After President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 paved the way for their removal, Japanese-Americans sold their homes, farms and businesses, often for pennies on the dollar. While incarcerated they worked menial jobs for $12 or $16 or $19 a month — hardly enough to survive on, let alone save for a new beginning. Unable to return to their farms — restrictive covenants and alien land laws often banned Japanese-Americans and their Japanese parents — many who worked on or owned strawberry or lettuce fields before the war moved to Los Angeles and became gardeners, trying to settle into an urban life for the first time in their lives.
Los Angeles, which was home to the largest ethnically Japanese community in North America before the war, was changing, too. The War Relocation Authority, the federal agency tasked with operating the 10 internment camps, worked to empty those camps as quickly as possible following Roosevelt’s closure order in December 1944. The W.R.A. shuttered almost all the camps in the fall of 1945. (One camp, Tule Lake, remained open until March 1946 to house “disloyal” incarcerees.) Each internee received $25 and a train ticket to wherever they wanted to go.
Housing was strained to the seams across the United States, but the situation in Los Angeles, described by one official in October 1945 as “full of dynamite,” was especially dire. More than 1.3 million people — roughly one out of every 100 Americans — moved to California between 1940 and 1944. The California State Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission estimated that 625,000 new homes would need to be built to accommodate the growth in the five years following the war, including 280,000 in Los Angeles County alone. During the war, Little Tokyo first became a ghost town, then swelled with Southern Black workers arriving for defense jobs; for three years Little Tokyo was known as Bronzeville. It was into this chaos that the W.R.A. planned to unload 1,200 incarcerees each week that fall.
By the end of 1945, a month after closing nine of the 10 W.R.A. camps, thousands of Japanese-Americans returned to the West Coast with nowhere to live. Those who couldn’t find other housing took rooms in $1-a-night hostels carved out of prewar hotels and Buddhist temples, or trailers and repurposed Army barracks.
Communities with as many as 1,000 residents filled mazes of barracks and trailers in El Segundo, Hawthorne, Burbank, Inglewood and Santa Monica. Even Lomita Flight Strip, an airfield used to house and train squadrons of P-38 fighter pilots 17 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, was converted into housing. To get into Los Angeles to find work required 85 cents each way, and a four-hour round-trip by bus. Charlotte Brooks, a historian, described the camps as “isolated ghettos that perpetuated the hardships of incarceration.”
— For Japanese-Americans, Housing Injustices Outlived Internment
