Homeless Sprawl
The City of Angels struggles to deal with a devil of a place
It was nothing unusual; just a high-voltage electrical box, 3 feet deep in trash, surrounded by a chain-link fence and wedged between two windowless warehouses on a downtown Los Angeles Street. It hardly merited a passing glance, or got one, from anyone other than Los Angeles Police Capt. Andrew Smith. After years of patrolling Skid Row, the city's sprawling 50-square-block homeless encampment, Smith has a way of seeing things that others might miss, like the pair of muddy feet peeking out from a mountain of garbage. "C'mon outta there," Smith called out as he rapped the fence with his nightstick. "Don't you see that high-voltage sign? You're gonna get hurt."
"Don't worry. I'm not going to electrocute myself. I worked in construction for years," the man called back, relying on the résumé that once kept his life afloat to qualify him instead to set up house in a reeking pile of filth next to a box of live wires. Rail thin and jumpy, Jack, 51, said he had gone to college and worked in construction, but then bad things started happening in the late 1980s and he landed on Skid Row. He has been there ever since, one of 12,000 homeless people living in the shelters, tent cities, cardboard condos, and flophouses that give Skid Row the dubious distinction of having the nation's largest concentration of homeless.
Like more than 1,000 other longtime street dwellers, Jack is what's known in the trade as "services resistant," a controversial term applied mostly to drug addicts and the mentally ill, who for a variety of reasons refuse to go into a shelter or program. (Nearly 10,000 Skid Row residents sleep in shelters and cheap hotels at night and return to the streets during the day.) "I don't mind being outside," Jack said as he unchained a bicycle piled high with his belongings. "I don't want to go to a mission and have people telling me what to do. I'd rather live out here."
But living on the streets of Skid Row is becoming an increasingly iffy proposition as police crack down on crime and camping and lift the lid on what has become a massive homeless gulag in downtown L.A. Out of view in an industrial district, Skid Row has been operating under the radar for decades. But it's on everyone's agenda now. Flashy Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton is on a crusade to conquer crime in Skid Row. Developers are circling with blueprints for high-priced hotels and condos. Even L.A.'s politicians are working together-sort of-to find a solution for what new Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has labeled a "national disgrace." Still, success is far from assured.
History. Skid Row, at the end of what was once the railroad line, has been around since the late 1800s when transient men who had come to the West looking for work would live in its cheap hotels. Then came the bars, the brothels, and the religious missions. Through the Depression and two world wars, Skid Row evolved as the place to bring together those who needed help-alcoholics, addicts, and the mentally ill-and the social-service providers who could give it to them. But after more than 100 years, it has become a containment zone for some of society's most desperate and a magnet for those who prey on them. "While the best of intentions may have been used in centralizing services in Skid Row, they have produced the worst possible solution," says Tom Gilmore, a developer and a former commissioner of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. "Years of flawed policies have enabled Skid Row to become the most obscene environment for the homeless in America."
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