For over a century, Los Angeles has presented itself as an Eden of single-family homes. But a Times investigation shows how it's now one of the most crowded cities in the U.S.
Los Angeles for decades advertised itself as an American Eden. But it ignored repeated warnings about the consequences of overcrowding on the working class. Now, when the situation is worse than ever, calls to fix it continue to go nowhere.
Today, we talk about an L.A. Times analysis that found that more people are squeezing into fewer rooms in L.A. than any other large county in America. And it’s been a disaster for public health, even before COVID-19 began to spread. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times housing reporter Liam Dillon and features reporter Brittny Mejia
More reading:
Packed In: Overcrowded housing in Los Angeles has brought death by design
L.A.’s love of sprawl made it America’s most overcrowded place. The poor pay a deadly price
One family’s desperate act to escape overcrowding
This is an unedited transcript. We apologize for the mistakes. A corrected transcript is coming soon.
Gustavo Arellano: Los Angeles County. It’s a sprawling metropolis. Second largest city in the United States… And also one of its most crowded.
A Times analysis found more people are squeezing into fewer rooms in L.A. county than any other large county in America.
And it’s been a disaster for public health, even before COVID-19 began to spread.
CLIP: It makes perfect sense. When you're talking about infectious diseases, communicable diseases, the closer people are to other people. The more time they are in that close proximity, the easier it is for you to get spread. It's the issue at schools. It's the issue at some of our work sites. And it's obviously the issues in many of our homes.
BEAT drop 1
I’m Gustavo Arellano. You’re listening to The Times, essential news from the L.A. Times.
It’s Wednesday, October 19, 2022.
Today…Los Angeles for decades advertised itself as an American Eden. But it ignored repeated warnings about the consequences of overcrowding on the working class. Now, when the situation is worse than ever and spreading, calls to fix it continue to go nowhere.
Mux bump to fade out
Gustavo: My colleagues Brittny Mejia and Liam Dillon just published a huge investigation on this matter. Brittny is a feature writer, Liam covers housing. Both of ustedes, welcome to The Times.
LIAM DILLON: Thank you.
BRITTNY MEJIA: Thanks so much.
GUSTAVO: There's so many stories that you folks did, issues, profiles, analysis, of all the people you talked to who especially stood out to you?
BRITTNY: Yeah, so when we started reporting this story we really wanted to illustrate what a heavy toll overcrowding has had on communities for us Leonard Miranda and his living situation was the clearest example of that.
mux in
BRITTNY: Leonardo was a construction worker living in Pico Union. He caught covid first. And he shared the bathroom, kitchen, and dining room inside of the main house. and from there it really started to spread. It spread to someone sleeping in the laundry room floor, sleeping on likethree red cushions. It spread to a grandfather to his grandson. And then by the time that was over two people in the house had died, including Leonard.
mux out
BRITTNY: If you look at Miranda’s neighborhood, Pico Union, that's actually one of the most overcrowded neighborhoods in the country. They have an overcrowding rate of 40%. and that's in comparison to L.A. which overcrowding rate is 11%. So there's a huge difference there. it actually is denser than New York City.
And when you look at the Covid impact, I mean there have been tens of thousands of cases, like nearly 16,000 covid cases and nearly 300 people who have died of the virus, which is one of L.A. County's highest death rates.
LIAM: I think what was really, striking about this whole endeavor was to understand the extent to which sort of L.A. development history led up to the point that, you know,a significant driver of the mass death, frankly, that L.A. has seen over the last three years during the pandemic, is overcrowded housing. and seeing how this sort of century of decisions that we've made, as a region, led to that was striking and deeply sobering, and deeply troubling We found the founding myth of modern Los Angeles as a sort of nation's capital of single family home sprawl, also ultimately, led to this sort of cruel paradox, which is the region is the most crowded in the country and has been for quite some time.
GUSTAVO: So how far back into L.A. history did you have to go to understand what was happening with overcrowding or how we got to this moment?
LIAM: Well, really in a sense, the start of modern L.A.
old-timey mux in
LIAM: Back in the 1880s when,you know, the rail lines were connected here and a bunch of boosters where they were the Chamber of Commerce types or the L.A. Times owners themselves and, uh, and others, you know, sold this place, Los Angeles, which was essentially nothing, into this potential paradise.
Pearl. Probably no single area holding so much of charm and beauty and the good things of life as Southern Californian.
LIAM: that got away from the idea of what was happening in East Coast and Midwest cities of being, you know, having high density
From the beautifully designed Spanish type station at Los Angeles, in the heart of the [00:04:00] city of the Angels, the thrill of Southern California is in the air.
and the sales pitch of L.A. is this bringing the mix of, all the things you can get in the cities
Fine buildings, huge store. Busy citizens
your. Playhouses and you're, you know, well integrated economy and all those sorts of things.
A city which has grown faster than any other in America in the past decade, and which sees a constant day to day influx of people from every part of the world.
LIAM: With the space that you could have in the countryside.That was the deep sell.
In the year since the turn of the century, Los Angeles has grown from a sleepy pueblo to a vast seating metropolitan city.
LIAM: And that went on for decades and decades and decades and led la to be the place that it is.
mux out
GUSTAVO: And what's interesting is, When we think of housing in big cities, the stereotype is always a place like New York, you know, tall buildings, public housing // very dense. And yeah, L.A. has that obviously, and it has had that. For a long time, but the defining feature for the city and the county is suburban sprawl, single family housing, specifically. Liam, how did that become the priority as the region grew?
LIAM: So that idea was part of this founding myth of Los Angeles. And I think it's important to note that this founding myth of Los Angeles was specifically designated for, you know, white residents to come here from other parts of the country. When you talk about what the world was like for Black families who may have been trying to escape Jim Crow laws and, Asian families who came here to build railroads. And, ultimately, you know, Mexican families who came here to build houses, and work in slaughterhouses and all the things in the early, you late 19th and early 20th century, the response among the power brokers in this city was essentially exclusion, you know, this single-family-home dream was marketed and sold as something that would be predominantly for white residents to come here.
Gustavo: And tis idea, Liam, of like, Oh, Southern California is wonderful. It's gorgeous, it's a paradise. Historians call that boosterism. And as you mentioned earlier, the Los Angeles Times was notorious for that and a very specific type of boosterism.
Liam: Right. So that boosterism was extremely prevalent. I mean, it's the idea of, you know, um, you could see from mountain to sea, you have, you yourself get a house and an orange tree in your backyard and with a manicured lawn. The weather of course being the central, the central sales point, which, you know, frankly it probably still is today, but like that's the deal. So we shouldn't underestimate how significant this booster campaign was. I mean, there were newsreels, there were billboards, there were postcard songs, cartoons, newspaper ads, and really they've just sent this one overriding message to the rest of the country, which was, Come! You know, uh, there was this ad we found from 1921 at the Times that was titled to Great Southwest. And I'll just quote a little bit from it.
booster song mux in
LIAM: You know, here where nature, and I'm bringing my booster voice, here where nature has built her finest playground, man has added the material things that provide the comforts that make life worthwhile. Thousands, thousands have come to enjoy the life in the mountains near the sea, and the citrus groves and amid the forever blooming garden. And yet, but a fraction of the resources of this wonderful country have been developed.
mux fade out
LIAM: And so, you know, orange groves, you get your house, you get your backyard, you know, you get all these things and you could only get them with the best weather in the world in Los Angeles.
BRITTNY: These postcards that we have from that time period too. It's all greetings from California, from the land of heart's desire. It's the same thing talking about the orange growing, the fruit trees, and every postcard it had a house. So it's just this idea yes, come here and you will have your own house.
GUSTAVO: But again, as, uh, the both of you mentioned, it was, “come here” basically if you're white, but black folks came in Latinos, everyone, everyone tried to come into L.A. and, you know, starting in twenties and thirties, But how did Los Angeles sure that people of color did not live in these white communities and we're not able to get part of that, uh, boosterism dream?
LIAM: So there were formal and informal ways of doing this. I mean, some of the formal ways with that, there were these racially restrictive covenants that developers would put in to communities that were being built. You know, we found an ad from 1925 in the Times that touted that, quote, the residents of Eagle Rock are all of the white race. There was legalized segregation that ensured that, you know, this sort of city of homes, which is a frequent theme among the boosters and what the L.A. Times in particular called what Los Angeles would be, would only be for, you know, white people.
GUSTAVO: And Brittny, that's when you started seeing the first, catastrophic effects of overcrowding.
BRITTNY: Right, exactly. I mean we were seeing cases of, you know, house courts like groupings of small wooden shacks and sheds. It's often filled with four or five people per room. I mean, these were Mexican laborers who were crowding into these conditions, and that's when tuberculosis started to spread.
LIAM: And I think it's important to note, I mean, this is, you know, a hundred years before the pandemic that we're in now. And you know, this problem was arising in over credit homes in Mexican neighborhoods and Latino neighborhoods. It's the same as it is today. And so there was a warning sign for what was going to happen, a century later in Los Angeles. And not only that, we should emphasize that, a lot of our research found that these public health and political leaders knew that overcrowded housing was driving the spread of tuberculosis, which spread through the air, just like Covid 19 is.
mux in
LIAM: Yet, instead of realizing the housing was the issue and the conditions where the issue and the low pay was the issue for these Mexican laborers, they blamed Mexicans themself – blamed, blamed race. And that, you know, will be a troubling theme that we found [00:10:00] sort of throughout the century.
GUSTAVO: Coming up after the break, an exploding population, bulldozed Mexican neighborhoods and garages become shelters of the last resort.
mux out
break 1
GUSTAVO: We're back with Brittny Mejia and Liam Dillon and my colleagues at the Times, It’s baseball playoff time, and the L.A. Dodgers are sadly out of the playoffs already, which means a lost opportunity for the country to learn about one of the most notorious incidents in L.A. housing history. Liam, what was it?
LIAM: So on the site, uh, where Dodger Stadium is, today, it was not supposed to be at Dodger Stadium. It was not supposed to be a baseball stadium at all, but rather it was supposed to be one of the largest public housing developments in the country, known [00:11:00] as Elysian Park Heights. And that was planned to relieve a significant housing shortage, that the city had had. After World War II. And the issue though, was that there were many Mexican, predominantly Mexican families who were living in those communities, who ultimately were forced out at the end of the day for what ended up being baseball.
mux in
Carol: the little walk up the hill was everything. and we'd just walk there and, uh, the nuns would make sandwiches and things and It was just a very vibrant, uh, center.
LIAM: So I spoke with a woman named Carol Haas. Uh, she's 79 and grew up in the Palaverde neighborhood in Chave zine. And she ended up, losing her family home to, what was thought to be this public housing development that ultimately became the stadium.
Carol: And we had affordable housing and the opportunity to, you know, generational wealth building. have us do better.
LIAM: She remembers in 1951 when, uh, city housing officials handed an eviction notice to her aunt for their properties and also members when their neighbors got the same knock on the door.
Carol: There was a lot of breaking into tears and what are we gonna do? And where are we gonna go? And, you know, this is our house, our, our, our, our land, our tierra, you know, God, I get chills. Yeah. When I think about it, it was a terrible time, you know, the whole year, two years.
mux fade out
LIAM: So the failure of the public housing plan in Chavez zine was really a turning point in L.A. history. It was supposed to be, you know, this potential, change from the City of Home's idea that we had been talking about earlier to one that would add density and diversity to LA's housing market. Uh, but what ended up happening, you know, real estate estate interests, using. Paranoia. The Red Scare, Communist red Scare killed the project. And, ultimately that land went to the Dodgers for their stadium. Now, overcrowding did decrease during this time, post-war time, and that's because there was this gigantic increase in construction, sort of writ large, uh, new single family home developments all over the place. you know, Lakewood, uh, building in a rate at like a new home. Three and a half minutes in the early 1950s. But it wasn't just about suburbanization too. I think it's important to know during this period, there are a lot of these and people that are still around, people will see them. These sort of thousands of low rise, ding bat apartments. You have your housing on top and your parking underneath, and they were springing up in more established neighborhoods in L.A. and offering some more affordable rents.
GUSTAVO: Yeah, that's an iconic architectural style in L.A. still to this day. And the fifties and early sixties. That was also a time where court rulings, they were saying desegregate housing, you can't, ban renters on the basis of their skin or their race. But Brittny, I'm sure there was backlash to those integration efforts.
BRITTNY: So largely white L.A. homeowner groups actually worried that the social unrest that had exploded in the Black community of Watts in 1965 would come to their area. And their interests aligned with the nascent environmental movement. They agreed that all new development in recent decades had made the city overpopulated and overpopulated. And so the city began declaring many neighborhoods off limits to more housing.
LIAM: Yeah. So, uh, to talk through that point, we spoke with Greg Morrow, who's a professor of real estate at UC Berkeley, and he's written a ton about what became known as L.A.'s Slow Growth Movement.
Greg Morrow: at the end of the day, we put in place a bottom up process that favored those who own homes and. They didn't want their neighborhoods to change. And as a result of that, many of the areas of the city became kind of privileged enclaves. the dynamic that, that plays out is you end up with areas that are very, very affluent and. Sort of walled off from the rest of us. And areas that are kind of the wild west, where you have lots of, kind ofredevelopment and, and development happening.
LIAM: So what happened up through the early 1970s is we put in place this condition for overcrowding potentially to explode as it did.
mux in
LIAM: First we disregarded sort of the housing needs of, of low income, Latino workers and their families. Second, we rejected public housing and, and public subsidy and low income housing and density in Los Angeles. And third, we ultimately began, as we've just discussed, turning off the spigot of mass home building, which had you know been dominant in L.A. for close to a hundred years. And what ended up happening is that when impoverished newcomers who were sort of bullied by relaxed immigration laws and L.A.'s sort of endless demand and ongoing demand for cheap labor began arriving from Mexico and Central America in the 1970s, they simply settled where they could. And that was usually in these older neighborhoods, near rendering plants, near freeways, near oil derricks, and factories, places like Pico Union.
mux out
GUSTAVO: And that's when, Brittny, and especially in the ’70s and ’80s with the Central American civil wars and a lot of migration from Mexico, that's when it seems overcrowding was really reaching a tipping point.
BRITTNY: Right, exactly. I mean, and Liam and I had seen this just going through a lot of oral clips at the time, you know, starting in the 1970s,. You had a slow growth fervor combined with a diminishing supply of new land to develop, which meant the end of L.A.'s home building booms, and that was happening as you were saying. All of these immigrants were coming into the region to work, and so they had no choice but to crowd into low rise slums and hasley converted garages. we read up on investigations. We had at the time that there were 1987, there were like 42,000 garages sheltering approximately 200,000 people in L.A. County alone.
MUX IN
One of the most, uh, striking cases to us as we were going through the archives was the case of a fire that happened in Westlake. There were 10 people who died. It was a packed apartment building. It was the mid-’90s. And, just looking at that toll and there, there were so many people who died because it was such a crowded building.I think at the time. Roger Mahoney, cardinal eulogized the victims and pled for more humane living situations.
GUSTAVO: And meanwhile overcrowding Los Angeles. It starts spreading across Southern California and it really hit in Orange County, specifically the city of Santa Ana. And that's where one family decided to fight back. More after the break.
MUX OUT
break 2
GUSTAVO: Brittny, you went to Santa Ana to interview the Briceño family. Where were they living back in the 1980s.
Briceño: Okey, primero quise, me puedes contar un poquito de la historia de ustedes? [FADE DOWN HERE] Cómo llegaron aquí a California? En qué año? De dónde?
BRITTNY: So the Briceño family lived in Santa Ana.
Beatriz Clip: Bueno, yo llegué aquí en todo ese tiempo. Tiempo tengo aquí.
mux in
BRITTNY: That was Beatriz Briceño, the wife of tk Briceño.
Beatriz Clip: yo solo estoy contando lo que yo viví lo que yo vi cuando fueron a la casa, nos entrevistaron así como ustedes, pero yo casi no me comunicaba mucho con él en ese líder que a veces llegaba y me platicaba.Y yo le decía que no me gustaba que anduviera en todo eso y sobre todo allí que tenía problemas y había tanto que vendía droga. Y como dicen ustedes, me daba miedo que. Que lo que se fuera a meter en algún lío o lo fueran a a golpear algo. No sé, pero no gracias a Dios nunca le pasó nada. Esto es lo que tuvo suerte.
Brittny: They shared a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Three children slept on bunk beds and, and his wife Beatrice were sleeping on the living room sofa. They were sharing 395 square feet with cockroaches and rats. En el apartamento. Sí, del
CLIP apartamento. Pues estaba pobre. Había mucha cucaracha. Este te había mucha cucaracha. Teníamos ratones. Recuerdo que lo que me peleaba al dueño que nos [00:19:00] humillara o que nos pero él nunca quiso hacer nada. Fue cuando él nos metió a s, no demandó
BRITTNY: So this big fight actually kicked off there, because they were living in this unit was on Minnie Street. They were trying to get repairs. A bunch of the tenants were getting repairs for the units and they were told that they would be evicted for having too many-– people living there.
CLIP: vivían muchos en los era también una ley que que querían que se quitaran y que viviera nada más como la familia, no los hijos que hacía como nosotros, que yo era yo, él y los tres. Así querían que no mala familia. Si tenían cinco seis como mi hermana, pues estaba bien, pero ya tener otros allí, como, como mi hermana los tenía, como que ella les hacía lonche le pagaban también algo a ella por porque los tenía viviendo ahí con ellos.
Guest 2: No? Bien político cho, verdad?
BRITTNY: So city council members also thought that there were too many people living in the apartments and others across Santa Ana. They passed rules that would've allowed no more than four people in apartments like Biennials, which would've meant that the family would've faced eviction. And so would thousands of others.
mux out
GUSTAVO: And why did the leaders say that there couldn't be more than four people per apartment?
BRITTNY: I think the big argument at the time, and Liam and I both saw this play out, not just in Santa Ana but in other cities as well. The argument was, Oh, this is, we're doing this. It's for safety reasons. but really what you were seeing, especially during council meetings, was protesters who were against the proposals were getting shouted down with chants of “Go back to Mexico.” And so for a lot of people it was really playing out as a race thing, and not really something done to help.
So… tk wasn’t actually wasn't this the type to give up the fight. He saw this as an attempt to force Latinos out of Santa Ana. So he sued.
Here's the son of Ri. His name is, Gerardo
CLIP at exactly 56:47 in Guest audio RAW: “Santa Ana was becoming more and more Latino and yet the leadership was predominantly more middle class, more affluent and, in many cases, more white// “They didn’t understand why these apartments were overcrowded. Or felt the need to critize or comment// I think their experience was so different than ours more humble more poor”
Brittny: Has he ever shared anything about the cases like your mom said he didn’t really talk about it.
Gerardo: No not with us, he talked about it with other people, with us he was a great man and more reserved. Once he was with his friends or people that were involved, he was more vocal
Sting fade in
GUSTAVO: What ended up happening?
BRITTNY: /SO/ eventually an appeals court threw Santa Ana's law out. AND they actually were able to save enough money to buy their own two-bedroom home in Santa Ana, which is actually where we went to meet them and interview them. But sadly tk died of Covid in December, 2020.
mux sting
GUSTAVO: So the lawsuit by the briceños against Santana was successful. But it sadly didn’t stop other cities in SoCal from forcing occupancy limits as a way to deal with overcrowding.
LIAM: As you said, Gustavo, these issues were spreading out from the city to, to places like Santaana and, and also Bell Gardens, you know, areas that had seen significant changes from all white or mostly white populations. To predominantly Latino and immigrant populations during this time. In Bell Gardens, for instance, as the early nineties, their all-white City Council proposed to demolish broad swaths of the city's apartment-heavy housing stock and replace them with single family homes and open space. And this is a time when Bell Gardens one of, was one of the poorest and most overcrowded places in the entire country. And what happened was that Latino residents in the city revolted, denouncing the plan as Mexican removal.
GUSTAVO: And while we spent this episode talking a lot about past cases from the ’50s, ’80s, and even earlier, the reality is that the housing crisis continues in Southern California. Is there any hope for people living in this situation today?
LIAM: So in some ways you could argue that things are even worse now than they were in the past. You know, the statistics say that overcrowding peaked in Los Angeles in the 2000 when the overcrowding rate here was about four times the national rate. Right now, our overcrowding rate in L.A. is 11%, which is about three times the national average. But what’s different about today is that overcrowding seems sort of endemic. You have generations of families who are packed into overcrowded housing and have no way to escape, when in earlier decades recent immigrants in some cases were able to afford to buy their homes and escape their situations
Mux in
Another family we spoke to, Ruby Gordillo, her husband and, and three children found themselves in, they were living in. 350 square feet in Westlake neighborhood of L.A. and living shoulder to shoulder, Ruby was feeling her children were not getting adequate education. all those sorts of things because there was just places to do your homework was always conflicting with places that you would need to eat and sleep, right? And so what she ended up doing is she ended up joining a group that advocated for low income renters and then. Right at the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic, she saw no other way out, and decided with a dozen other families to seize, empty state, own homes in the El Sereno neighborhood that had been left abandoned for an aborted freeway project.
Mux out
GUSTAVO: Knowing this problem is as bad as it's ever been and spreading across Southern California. Brittny, what are current L.A. leaders saying about overcrowding?
BRITTNY: Yeah, so we connected with county public health director Barbara Ferrer, specifically because we were looking at that covid impact, especially in overcrowded housing. And she acknowledged to us that this is a longstanding issue that's impacted families long before the pandemic. And she also noted that overcrowded housing often goes hand in hand with lower quality housing. I think some of what she was telling us was that there need to be solutions to improve access to safe and affordable housing for everyone. And I think another point she had made was that we need to ensure elected officials are actually using tax dollars to make difficult decisions that benefit those who are most marginalized.
GUSTAVO: And both of you ended up talking to L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. What was his response to the questions that you had about overcrowding?
LIAM: So, you know, he noted the fact that this is a problem that started many years ago. And the efforts to dig out of it are really, really hard given decades of underbuilding, decades of the city not supporting low income housing and denser housing in particular. And, while he argues that his administration has mad strides in all sorts of housing development is just simply not caught up with the demand and not really allowed the city to ameliorate some of these challenges.
BRITTNY: Yeah I feel like he did acknowledge and he was running us through some of the efforts he's made to address overcrowded housing. I think one of the big points that really struck me was asking about the use of overcrowding as a solution or stopgap to prevent people from falling into homelessness. And he made the point where he's that's, it's not a solution. That's, it's not a solution.
CLIP: I guess that's a solution. People not being in cars and on the streets, but it's not a solution. The only solution is to actually build our way out of this. I mean, it's interesting. Our housing crisis needs much more than addressing overcrowding. So you have to do many different things. But overcrowding is addressed 90% of it by building our way out of this period.It's a mathematical question. It's a mathematical equation and it has a mathematical answer.
GUSTAVO: Finally, Liam and Brittny, this story's also personal to the two of you because the both of you are in Los Angeles County. You all, you do live in these neighborhoods. You're going around and you have friends who live in this. So what's gonna stick with you from doing all of this? I think for. Certainly these stories of individual folks who are dealing with these situations right now and the difficult, both to their mental health and potential physical health is overriding. But I think from a historical perspective, this sort of thread that ties together over a century of L.A. history where.
LIAM: It's clear. I mean, the region has relied on poor Latino immigrant labor to power its economy, but has never really provided sufficient wages or housing for those immigrants to live here. That's the reason we found why overcrowding emerged and it persists to this day. And when leaders were confronted with this time and again, with the conflict between the suburban lifestyle they were promoting and sold worldwide with the reality of crowding on the ground, the response largely has been to blame Latino immigrants for their lot and the sort of tragic result of this is fueled this horrific mass death that we've faced in L.A. over the past three years.
BRITTNY: Yeah, I feel like that the point or what's really gonna stick with me out of this is doing this deep dive into history and seeing history basically repeating itself again. I think that's probably the most devastating thing and the heartbreaking thing, I think, to spend time with these families and see the conditions that they're living in and knowing that's been those conditions for decades, for century. I think that is really what's gonna stick with me.
mux in
GUSTAVO: Brittny Mejia, Liam Dillon, thank you so much for this conversation and for your work.
LIAM: Thank you.
BRITTNY: Thank you.
mux out
Liam and Brittny’s package also features photos by Gary Coronado that take you inside the overcrowding crisis in L.A. They also did
features with residents GABRIELLE LAMARR LEMEE
mux out
Break 3
And that's it for this episode of “The Times”: essential news from the L.A. Times. David Toledo and Denise Guerra were the Heest on this episode and Mark Netto mixed and mastered it. Our show's produced by Shannon Lynn, Denise Guerra, Kaha Bra, David Delto and Nation, Ashley Brown.
Our editorial assistant is Battle and a motto. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Netto and Mike Kelin. Our editor is Kinzie Morelin. Our executive producers are has Nasta sh Hilton, and Hi or Bonnie. And our theme music is by Andrew Wein. Hey, we're building ATO audio alter this year, and we'd like to hear your stories. Call 6 1 9 800 0 7 1 7 6 1 9 800 0 7 1 7 and leave us a voicemail with your own friend. Tell us who you are, where you live, and give us a great anecdote about. A family member, a friend, someone, uh, that you love that has gone on with the ancestors, think of it as a communal digital altar, and we're gonna air those stories in an episode closer to [00:28:00] Dmar Day of the Dead.
Thanks in advance. And again, the number 6 1 9 800 0 7 1 7. I'm Gusta. We'll be back Friday with all the news in this mother.