Enriquez grew up as the youngest of 10 children. His father was a World War II veteran who worked in a meatpacking plant, his mother a homemaker who went on to work in his school cafeteria. He was an altar boy at Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The West Side has changed a lot since he grew up there in the ’70s, he said. He describes an “ecosystem” of small businesses sharing the streets with single-family homes, often built by the families themselves with kits purchased from lumberyards. There was a Joske’s department store in the Las Palmas area and movies showing at the Guadalupe Theater.
Without access to lawyers or real estate agents, West Side families often bought homes by making handshake deals with the prior owners or writing agreements on napkins, he said. Decades later, the same families are having trouble proving ownership of the homes. The difficulties can prevent the families from building wealth through homeownership.
A home without clear title might fall into what Enriquez calls a “death spiral”: If no one can establish ownership of it, no one will take care of it. A lack of title can be a hurdle to securing homestead exemptions or making use of government programs such as the city’s“What we know about communities — particularly communities of color — is there’s a lack of intergenerational wealth transfers,” which are “extremely important to build up communities,” Enriquez said.