland - who helped launch LA VOICE in the late 1990s and is still a board member - has watched the so-called "revitalization" of Hollywood up close. He's seen the seediest streets cleaned up and many ancient apartments converted to condos and luxury apartments.

He's in favor of all that. He's less supportive of working and middle class families, along with senior citizens on fixed incomes, being driven out of their community by a handful of developers interested only in enriching themselves.

"I would say it's an 'evolving crisis' in the sense that as more high-priced condominiums and apartments are being built, more and more landlords are saying, 'We've got to get rid of the tenants who have rent-controlled apartments,'" he reports.

"So just about every week, somebody is coming to us at the church with a heart-moving story about they'd love to continue living here but they can't. They've got to leave this community, their family. And they have to move to the Valley, to San Bernardino, to New Mexico - someplace where they can buy a home or rent something that's affordable."

When Father Mandala came to Blessed Sacrament, the area was pretty downtrodden, with drug dealers selling their wares and prostitutes selling their services openly. "So I like the idea that Hollywood is being revitalized. That's great!" he declares. "I just think the benefits should accrue to all the people, not just a certain segment of the people."

It's especially difficult for families with kids to live in Hollywood today as it becomes more and more gentrified, he points out. White collar are replacing blue collar workers. Gays are replacing straight couples as West Hollywood moves east. All good people, he says, but not people who have large families with lots of children.

"It's harder for families with kids to live here," Father Mandala observes, "because it's expensive."

So there are many stories like Victor Rodas'.

"We've had kids in our school whose folks are living in a car," Father Mandala says. "It's just part of living in this community at this time. What we see is the change in demographics. So the population of the school is going down because we have a number of kids whose family can't afford to live here. So they're moving out. There's still a lot of kids in CCD [religious education] classes for public school students. But the number is down to about 300 from 450 in previous years."

A moral problem
Father Mandala stresses that while Hollywood is currently undergoing a housing crisis, the underlying reality is that almost all of Los Angeles has a housing shortage, especially in affordable housing. He believes it's a moral problem that needs to be directly addressed by more churches and congregations.

"People do have a right to survive, so food and health and housing are inalienable rights of some kind or other," he observes. "Our society mandates that our morality will just not let us leave people to die of starvation or to live in the streets without an effort to provide food and housing.

"The moral imperative, I believe, is that we're making use of people's labor. We're paying them a salary, and with that salary they can't afford to live in a decent house. There's something that's morally wrong with that."

Still, the seasoned pastor also believes it's not inevitable that Hollywood will be the next Southland community to go the gentrification route. On the national level, he notes that both his Jesuit community and U.S. bishops are supporting the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act of 2007. The act would set up a fund for the production, preservation and rehabilitation of 1.5 million affordable homes in 10 years, with at least 75 percent of the money going to "extremely low" income households.

Locally, according to Father Mandala, there are solid economic reasons for having mixed housing in Hollywood and other burgeoning Southern California neighborhoods.

"It makes economic sense because business owners have to have employees," he says. "If those employees have to commute in from Lancaster to work as a dishwasher in Hollywood, it doesn't make economic sense. What makes sense is to have housing for employees that's reasonable and reasonably close to the businesses where the employees are working.

"So somehow or other to provide housing for the different economic levels of our community is a goal of not only LA VOICE but the Chamber of Commerce and the business community as well. How we get there, we have different opinions about whether it should be voluntary or mandated. But the goal is the same."