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If you’ve read your John Steinbeck and listened to your Merle Haggard, or if you grew up in a farmworker family, you know that farm laborers in California have struggled to find decent housing for decades. Except in a few cases, growers have no legal obligation to house employees, and there’s not a lot of state and federal money earmarked for farmworker housing. In the Salinas Valley — the fifth- least-affordable place to live in the country — there’s just not enough decent housing for all the people needed to pick crops like lettuce and strawberries.
By Lisa Morehouse5
4040 ratings
If you’ve read your John Steinbeck and listened to your Merle Haggard, or if you grew up in a farmworker family, you know that farm laborers in California have struggled to find decent housing for decades. Except in a few cases, growers have no legal obligation to house employees, and there’s not a lot of state and federal money earmarked for farmworker housing. In the Salinas Valley — the fifth- least-affordable place to live in the country — there’s just not enough decent housing for all the people needed to pick crops like lettuce and strawberries.

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