The Pajaro Flood Forced Them to Flee. California's High Rents Forced Them to Return

C

arla Escutia fled with her three kids to the second story of an apartment building across the street when a storm burst an infamously weak levee outside their town of Pajaro in March 2023.

They huddled and watched in horror as chocolate milk-colored flood water swamped their beige home and rendered their cars inoperable. When the California National Guard rescued her family, crammed into military vehicles, they swore they’d find a new place to live on higher ground.

That was the beginning of what would turn into a 16-month odyssey to find an affordable two-bedroom apartment, which can cost more than $3,000 in the area around Monterey County. The family cycled through a shelter, a trailer, group homes, rentals and couches at other family members’ houses. Escutia, a custodian at UC Santa Cruz, encountered landlords who wouldn’t accept applicants from single parents like her with little kids and teenagers.

“They said little kids would destroy the property,” Escutia explained. Some of the apartments cost as much as $4,000. “It was difficult. The prices were really high, and I couldn’t pay that much.”

The only affordable option Escutia, 42, could find was an apartment back in Pajaro, but she did not want to put her kids through that trauma again. “I wanted to find something far away,” she said. Authorities have reinforced the crumbled section of the levee, but they admit it is still too small to protect Pajaro, a community of many lower-income earners and farmworkers who harvest strawberries and other crops near Watsonville and Monterey County. The Army Corps of Engineers, along with the state and the local flood agency, plan to build a new levee, but that project won’t be completed until at least 2031.

“We left because we don’t want the same thing to happen again,” said her oldest daughter, Denia Escutia, who KQED profiled for the third season of its Sold Out podcast. The 19-year-old deferred her dream of studying at UCLA to help her mom, choosing to enroll in community college and working to help pay bills instead.

In April, the Escutias landed a spot for $1700 in a shared house with 12 people in Castroville, about 20 minutes from Watsonville. The family hated the cramped quarters and quickly resented their housemates who raided their bathroom for toilet paper.

“One family had a daughter who would go into our refrigerator and grab stuff,” said Denia Escutia, with shoulder-length chestnut brown hair and pearl-colored long acrylic nails. “We didn’t have our own space, and I was uncomfortable.”

In July, reality set in; Escutia wanted to get her three kids out. Beaten down by the reality of living in one of the most expensive areas in the country for rentals, she called the landlord in Pajaro and accepted the apartment.

The family would return to the floodplain.

Their nearly year-and-a-half-long housing search concluded right across the street from their old home in the same apartment complex where they had found refuge from the flood.

They moved in early August and now pay $1,900 for a freshly painted three-bedroom apartment. They knew the landlord and said he gave them a deal based on their relationship, and because of the flood risk, Escutia explained as she stirred sizzling chorizo and flipped homemade corn tortillas on a comal in her new thin galley kitchen.

“There were no options but this one,” Escutia said, her brown hair tied with a big black bow. “I am happy that I have my room and my kids have privacy.”

Her new address is just one number different from her previous home.

“I am scared the flooding might happen again, but I try to put it in the back of my head, telling myself it won’t happen for a few years and in a few years, we will probably not live here,” said Escutia, as she served her daughter a guava Jarritos soda.

Daily, she’s reminded of the flood and the toll on her family. From her upstairs bedroom window, she can see her former landlord slowly repairing the gutted tan house across the street.

“I miss that house,” she said. “When I see it, I feel sad they’re rebuilding the house, and it’s not for us.”

‘We’re taking that chance’

The family now lives in a constant state of déjà vu, dwelling in the apartment complex they fled to when the debris-laden water ran up the walls of their home.

“If it floods again, where will we go when we just settled down? We’re taking that chance,” said Denia Escutia, who is in her third semester at Cabrillo Community College in Aptos.

The family’s choice — to return to the floodplain — is one other Californians will face as future storms intensify due to human-caused climate change. Thousands of miles of levees pen in rivers and streams across the state; much of that infrastructure, including the levee that protects Pajaro, is aging and is not built for these storms, which could cause major flooding in any given year. A 1-in-1000-year storm flooded the Connecticut area last month, and a similarly rare storm flooded parts of Los Angeles last February.

“Climate change is affecting these probabilities,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “What is clear is that the probability of extreme wet conditions is going up.”

The storms that doused the region in 2023 were a small example of what Californians can expect, and they still oversaturated the system.

The 2023 Pajaro flood damaged 273 homes and destroyed five. Most of the damaged homes were single-story, single-family residences, like the Escutias’, according to an assessment by Danielle Zoe Rivera, assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley. She reviewed an early assessment of damaged structures from the Cal Fire Damage Inspection Program.

Rivera is trying to determine how many people moved back after the water receded. The Pájaro Valley Unified School District lost 2,043 of its 17,963 students between the 2022–23 and 2023–24 school years, which she said is a “hint at the scale of the displacement” but might not be due to the storm.

She also reviewed the U.S. Postal Service records and found very few people moved from Pajaro after 2023. She said residents, facing the high cost of housing, appear to have chosen to “live through flooding” instead of finding a new place to live.

“Maybe some people did leave, but the need for housing was so great in the region that people just instantly repopulated those flooded homes,” Rivera said.

‘An undersized levee system’

Under pressure from lawmakers, the local flood agency quickly rebuilt the 400 feet of levee that ruptured. The restored section has the same amount of flood protection as the levee that failed, leaving Pajaro vulnerable.

“Residents still need to be a bit concerned because we are still living in a situation where we have an undersized levee system,” said Mark Strudley, executive director of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency. “My hope is that if water starts touching this part of the levee system, we’re going to see less damage.”

Tommy Williams, chief of project management at the Army Corps in San Francisco, said the positive news is that the newly repaired section is “no longer the weakest link.” The bad news is that while crews frequently inspect the mostly earthen structure, the exact strength of the entire aging levee is nearly impossible to tell.

The Corps expects to break ground later this fall on a project to raise and widen nearly 14 miles of levee to strengthen it against future storms. Flood authorities won’t widen the main section that failed for several years, although Williams said the design work has started. They want to set the new levee back 100 feet from where it is today to give the river room to expand during storms.

Years before the recent flood, the Corps had officially rated the levee along the Pajaro River a “moderate” risk of flooding. The truth is that for decades, officials knew it needed repair but didn’t act. They determined that the town wasn’t worth protecting because property values were too low, according to levee records and interviews with several officials.

The Corps’ plan will prepare the most populated areas for a 1-in-100-year flood — some experts believe that is only half the needed protection. With that level of protection, a house has a 25% chance of flooding during a typical Pajaro homeowner’s 30-year mortgage.

Living behind a makeshift levee scares residents and leaders of community groups like Regeneración – Pájaro Valley Climate Action.

“It’s a ticking time bomb,” said Nancy Faulstich, director of the community group. “We all know there are vulnerabilities here, and with the acceleration of climate change, all bets are off.”

‘I fear we’ll have to leave this one, too’

A Pajaro where all bets are off is a future the Escutias hope to escape. Denia Escutia wants to become a doctor and eventually buy “a big house or ranch where I can have my mom retire from her work.”

Unless the family’s financial situation changes, that could prove difficult. The Santa Cruz-Watsonville region is the most out-of-reach metropolitan area in the country for rental homes, according to the latest report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The 2024 study found a family like the Escutias would need a household hourly wage of $77.96 to afford a modest two-bedroom rental in this area without spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

“Most people would have to work nearly five full-time jobs, with a minimum wage of $16 an hour, to afford just a regular rental in our county,” said Miriam Greenberg, professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz and co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies.

Greenberg studies the intersection of housing and climate catastrophes. She said when a wildfire burns through a community, it displaces families and, in turn, can raise the rent price. She said the same thing happens when floods eliminate the number of rentals in a community and “compound an already dire situation for housing.”

Denia Escutia finds herself replaying the fear of flooding and displacement, even as she lays on her new trundle bed covered in lavender sheets surrounded by K-Pop posters and scissor-cut photos of her girlfriends.

“We were forced to leave one house, and now we have another house,” she said. “I fear we’ll have to leave this one, too, and we might not find anything.”