Seeking Home With a Big Yard and Entry Into the Middle Class

Gilberto Cortes stands on an Encino sidewalk, a tidy figure in a gabardine suit, bouncing on his heels in the cold.

He’s early for an appointment, just a morning’s work for him, but another small step toward the slow transformation of Los Angeles.

The San Fernando Valley real estate agent specializes in less expensive homes and immigrant, first-time home buyers. His clients are from Guatemala, Mexico, Eastern Europe, China. As they buy up the aging housing stock, they are giving L.A. a new yet familiar form, their aspirations renewing the suburbs’ historic role as the steppingstone to the middle class.

On this day, Cortes is in a hurry and his clients are late. But at last, a brand-new silver Ford hums to the curb, and out steps a bleached-blond mother, her daughter and the mother’s aunt--the last a self-appointed overseer of the home-buying enterprise.

*

The family is from Armenia. For 10 years they have been living in a cramped apartment in Northridge, a couple of miles away, saving their money for a house. They nod distractedly to Cortes’ description of probate sales.

The mother is a hairdresser. Her husband, off at work, is a mechanic who works in Oxnard. Their only daughter, a green-eyed 12-year-old, goes to school nearby.

“This country--you dream to come here,” says the mother. “Of course there have been disappointments, but--”

She breaks off with an impatient shrug, and veers back to the business of home-buying.

“I like a big backyard,” she says. “Dining area, sitting area.”

The trio eyes the house without enthusiasm. They take in the brown lawn, the dingy fiberglass-sided porch, the sun-bleached garden hose looped across the dirt. The house looks so tiny it is hard to see how it could have the two bedrooms advertised.

An elderly tenant answers Cortes’ knock good-naturedly, and shuffles in behind the group.

“Watch out, there’s two cats in the bedroom,” he says as the group filters through the house.

Cortes has been selling homes in the Valley for 19 years. He used to specialize in selling to better-heeled south-of-Ventura-Boulevard buyers but switched to first-time immigrant buyers because it was more fun.

“They appreciate it more,” he says. “When I moved over, I thought I would lose income. But it was just the opposite. The first year I made twice as much. . . . There are many more buyers even though they are smaller buyers.”

The job comes with all kinds of unforeseen cultural complications: Buyers who won’t buy a house facing east, buyers who won’t live near graveyards, buyers who want to live near relatives and, most often, buyers short of cash.

Cortes has personal interest in these buyers. Now 63, he moved to this country from Zacatecas, Mexico in his 20s. He recounts with pride how he arrived on a Friday night and began taking his first English classes on a Monday.

He does not present himself as a crusader for ethnic integration or even for the preservation of stalwart old houses. He is simply, as he declares proudly, a salesman. “I have been a salesman all my life.”

In the end, he is what his clients are, what many are: an immigrant who came here with little but his wits, just trying to make a living in L.A.

Demographers have painted immigrant home buyers as the new version of the World War II generation, moving to Southern California and moving up into the American middle class.

Increasingly, it is immigrant capital and aspiration that are rescuing what brokers call entry-level homes, pulling up the stained carpets, replanting the weed-grown lawns and carrying on the postwar dream.

But middle-class status in America today is not so easily obtained for immigrants as it was for the young servicemen of the ‘40s, and this process is occurring only slowly. So the houses wait, growing dingier all the while.

The Encino house Cortes is showing on this day is sadly in need of rescuing. Part of a G.I. housing tract, it was built in 1949 and has seemingly not been touched since then. It is a Cinderella house--a little sullied, looking for that last chance to be discovered at the ball lest it be relegated to a shabby decline.

*

As the aunt walks through the house, she is already drawing up her shoulders in an extended shudder. Stains seemed to leap off the walls and carpets. Flea market paintings and a faint smell of cats don’t help. The backyard is barren except for some overgrown ivy and a couple of rusty metal sheds. The birdbath, chipped and dirty, hints sadly at the personality of the former owner, recently deceased.

The clients make a polite exit. “My God,” says the aunt, safely out on the sidewalk. “It needs . . . stripping.”

As they loiter on the sidewalk, the mother and aunt give Cortes a rundown of the family’s dream house: wood floors and no additions, two bedrooms and a bath. And it’s got to be less than $140,000.

Cortes nods politely, knowing he will not make this sale today. The house will await another buyer. But “this business is mountains and valleys all the time,” he says lightly, “mountains and valleys.”

He is off to meet his next client.

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