The structure where mass shooting suspect Chunli Zhao, 66, allegedly lived with his wife, is seen from this drone view at California Terra Gardens in Half Moon Bay, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023. Zhao was booked on seven counts of murder after the Jan. 23 shooting. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
There’s no question the employees on two Half Moon Bay mushroom farms lived in desperate circumstances. Many of their homes were flimsy shacks propped up on wooden pallets. The roofs leaked. There was often no running water or kitchens.
But while county and state officials quickly decried the living conditions exposed by the terrible mass shooting that erupted at California Terra Garden farm on January 23, they have mostly deflected when asked why the situation was allowed to persist. Now, a Bay Area News Group review indicates that laws meant to ensure livable farmworker housing often went unenforced in San Mateo County, allowing farm owners to neglect their struggling workforce, including the shooter and his victims.
Neither Terra Garden nor Concord Farms — the second shooting site in a disgruntled worker’s rampage that left seven dead — had permits for their worker housing. County officials say they take action against such illegal housing mainly in response to complaints, and there is no record that workers at either farm ever sounded an alarm.
But that response overlooks the county’s own responsibility amid an obvious reality for farmworkers in Half Moon Bay and across the state: Speaking out against working conditions may cost them their homes and jobs.
“There are laws on the books, but they just aren’t enforced,” said Ann López, director of the nonprofit Center for Farmworker Families in Santa Cruz County. “I see the issue as systemic.”
State law requires farm labor housing to be a self-contained unit with a sanitary toilet, shower, lavatory facilities, heating and electricity, and a kitchen with a refrigerator, sink and stove. In most California counties, the job of monitoring farm labor housing rests with the state. But San Mateo County, under a 1975 state authorization and county resolution, is among a handful of California jurisdictions that have taken over the task of oversight.
San Mateo County’s Planning and Building Department is the agency that enforces building codes. Records show it does inspect farmworker housing periodically when the farm owner has permits, responds to complaints, and on some occasions has ordered the removal of illegal dwellings, including some past interactions with Concord Farms as recently as 2012.
But in response to questions about the living conditions at Terra Garden and Concord Farms, San Mateo County Executive Officer Mike Callagy said last week that the county didn’t have “any idea” that farmworker housing “even existed out there,” as there were no housing permits on file and no current violations or complaints.
“These are large farms,” Callagy said. “We don’t typically have a right to go onto a location in an exploratory look for housing or violations. Mostly it’s complaint driven.”
State officials, however, noted the Health and Safety Code gives any employee housing enforcement agency the right to enter private properties to determine whether there is any employee housing. And in San Mateo County, the enforcement agency clearly is the county itself.
Told the county does indeed have the authority to search proactively for employee housing, Callagy said while that’s a “great provision,” it’s difficult to implement in practice — especially if county officials don’t know where to look. “Certainly there’s not enough resources to go door to door throughout the county looking for illegal units,” he said.
Alison Alkon, a professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockon who researches food justice, said a county has a clear responsibility to be aware of illegal farmworker housing within its jurisdiction, and a duty to do so given the farmworkers’ unique vulnerability, but that bureaucratic buck-passing is common.
“I think finding unpermitted housing is one of the things that counties do, and penalizing people who construct housing without permits,” Alkon said. “It’s kind of their job, in my opinion, to seek out these exploitative practices and find them and enforce their laws. But that doesn’t tend to be the way they work.”
There remain many questions about the conditions under which workers at California Terra Garden and Concord Farms lived. Both companies have refused media requests to tour their facilities. County Supervisor Ray Mueller joined a group of officials who visited Terra Garden three days after the shooting, and he posted pictures on social media of housing he labeled “deplorable.” Confessed shooter Chunli Zhao and his wife lived in a tiny shack whose roof was covered by a blue tarp, as seen in Mueller’s photos and drone pictures taken by the Bay Area News Group. No pictures have become public of the housing at Concord Farms.
On Monday, California Terra Garden announced it will build new permanent housing on a separate area of the farm for its employees and their families, and that it is working with local officials to ensure the workers have adequate affordable housing in the area for the estimated 12 months until it is completed. The farm said the decision followed “collaborative discussions with local officials that uncovered a series of code and permitting requirements unknown before the tragic shootings that occurred last week.”
The statement, which Terra Garden declined to elaborate on, suggested the farm owners had no knowledge of farmworker housing permit requirements or codes, and that county authorities who enforce those rules did not make them known to the company.
The company, however, isn’t new to farming in California. State records show California Terra Garden was incorporated in 2013 as a privately-owned “fresh mushroom wholesale” company, initially in Foster City and most recently in Commerce. It lists Xianmin Guan as chief executive and Liming Zhu as secretary. They also are associated with a Pescadero Terra Garden Inc. “mushroom farm,” down the coast from Half Moon Bay, incorporated in 2015, as well as Ventura Terra Garden Inc., a “mushroom wholesaler” incorporated in 2014.
While there is no paper trail regarding housing conditions at Terra Gardens, county officials acknowledged they have some record of concerns about the quality of farm labor housing at Concord Farms, where Zhao had previously worked. County officials had been discussing issues of an illegal trailer on that farm for years. After the owner said in 2012 that they were no longer providing housing, the county said in 2019 that a follow-up inspection was needed to confirm that the violations had been addressed. But the county “never followed thru after that,” records said.
When asked why the county did not follow through, San Mateo County Health Department spokesperson Preston Merchant responded with the same sort of explanation Callagy offered: The county often relies on complaints to initiate investigations, and none were filed against Concord Farms.
Employees have said the housing on the farm has been there for years. It wasn’t clear if that housing is up to code — and calls by this news organization to the company’s CEO and registered agent, Grace Tung, have not been returned this week. The company was incorporated in California in 1997, and it is not clear if they run other farms in the state.
Bay Area News Group spoke to a married couple who worked at Concord Farms for seven years and said they slept on the property in a tiny room just big enough for a bed and two drawers to hold their belongings. The couple — Chinese immigrants who declined to give their names out of fear of retaliation by their bosses — described a dormitory-type structure where people lived in small, individual rooms, many of which had no running water, they said. When it rained, ankle-deep water flooded the meager dwelling.
“We lived a simple life,” the wife said. “We had no choice.”
BJ Burns, a hay farmer and president of the San Mateo County Farm Bureau, said the county inspects his onsite farmworker housing every year. He’s convinced county officials knew about the mushroom farms’ unpermitted housing and said that it’s unfair to him and others in the agriculture industry for the government to let others slide on the rules.
“There’s no excuse,” Burns said, adding that farmworkers are “like family,” but when awful conditions like those at the mushroom farm are exposed, he said, “it blows up, and we get painted with the same brush.”
“That’s not right,” Burns said. “When you see them treated like this, it’s not right. They’re human beings and need to be treated like human beings.”
San Mateo County officials have long been aware of subpar farmworker housing in at least some locations. Don Horsley, a former county sheriff and supervisor, was quoted in 2020 saying some of the housing was “abysmal” and that “we couldn’t put people in (a) jail with these standards.” He worked to develop a grant program to help farms build or refurbish farmworker housing.
Local officials like Half Moon Bay Vice Mayor Joaquin Jimenez, who also is Farmworker Program Director for the local nonprofit ALAS, said the threat of losing farmworker housing makes complaining about conditions complicated. He had visited Terra Garden as recently as three days before the shooting and said he saw the housing wasn’t up to code. But asked whether he regretted not reporting it to the county, he said “yes and no.”
After ALAS reported housing conditions at a local nursery in 2021, county authorities told the company to remove four trailers where workers were living part of the week. The owner complied, according to county records, but Jimenez said that displaced all the farmworkers.
During a board of supervisors meeting Tuesday, Callagy acknowledged there are other farms in addition to Terra and Concord where workers are forced to live in unacceptable conditions. Officials are now working on a plan to identify and fix those, he said.
“We do know that there are these shadow areas of the county where farmworkers are living and they’re living in conditions that are substandard and not conducive to the health and safety of our residents,” he said, “and that’s something we can’t tolerate in this county.”
Mueller, who was elected county supervisor last fall, made a campaign commitment to do more to improve farmworker housing conditions. He hopes to have a plan to review in the coming months for upholding farmworker housing standards without displacing workers.
“This spotlight on farmworker housing will not go away,” Mueller said. “We’ll build a fire big and bright until we’ve made progress on it. We want to take a big leap forward on the coast to provide safe, healthy living conditions for our farmworkers. There’s a lot of support for that in the farmworker community and also a lot of support for that in our agricultural community.”
Originally published at John Woolfolk, Marisa Kendall, Jakob Rodgers, Scooty Nickerson