ESCONDIDO, Calif. — At 4 o’clock on a Thursday morning, Salomon Olea grabbed a packed lunch of a ham-and- cheese torta and a white peach, kissed his wife goodbye and left the home in Escondido he’s owned for nearly 30 years.
He drove five minutes to a small apartment complex to pick up his son, Angel, whose own three children were still asleep. The men then drove another half hour in silence, the head beams of their car the only lights on otherwise deserted streets.
The Olea men both drive commercial trash trucks for a private waste company. They spend 12 hours a day navigating the same route through the northern suburbs of San Diego, where they unload recycling and trash bins from schools, restaurants, convenience stores and, in one case, a church.
It’s exhausting work, but for the older generation of truck drivers, which includes Salomon, 55, it has meant a stable life. They have been able to buy homes and raise families in safe neighborhoods in Southern California — all on a trashman’s paycheck.
For a time, these kinds of working-class jobs, or jobs that demand manual labor, were a route to the American dream of homeownership.
Between 1980 and 1990, men without college degrees saw their incomes rise relative to the average U.S. worker. Around the same decade, more than two-thirds of construction workers and mechanics owned homes. But since then, wages have fallen, home prices have soared and fewer than half of people working manual labor jobs own a home.
That includes Salomon’s son. Angel’s been working to save for a down payment on a house, but, at 33 years old, is renting an apartment. He got a job because he saw the kind of life his father could afford, but at the truck yard he talks to the drivers his age about feeling left behind.
“We all came here almost expecting what our fathers accomplished,” Angel said. “We’re doing the same amount of hours, taking overtime that’s available. … What are we doing wrong?”
Salomon’s example
Angel and Salomon arrived at the truck depot in north San Diego an hour and a half before sunrise. They wore long-sleeved shirts and striped vests just like the roughly dozen other men who joined them, some of whom had driven up the night before from Tijuana. They sipped instant coffee as they circled the truck yard boss and tried to look alert at an hour when many people were still dead asleep.
After watching a short safety video on a small TV, each driver was handed the day’s route — a paper list of addresses that included schools, office parks and apartment buildings.
Angel hoisted himself into the cab of a front loader Mack truck. After checking the truck’s oil and making sure no alert lights were on, he put in his AirPods and turned up the ‘90s House music he listens to — something low energy, no lyrics.
He and the other drivers then fired up their engines and turned the hulking trash trucks onto the streets of San Diego. It was 5:30 a.m. Angel was in front, his dad a few trucks behind.
When Angel was in first or second grade, his teacher gave the class an assignment: What do you want to be when you grow up?
“They had a picture of a little duck and you had to draw what you wanted to be and I remember I wrote trash man,” Angel said. When he volunteered to share, his classmates laughed.
“I didn’t understand why,” he said. “What’s so funny about [that]?”
His dad, Salomon, began working in sanitation at 23 years old in 1994. He’d been working odd jobs — on construction sites, in the building materials department of Home Depot, at a printing press — but no job lasted for long and he was considering going out to Las Vegas, which was exploding with new construction. That’s when his wife, Maria, got him in touch with a cousin who was working in sanitation.
Salomon started out cleaning the beds of trash trucks and then worked as a helper to the drivers, jumping out to adjust the bins so the truck’s forks could slide into the slots and lift up the bins to dump the load into the hopper.
Within a year, he’d gotten his commercial driver’s license and was driving his own trunk.
By then Salomon had two kids — Yesenia and Angel. The family was living in an apartment building in Escondido, a majority Latino working-class city north of San Diego.
One day Angel, who was about 5 years old, was playing with a ball when it soared over a fence. When he tried to retrieve it, the property manager scolded him. Salomon saw this as he was getting home from work and decided he would try to buy a house so his son could have his own yard to play in.
He took on overtime shifts to earn extra pay, regularly working 80-hour weeks. Salomon was out of the house so much that in order for the kids to get time with their dad, Maria would put them in the car and drive to wherever Salomon had parked on his lunch break.
In 1998, four years after he started working in sanitation, Salomon was able to buy a three-bedroom house in Escondido. He paid $127,000. The median price for a home in the area was only slightly higher back then; today homes in the area sell for more than $1 million.
Salomon took a lot of pride in being able to buy a house. His parents died when he was a child in Mexico and he immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager under the care of an older sister. In just over a decade, he became a U.S. citizen and the first in his family to realize the American dream of homeownership — property he would eventually pass on to his children.
Bodies in the bins
One of Angel’s first stops was a McDonald’s, and he parked beside the cars idling in the drive-through line. He hopped out of the cab and opened the metal gate that holds the trash bins. Before operating the hydraulic steel arms that would dump the pile of flattened cardboard boxes in the compactor, Angel peeked under the lid.
It was the first thing Salomon taught his son about trash pickup: Always check for people in the bins. About 5,100 people a night in San Diego County sleep outside or in their cars, and Angel has found a few staying inside trash bins — most recently, in a large recycling bin used by a Home Depot.
“As soon as I opened the lid his face was just right there staring at me,” Angel said. Since some businesses don’t regularly recycle, those bins tend to be emptier. “I just told him, ‘Dude, get out of there.’”
It’s more common, Angel said, to find people sleeping in their cars in the strip mall parking lots of the stores on their routes. These people are often wearing work uniforms for the very businesses they’re sleeping outside of.
“The housing thing, it’s affecting everyone,” Angel said. “Some worse than others.”
In San Diego County, roughly 38% of all households spent more than a third of their income on housing costs, including rent and mortgage payments, a portion that experts say indicates someone is burdened by the cost of housing; in other words, it’s unaffordable and unsustainable.
Angel and his wife, Estephania, currently pay $2,800 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Escondido. It’s tight for a family of five; the boys, Angel Jr. and Isaac, sleep on bunk beds in one room, while Ruby, the youngest, sleeps on a small futon in her parents’ bedroom. They all share a bathroom.
At the beginning of 2025, Angel felt like he was finally starting to get close to having a down payment on a house. He and Estephania had managed to save $14,000.
But the median value of a home in Escondido is now just under $800,000, according to Zillow, and if Angel and Estephania wanted to put down 10%, a typical down payment for first-time homebuyers, they’d still be tens of thousands of dollars short.
They’d started considering looking outside Escondido for a home, as far as Wildomar, a semirural town about 45 minutes north in Riverside County. There, homes are a bit cheaper, but Angel’s work commute would become significantly longer, extending an already grueling 60-hour week.
The couple were weighing their options last year when life began siphoning off their savings. The engine in Angel’s 2009 Subaru died and even though he saved on labor costs by fixing it in the driveway with his dad’s help, he still spent about $3,000 on a used replacement. Then a dentist told them Angel Jr., the couple’s oldest son, badly needed braces because one of his front teeth had grown sideways, an expense that set them back $5,000.
The savings had all but vanished.
“We just feel like our heads are above water,” Angel said.
As the workday goes on, the temperature rises and each trash pickup gets a bit stinkier. At an elementary school, Salomon picks up three trash bins full of cafeteria food refuse, including what appears to be leftover Sloppy Joe meat in a clear bag swarmed by flies.
At a CVS, whose bins are shared by a nearby Thai restaurant, Salomon scoops up empty boxes of chopsticks, melon-flavored soft drinks and a large spool of red and pink fabric.
By 4 p.m., both Salomon and Angel head to their final stops — the landfill for Salomon’s trash route, and the recycling center for Angel. Then they drive back to the truck yard, where they clean out their trucks and get into the car for the 30-minute drive back home.
They get to Escondido 14 hours after they left.
When Angel arrived home, his two youngest kids — Ruby is 6, Isaac is 7 — ran out of the second-floor apartment to greet him, each angling to be the first to hug Dad. They hugged Grandpa next.
Salomon got back in his car to drive home as Angel followed his kids inside. He ate a dinner of carne asada and bean burritos while the kids watched “Angry Birds 2.” He showered and was in bed by 10 p.m., his alarm set for six hours later.
By the time Salomon typically gets home, he’s often too exhausted to do much other than eat and watch a little TV before going to bed. He thinks of his son and the conversations they have on their drive home, when Angel is more talkative compared with their predawn commute.
His son, Salomon said, can be hard on himself, feeling like he’s failed at some core tenet of life by not being able to buy a home like his father.
“Most of your cousins don’t have houses,” Salomon tells him. “It’s not like you’re failing. Most everyone has the same problem. It’s different times.”
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.
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