A hoarder upends an L.A. neighborhood and almost nothing can stop it - Los Angeles Times
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How a hoarder has upended a neighborhood and why almost nothing can stop it

An aerial view shows piles of junk on a hillside property.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
By Harriet RyanStaff Writer 
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Good morning. It’s Friday, July 12. Here’s what you need to know to start your day. I’m Harriet Ryan, an investigative reporter for The Times.

Why almost nothing can stop a hoarder ruining this neighborhood

If you live in Los Angeles, as I do, you probably see evidence of our crisis of untreated mental illness everyday — people suffering beneath underpasses, at bus stops, on sidewalks.

But what if the problem were right next door, a troubled hoarder who turned a plot of property into a dangerous dump? That’s the situation confronting a pair of school teachers in Sun Valley.

Three years ago, Elena Malone and her husband, Joshua Ryan, were like a lot of Angelenos — renting an apartment that was too small for their family and hoping against hope that they could someday afford their own place. Thanks to a lot of scrimping and saving, they bought a 2,000-square-foot house on a half-acre near La Tuna Canyon, a horsey community in the Verdugo Mountains that is one of the city’s most rural enclaves.

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The $1.2-million house is lovely — hand-carved cabinetry, exposed beams, an open kitchen and bedrooms for both of their children — with grounds featuring fountains, vegetable gardens, an orchard and mountain views. But these days, their dream home is a prison.

A woman looks at her neighbor's property.
From her Sun Valley home, Elena Malone can see trash and vehicles hoarded by her next-door neighbor.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

It’s a story that illustrates how entire neighborhoods can suffer alongside the mentally ill and homeless and how difficult these cases are to address, even when everyone from the local LAPD officer to the federal Environmental Protection Agency to the man’s own family agrees there is a problem.

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A few months after they moved in, fast-food wrappers started accumulating in the street in front of their house. Before long, there was a pile of junk with more arriving every day — stolen vehicles, car batteries, scrap metal, garbage bags of marijuana, human waste, needles, used condoms, a sex toy and lubricant.

A hoarder next door The man living next door was David Ferrera, 50, whose family described him as a mentally ill hoarder. His mother owned the 6-acre property, and for a time, he had maintained it, even building a house on the land and landscaping the area around it.

But in the 2017 La Tuna Canyon fire — the city’s largest in half a century — Ferrera lost almost everything. A few years later, in another fire, his house burned to the ground. His mother, Mary, an 80-year-old retired school teacher, told me that the fires and other setbacks may have triggered a hoarding instinct in him. “We think that the trauma of all this, and possibly some unresolved past trauma, led to his acquisition of more and more ‘things’ to replace what was lost,†she explained. Ferrera turned the land into an unlicensed dump with more than 100 rusting vehicles, scavenged metal and dangerous chemicals seeping into the ground. When the property became impassable, he took to living in a car in the street in front of Malone’s home.

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Agencies pass the buck, a mother enables

Elena Malone has spent almost three years trying to get help from nearly a dozen agencies with almost nothing to show for it. A log she keeps on her computer shows how one agency after another passed the buck. The city Department of Building and Safety sent her to the city Department of Transportation, which told her the street — a fire road — was private property.

The LAPD said it was not authorized to remove cars and trucks blocking the street. The state water board referred Malone to the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. That agency said the EPA was in charge.

In the meanwhile, Malone’s children cannot play in the front yard, and residents live in fear that flammable liquids will fuel a wildfire in the blaze-prone canyon. Malone would love to sell their home, but that seems an impossibility with the dump next door.

Ferrera’s mother, as the landowner, was briefly jailed this year for failure to address the problems, but she says she feels there is little she can do. After she paid for the removal of 21 truckloads of debris, her son filled the space with more junk.

Still, she refuses to kick him off the property or clear all the trash away. “I am an enabler,†she told me. “But that is because I love my son.â€

But what about Elena and her family?

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My story delves more into their angst and what it’s like to live next to a seemingly intractable problem. I hope you’ll give it a read and let me know what you think — and what could be a possible solution. I can be reached at [email protected]

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Harriet Ryan

Harriet Ryan is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2008, she has written about high-profile people, including Phil Spector, Michael Jackson and Tom Girardi, and institutions, including USC, the State Bar of California, the Catholic Church, the Kabbalah Centre and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with colleagues Matt Hamilton and Paul Pringle in 2019. She and Hamilton won the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability in 2023. She previously worked at Court TV and the Asbury Park Press. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

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