In an abandoned Koreatown building, homeless Angelenos create a community
LOS ANGELES — To enter 732 S. Vermont Ave., you must carefully shove open a rusted gray iron gate until a gap large enough for you to slide through sideways appears.
If you delicately step your way through the onetime parking lot littered with mounds and mounds of trash — a stained mattress here, a toilet there — you'll approach a graffiti-covered building with a large sign: Vermont Dental Group Implant Center.
And if you stick around for a while, you might see the people who called it home. In a city with homeless encampments popping up in parks, on sidewalks and under overpasses, a tiny and mostly unnoticed community took hold here, two blocks away from sleek Wilshire Boulevard apartments, finding shelter within the derelict building's dusty, wire-exposed walls.
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The main entrance is blocked, somewhat, by planks of plywood leaning against the doorframe, but it's easy to squeeze through.
The first door on your left: Cuba and Sergio's room.
The couple met in MacArthur Park eight years ago, and their barely twin-size canopied bed was placed against one wall with fairy lights draped above it. A small yucca plant was growing in a plastic bottle. A shopping cart brimming with recyclables sat near the entrance of the room.
On one Tuesday morning, Cuba was busy cleaning.
He lifted one corner of a sheet of metal from the ground to reveal a gaping hole in the floorboards. Then he swept, sending dirt and debris into the
