A mass shooting revealed their brutal living conditions. Will new housing ease these farmworkers’ trauma?
Just a short car ride from the famous crescent shoreline of Half Moon Bay, the California beach town best known for big wave surf contests, a gravel road off Highway 1 leads to a cluster of ramshackle sheds and trailers.
For years, few people knew about the dozens of farmworkers who lived in them, growing fresh gourmet mushrooms to deliver to grocery stores and restaurants across the state.
But the brutal conditions they lived in came into a harsh light in January last year, when a 67-year-old former resident opened fire on the grounds of two mushroom farms where many of the residents worked, and killed seven people.
Soon, photos of the dilapidated trailers, sheds and shipping containers and a moldy, insect-ridden greenhouse that farmworkers at Concord Farms and California Terra Garden called home were on the front pages of newspapers. The Guardian has reached out to the two farms, but neither responded to requests for comment.
Authorities expressed shock at the treatment of Half Moon Bay’s Latino and Asian farmworkers. The 40 farmworkers who survived the shooting were quickly placed in motels, Airbnbs and other temporary housing paid for by the county. The tragedy galvanized elected officials to expedite low-income farmworker housing in a city where average home prices have surpassed $1.6m. And earlier this year, the farms paid surviving workers a $450,000 settlement.
But a year-and-a-half after the shooting, social workers say dozens of surviving farmworkers are still reeling from trauma and many are still awaiting permanent homes.
A bullet hole on the entrance gate at Concord Farms was, for some workers, a stark, daily reminder of the violence.
“I have nightmares every night,” Li, a Chinese farmworker in his late 60s whom the Guardian is identifying only by his first name, said in Mandarin. Li said he’d held a co-worker in his arms and watched the blood drain from his body. Haunted by the memory, Li said he suffers from insomnia and hasn’t returned to work. A county-assigned psychiatrist, whom he sees twice a week, prescribed him a host of medications, which he said has provided minor relief.
“The emotional and psychological toll has definitely been significant,” said Belinda Arriaga, the executive director of Ayudando Latinos a Soñar, a social services organization that’s been supporting Half Moon Bay’s Latino farmworkers. “We’ve been trying to push through to get back to some normalcy.”
Like many workers at Concord Farms, Li lived in a shed ill equipped to withstand tempestuous weather. Heavy rain caused the structure to flood, and mold grew on the floor beneath a flimsy mattress.
During the six years he worked on the farm, he developed acute back pain from wet winters that left his shoulders permanently hunched. Since the shooting, he and his wife have relocated five times, now staying in a sparsely furnished but spacious one-bedroom apartment five miles from the farm. “We have nothing to complain about,” he said.
Most of the Chinese farmworkers who survived last year’s mass shooting had been at Concord Farms about the same time as Li, said Sao Leng U, the director of social services at Self-Help for the Elderly, a San Francisco-based non-profit that has been assisting six of the survivors.
The subsidized temporary housing the county provided in the aftermath of the shooting has been a major upgrade from a shed, she said, but the farmworkers have had difficulty maintaining a sense of security and normalcy. “Now it’s like living in a hotel,” she said.
Displaced farmworkers are expected to move into a new housing project next spring. The 47-unit development near downtown Half Moon Bay, which broke ground in May, is geared toward low-income farmworkers, and more than half of the manufactured homes will be available for purchase.
The units are meant to provide relief not only for the mass shooting survivors. Last November, San Mateo county officials found that 75% of current farmworker housing didn’t meet safety standards; many units had no insulation or running water.
A separate, more ambitious downtown farmworker housing project, which is geared toward senior farmworkers and will include a farmworker resource center, faced pushback from residents and local officials who worried about the project’s impact on traffic and parking.
In May, the city planning commission approved the 40-unit building, which will be spearheaded by Ayudando Latinos a Soñar. But several appeals continue to stall the proposal.
Meanwhile, in June, the owners of California Terra Garden and Concord Farms agreed to pay 62 workers a total of $450,000 for wage theft and other damages, including illegal housing deductions and record-keeping violations. The settlement came after a lengthy probe by the Department of Labor and is significant given that farmworkers on average make $20,000 to $25,000 a year, according to numbers from the 2015–19 National Agricultural Workers Survey.
“The message here is that the US Department of Labor recognizes that the hardworking people who harvest the nation’s food are some of the lowest-paid people in the country and do face exposure to dangerous working conditions,” said Alberto Raymond, the labor department’s wage and hour division assistant district director.
Juan Flores, a farmworker employed at California Terra Garden since 2015, received a $2,200 check from the farm owner as reimbursement for back wages. He said he’s grateful for the funds, which would help cover months of rent and groceries. But he’d had no idea the owner had been shortchanging him and his co-workers. “It’s hard to keep track of hours,” he said in Spanish. “Without the investigation, we would never have known we were owed all this money.”
Flores lived in a cramped trailer with his wife and two teenage children, as well as his sister-in-law and her two young children. The family of six shared a bunk bed and one shower. Winters were frigid, as the heater seldom worked. His living situation has improved since the shooting: he moved into a more spacious three-bedroom condo with his wife and children, while his sister-in-law relocated to her own unit.
California labor organizers have long drawn attention to the plight of the state’s farmworkers, two-thirds of whom are undocumented. In 2023, Department of Labor investigators recovered nearly $7m in back wages for more than 7,300 agricultural workers.
Farmworkers “are second-class modern-day slaves that nobody seems to care about”, said Ann López, executive director of Center for Farmworker Families, an organization that promotes awareness about farmworker living and working conditions. Substandard housing issues exposed by the Half Moon Bay shooting aren’t new or unique, López said, and many elected officials have long ignored the crisis.
“I’ve worked on this issue for 25 years and haven’t seen any improvement,” she said.
Over the past year, said U of Self-Help for the Elderly, her organization has been working with the Chinese farmworkers to develop skills beyond farming. Some are learning English and applying for truck licenses so they can supplement their farm income. Li, meanwhile, is studying for his citizenship test so he can be eligible for social security benefits and live stably in retirement.
Huang, a soft-spoken produce driver in his early 50s, lives alone roughly one mile from Li in a small, upstairs bedroom of a condo that’s been converted into a studio. He said the new place, despite a malfunctioning fridge and sink, offers more comfort and security, though he misses the sense of community he shared while living on the farm with the other Chinese workers. He said he’s grateful to still have a job because his two young children, who live with his estranged wife, depend on his income. But returning to work hasn’t been easy, as physical reminders like the bullet-ridden gate often trigger memories of the shooting.
“We still have trauma, but we can’t stop working,” he said in Cantonese.
The upcoming housing project, Huang said, makes him feel hopeful. He said he feels a sense of relief knowing that, soon, he’s guaranteed to live somewhere long term, somewhere where his children can visit. “I’d like to buy my own home one day,” he said.
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