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<\/p>\nESCONDIDO, Calif.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0At 4 o\u2019clock 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\u2019s owned for nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Salomon Olea and his son Angel stand together before starting their shift.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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 \u2014 all on a trashman\u2019s paycheck.<\/p>\n
For a time, these kinds of working-class jobs, or jobs that demand manual labor, were a route to the American dream of homeownership.<\/p>\n
Between 1980 and 1990, men without college degrees saw their incomes rise<\/a> relative to the average U.S. worker. Around the same decade, more than two-thirds of construction workers and mechanics owned homes<\/a>. But since then, wages have fallen, home prices have soared and fewer than half of people working manual labor jobs own a home.<\/p>\n That includes Salomon\u2019s son. Angel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all came here almost expecting what our fathers accomplished,\u201d Angel said. \u201cWe\u2019re doing the same amount of hours, taking overtime that\u2019s available. \u2026 What are we doing wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n Salomon Olea leaves for work at 4 a.m.<\/p>\n Salomon\u2019s example<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n After watching a short safety video on a small TV, each driver was handed the day\u2019s route \u2014 a paper list of addresses that included schools, office parks and apartment buildings. <\/p>\n Angel hoisted himself into the cab of a front loader Mack truck. After checking the truck\u2019s oil and making sure no alert lights were on, he put in his AirPods and turned up the \u201890s House music he listens to \u2014 something low energy, no lyrics.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 1 <\/p>\n 2 <\/p>\n 1. Just like his father, Angel Olea drives a sanitation truck in the pre-dawn light. 2. Salomon Olea gets ready for work in the kitchen of his home with his wife Maria. <\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n \u201cThey had a picture of a little duck and you had to draw what you wanted to be and I remember I wrote trash man,\u201d Angel said. When he volunteered to share, his classmates laughed.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t understand why,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s so funny about [that]?\u201d<\/p>\n His dad, Salomon, began working in sanitation at 23 years old in 1994. He\u2019d been working odd jobs \u2014 on construction sites, in the building materials department of Home Depot, at a printing press \u2014 but no job lasted for long and he was considering going out to Las Vegas, which was exploding with new construction. That\u2019s when his wife, Maria, got him in touch with a cousin who was working in sanitation.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s forks could slide into the slots and lift up the bins to dump the load into the hopper.<\/p>\n Within a year, he\u2019d gotten his commercial driver\u2019s license and was driving his own trunk.<\/p>\n By then Salomon had two kids \u2014 Yesenia and Angel. The family was living in an apartment building in Escondido, a majority Latino working-class city north of San Diego. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 1 <\/p>\n 2 <\/p>\n 1. Salomon Olea opens the gate to where the trash bins are so he can access them with his truck. 2. Salomon Olea drives a sanitation truck while on his daily work route in San Diego, CA on Thursday, September 3, 2026. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/a>; today homes in the area sell for more than $1 million.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 property he would eventually pass on to his children.<\/p>\n Bodies in the bins<\/p>\n One of Angel\u2019s first stops was a McDonald\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAs soon as I opened the lid his face was just right there staring at me. I just told him, \u2018Dude, get out of there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Salomon<\/p>\n 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<\/a> sleep outside or in their cars, and Angel has found a few staying inside trash bins \u2014 most recently, in a large recycling bin used by a Home Depot.<\/p>\n \u201cAs soon as I opened the lid his face was just right there staring at me,\u201d Angel said. Since some businesses don\u2019t regularly recycle, those bins tend to be emptier. \u201cI just told him, \u2018Dude, get out of there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019re sleeping outside of.<\/p>\n \u201cThe housing thing, it\u2019s affecting everyone,\u201d Angel said. \u201cSome worse than others.\u201d<\/p>\n In San Diego County, roughly 38% of all households spent more than a third of their income<\/a> 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\u2019s unaffordable and unsustainable.<\/p>\n Angel Olea with his wife, Estephanie, and kids Ruby, 6, Isaac, 7, and Angel III, 13, at their apartment.<\/p>\n Angel and his wife, Estephania, currently pay $2,800 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Escondido. It\u2019s 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\u2019 bedroom. They all share a bathroom.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But the median value of a home in Escondido is now just under $800,000, according to Zillow<\/a>, and if Angel and Estephania wanted to put down 10%, a typical down payment for first-time homebuyers, they\u2019d still be tens of thousands of dollars short.<\/p>\n They\u2019d 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<\/a>, but Angel\u2019s work commute would become significantly longer, extending an already grueling 60-hour week.<\/p>\n The couple were weighing their options last year when life began siphoning off their savings. The engine in Angel\u2019s 2009 Subaru died and even though he saved on labor costs by fixing it in the driveway with his dad\u2019s help, he still spent about $3,000 on a used replacement. Then a dentist told them Angel Jr., the couple\u2019s oldest son, badly needed braces because one of his front teeth had grown sideways, an expense that set them back $5,000.<\/p>\n The savings had all but vanished.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just feel like our heads are above water,\u201d Angel said.<\/p>\n Angel Olea hugs his kids Ruby and Isaac while his dad, Salomon, looks on at Angel\u2019s apartment complex at the end of a workday.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n By 4 p.m., both Salomon and Angel head to their final stops \u2014 the landfill for Salomon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n They get to Escondido 14 hours after they left.<\/p>\n When Angel arrived home, his two youngest kids \u2014 Ruby is 6, Isaac is 7 \u2014 ran out of the second-floor apartment to greet him, each angling to be the first to hug Dad. They hugged Grandpa next. <\/p>\n 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 \u201cAngry Birds 2.\u201d He showered and was in bed by 10 p.m., his alarm set for six hours later.<\/p>\n By the time Salomon typically gets home, he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n His son, Salomon said, can be hard on himself, feeling like he\u2019s failed at some core tenet of life by not being able to buy a home like his father.<\/p>\n \u201cMost of your cousins don\u2019t have houses,\u201d Salomon tells him. \u201cIt\u2019s not like you\u2019re failing. Most everyone has the same problem. It\u2019s different times.\u201d<\/p>\n This article is part of The Times\u2019 equity reporting initiative<\/a>, funded by the James Irvine Foundation,<\/a> exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California\u2019s economic divide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ESCONDIDO, Calif.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0At 4 o\u2019clock on a Thursday morning, Salomon Olea grabbed a packed lunch of a ham-and- cheese…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14541,7,9,8,283,9229,10428,1073,2882,9172,3410,592,181173,74,7756,181174,7199,72],"class_list":["post-459361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-angel","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-car","tag-dad","tag-escondido","tag-home","tag-hour","tag-house","tag-kid","tag-people","tag-salomon-olea","tag-san-diego","tag-son","tag-trash-bin","tag-truck-driver","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Salomon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1789044272_210_.jpeg\")
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