LOS ANGELES _ Twenty-thousand-dollar date palms fluttered in the breeze and cranes glinted against the sapphire sky as Jennifer Ramirez pulled her lunch truck to a stop outside the half-finished mansion on Bel Air Road.
It was her third stop on a balmy Friday, a bustling site packed with construction vehicles and hardhats laboring behind green privacy mesh. One moment, the 20-year-old from South Los Angeles stood alone on the glittering pavement, her 5-foot frame dwarfed by one of the most expensive homes ever built. The next, she was mobbed by a dozen hungry workers scrambling for their 9:45 a.m. lunch.
"It's cool (lunch trucks) come up here, because the streets are narrow and tight," said Joseph Trujillo, 26, who was installing aquarium-style acrylic windows in the bottom of the pool _ his third such project in recent weeks _ so future partygoers could watch beautiful people swim above them. "It's nice they come to us."
On Bel Air Road, grown men run out to meet Ramirez like kids chasing an ice cream truck. They call her "La Chaparrita," an affectionate diminutive for "shorty," the nickname of the infamous Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
Her horn signals a 20-minute break in a 10-hour work day, a chance to trade gossip with gardeners at the compound next door or the carpenters at the site down the block. Los Angeles is in the midst of a development boom, one that operates here at imperial scale. La Chaparrita's Munch Truck makes 15 stops in four hours, selling hundreds of meals to men who build homes the size of strip malls.
"They're building all these mansions, and they're always remodeling them," Ramirez said. "They've built mansions and completed them and then they tore them apart because they didn't like the way they turned out." Mohamed Hadid's unfinished mansion is among those Ramirez serves. Better known to most as the father of supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid, the billionaire attained local infamy for his 30,000-square-foot Strada Vecchia citadel, an icon of palatial excess in a neighborhood increasingly antagonistic to new construction, and to those who attend it.
"I've got a community on the edge of revolt," said Shawn Bayliss, executive director of the Bel-Air Assn. "Imagine building a Target. Now imagine putting that on a 22-foot-wide street that dead-ends, and imagine putting three of those on the same street. We're overwhelmed."
