LOS ANGELES — In a city of multimillion-dollar houses and celebrity estates, Cesar Augusto’s home stands apart.

The walls consist of discarded fencing and wood paneling repurposed by Augusto, a tarp serves as a roof, and the front yard is the industrial backdrop of a city’s flood channel.

Balanced on a thin slice of land between the 110 Freeway and the Arroyo Seco flood channel, the home — not a house in the conventional sense — is framed under a stand of trees by a white lattice fence and window shutters. The rectangular shelter appears above the channel like a section of a wood-paneled suburban basement, and a sign hangs near the entrance: “ Ponte trucha,” or “Stay sharp.”

Augusto climbs a ladder up the steep wall of the channel to reach his makeshift shelter, another example of the extreme measures taken by many Angelenos struggling to find a place to live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

The unhoused in Los Angeles sleep in tents on the street, in government-built tiny home villages or in converted hotels. Those with construction skills and a bit of ingenuity — like Augusto — build their own shelters on whatever strip of unused or discarded land they can commandeer.

Augusto, 43, arrived in Los Angeles roughly 20 years ago from Guatemala. For 15 years he worked as a house painter throughout Los Angeles County, but he struggled to find jobs after his employer died five years ago.

“There wasn’t enough to live on. And it just became harder and harder to pay for a room to live in,” Augusto said in Spanish while standing in the concrete channel, which carries runoff through the Highland Park neighborhood.

Several TV news crews have passed through his riverside community in the last few days, asking him and his neighbors about their way of life. Augusto doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. He’s just trying to keep a roof over his head.

Reporters have recently focused on his neighbor, Alejandro Diaz, who built a much more elaborate shelter than Augusto — one that sports a bright yellow facade, decorative plants, solar panels and a concrete path leading to his front door. The shelter appears above the flood wash like a seaside cottage plucked from a coastal town.

One reporter described Diaz’s home as having “ riverfront appeal,” and other news stories have highlighted the ingenuity of the encampment amid an ongoing homelessness crisis.

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