12.19.2024
A conversation with community organizer Elva Yañez on how a 20-year community effort readied the soil for the first community-based organization to win funding through L.A.’s Safe, Clean Water Project.
Beneath Elephant Hill, the 110-acre El Sereno hillside that provides a habitat for coyotes, red-tailed hawks, gopher snakes, fiesta flowers, Allen’s hummingbirds, black walnut trees, and California gall wasps, an underground spring lies dormant. But when it rains heavily on Elephant Hill — also known to many in the predominantly Latino Northeast L.A. neighborhood as “The Heavens” — the spring comes to life, running in rivulets down the saturated hillside and into the streets below.
An image of Elephant Hill Open Space, a foothill and valley forests and woodlands habitat.
This very spring played a key role in halting the development of two dozen luxury homes in 2006, when a backhoe grading the hillside during heavy rains got stuck in wetlands surrounding the active spring. It took two cranes to pry it out of the mud.
The incident created fodder for community organizers, including Save Elephant Hill (SEH) co-founder and El Sereno resident Elva Yañez, to further their longstanding campaign against the development by pursuing additional environmental review of the site’s water conditions. Neighbors who experienced landslides at the nearby Monterey Hills condos in the 1980s believed the new luxury homes would destabilize the hillside and endanger the homes below. The high-end development also signaled the threat of displacement by gentrification in El Sereno, which had historically been an affordable place for working families to buy or rent homes.
The organizers’ highly strategic effort, which hinged on proving the presence of underground water, culminated in the developer selling 20 acres of the project parcels to the City of Los Angeles for $9 million.
“[Water] had this miraculous impact on a development that advocacy couldn’t stop, but water could,” says Elva. “Water plays a significant part in the history of Elephant Hill from a development and protection standpoint.”
Today, Elephant Hill remains one of Northeast L.A.'s last and largest open spaces. To some, it’s a beloved hiking spot and iNaturalist hotspot. To others it’s a convenient, though unauthorized, place to offroad or dump trash. To others still, it’s a site of rich cultural history, an ancestral homeland with an even older history of displacement, and an invaluable habitat and oasis amid densely developed Northeast L.A. To Elva, it’s the place she and her partners have dedicated themselves to protecting since 2003.
For nearly two decades, water has been a quiet ally in the fight to save Elephant Hill, and now its defenders are turning their attention to the water itself. Earlier this year, Save Elephant Hill partnered with Upper Los Angeles River Watershed Area Coordinators to submit the first application by a community organization to win funding through the L.A. County Safe, Clean Water Program (SCWP) for a feasibility study to explore stormwater improvements.
SEH submitted the SCWP Technical Resources Program application on behalf of the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority for its five-acre Elephant Hill Open Space Area and several surrounding streets. The feasibility study will identify opportunities to capture, cleanse, and retain stormwater on Elephant Hill to prevent polluted runoff from entering the surrounding neighborhoods, and ultimately, L.A.’s waterways. SEH’s project also seeks to provide community benefits through planting native trees and plants, creating a vibrant park and biodiverse habitat that can continue to provide a space for engaging residents around land and water stewardship.
Over the last 1.5 years, Save Elephant Hill and its many collaborators used the Living Infrastructure Field Kit to hone their application for technical assistance, with hands-on support from Spherical’s Engagement Team. Co-created by Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles, Spherical, and organizations across L.A. County, the Field Kit is a free co-design tool and set of learning resources that help communities envision, plan, and apply for funding for multi-benefit projects.
SEH used the Field Kit to sketch out and map remedies across the project site, including rain gardens, native trees and plants, bioswales, water storage tanks, storm drains, walking paths, benches, drinking fountains, and interpretive signage. The Field Kit’s data layers also helped the team estimate the costs and scope of benefits these improvements would provide.
Spherical Engagement Manager Nathaly Moreno sat down with Elva for a conversation about the significance of this milestone, and the years of community care, collaboration, and participation that led to it.
