By Ellis Song
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
When Masako Mochizuki married her husband, they had already planned on buying a home for themselves. But they were busy people. It’s not that they couldn’t afford a house. They just couldn’t afford the time to go look for one. So the year after they wed, they settled in an apartment they had found on Oxford Avenue in Los Angeles Koreatown. It was 1973.
Mochizuki, a former aspiring actress, had planted rose bushes when she first moved into that apartment, and the flowers have always provided her with joy.
“When we first moved in, there were rows of azaleas and it was pretty nice when they bloomed, but later on the kids living in the apartment got careless and put their bicycles on top of the azaleas and destroyed them,” says Mochizuki, who is now a 73-year-old widow. “I decided I’m going to plant roses, because with the thorns, no one’s going to step on them and ruin them.”
She planted five bushes, which still remain alive today.
As for her neighborhood, it wasn’t “Koreatown” back in the 1970s, Mochizuki says. But that would quickly change. Korean and Central American immigrants replaced the white community, and small businesses turned the area into an entrepreneurial hub.
But the biggest change to her immediate surroundings came when a Ralphs supermarket was transformed into a Korean church. “I couldn’t imagine converting a market into a church, but I didn’t think anything of it,” says Mochizuki.
Today, Oriental Mission Church’s brick red building is an imposing fixture that sits on the major thoroughfare of Western Avenue in Koreatown, and occupies nearly half of the block that it sits on. With its elliptical supermarket-esque sign and cavalry of church vans, the church can’t help but be noticed.
In recent years, the church has attempted to stretch its legs even further, and in an ambitious plan for expansion, bought Mochizuki’s apartment and those around her. Tenants from a number of the complexes were thereby pressured to vacate, so that the church could construct a parking lot for the OMC’s huge congregation, which boasts up to 4,000 members.
According to the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance, a nonprofit organization, the church has evicted and vacated 43 families since last year.
But, “to my knowledge, no one was forced out,” counters Matthew Kim, an associate pastor at OMC. Kim says the church did everything they could to accommodate the tenants. “Our church did a lot to help the residents. I believe we paid nearly $50,000 in relocation fees—$2,000 to $3,000 per family.”
Families that did not want to haggle with the church accepted a relocation fee and moved. The only one who refused to leave was Mochizuki. KIWA rallied around her, and adopted the rose as a symbol of her perseverance. In February, the organization planted 28 rose bushes along Oxford Avenue in support of Mochizuki’s struggle.
In March, after the OMC demolished one of the apartment complexes, the church was met with protests and human barricades by the members of KIWA. “The issue is that these are rent-controlled apartments,” says Danny Park, KIWA’s executive director. These are apartments built before 1976 that are controlled by different laws to prevent rent from being raised more than the Consumer Price Index, he explains. “Rent-controlled apartments are considered something that’s affordable to low-income families.”
While KIWA recognizes that the church did not break any laws and went through all of the necessary legal steps, Park believes that the church is severly disrupting the lives of entire families, for a parking lot that would be used only a few hours a week.
“We feel that a church has a much higher moral responsibility in serving the community,” says Park. “We’re not questioning whether they violated their legal responsibility, but we’ve questioned their responsibility to the community that they serve and operate in. A church that powerful should be building more affordable housing for the needy, but in this case, they’re knocking them down.”
Pastor Kim, however, believes that the church made significant efforts to fulfill this “moral obligation.” He adds he doesn’t believe that the parking lot will be permanent. “The initial plan was for the parking lot, but the long-term plan is to build some kind of community center,” he says.
Kim also states that the new parking lot addresses a safety issue for the congregation as well. “We have parents with young children who have to park far away,” said Kim. “Sometimes, these kids run back and forth across the streets to get to their car. So, there is a concern for safety.”
Despite community efforts to keep Mochizuki in her apartment, this spring, she could not hold out any longer. She eventually struck a deal with OMC and agreed to vacate her apartment. Her new place, however, is across the street and also owned by the church. With the help of KIWA, she negotiated with OMC a lease agreement that has her paying the same amount as before. But she still considers her old home, her home. “I still do feel comfortable there,” says Mochizuki.
For more than three decades, Mochizuki lived in her original apartment, which is located behind the church, separated by an alleyway. During that span of time, she grew attached to the neighborhood, her space and the rose bushes she’d planted in front of her door. But that attachment has been severed.
Mochizuki is still in the process of moving her belongings out from her old place into her new one. She has high blood pressure and a noticeable limp, the result of a stroke she suffered in 1999. So, walking up the stairs to her new apartment is difficult. The constant tug-of-war with the church and uncertainty of her living situation have deprived her of sleep, too. Her home has always provided her security, peace of mind and joy, but it’s all been taken away from her.
“I can’t see my flowers anymore,” says Mochizuki. “Now, if I open the window, all I have to see is a cement wall and painted bricks. In the dark, I used to be able to find my way, but now I will have to memorize everything all over again. In my old age, it’s become very stressful and really tiring.”
