Echo Park, California responds to Nancy Cleeland's Los Angeles Times story about an Echo Park family that was kicked out of their home, from a Delta Street building that has sat vacant since the eviction of all tenants. The site points to a lively back and forth on Hexod.us about whether rent is a racial issue.

An angry comment on Echo Park, California, from a Latino reader shows that bigotry knowns no color.

In the meantime, my own rent and race story in Echo Park is as follows. When my husband and I decided to look for a house to buy we had been renting in Echo Park for a few years. We looked at MANY houses in the neighborhood. They were almost all owned or occupied by white residents. The house we ended up buying was the home of two young white men, one of them from Iowa. They loved the house and tried to raise the money to buy it. They were able to raise only half the asking price. We felt badly about it, especially as we had met them, and liked them. And they, in turn, were decent to us. We also knew that walking away from the house would not change the verdict: the tenants were going to move. At least no one ever pointed a finger and said we were getting the house because we were white.

I don't want to try to minimize the effect that losing their homes has upon lower-income Latino renters. Cleeland's story shows how devastating it is. I just want to point out that the dynamic -- landlords selling their rental properties as prices rise -- transcends race.