Homeless Sprawl
The City of Angels struggles to deal with a devil of a place
For Malcolm Quon, a manager for his family's firm, the Umeya Rice Cake Co., simply being able to enter his warehouse without stepping past heroin addicts shooting up is a big improvement. Umeya, which makes fortune cookies and other Asian snacks, has been on Skid Row since the end of WWII. "It's hard to attract new customers ... because people come down here and they are not comfortable," says Quon, who doesn't schedule meetings until late morning and alerts his neighborhood LAPD officer every time he has a client coming, so that there is no one camped out close to his entryway. "Things have gotten much better in the last six months," Quon says. "But that just means someone else's problem got worse. It's not like it has disappeared."
No one is more aware of that than Bratton. "This is a big and complex problem that needs a big fix. Busting up the crime is an aspect, but it's not the solution," he says. "You can't arrest your way out of it."
Even if he wanted to, he couldn't. In 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the police chief and the city to stop enforcement of an ordinance that prohibited people from camping on streets and sidewalks at any time of the day. In April, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the ACLU in ruling that the law amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. With not enough shelter beds, the court argued, the city was in effect criminalizing homelessness.
The decision set in motion one of L.A.'s signature political polkas, featuring the city, the county, the mayor, the business community, and the police chief. At first, the city was going to appeal, with Bratton's support. Then he joined forces with Villaraigosa, who wanted to settle with the ACLU. (Villaraigosa is a past president of the ACLU of Southern California.) A settlement that would have called for only a partial, daytime sleeping ban was proposed in September but shot down by the City Council. Then came a similar plan to allow sleeping on the streets between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.-but the mayor withdrew from that one amid widespread worry the agreement would create a permanent homeless sanctuary in Skid Row.
Even the ACLU admitted that formalizing Skid Row as a city within a city probably wasn't a great idea. "The [proposed] settlement was not a very good settlement," says Ramona Ripston of the ACLU of Southern California. "No one thinks that sleeping on the street is a solution. But we thought it was a step toward getting more shelter beds, more services, and more low-cost housing."
The parties are still talking, and for the moment, the LAPD feels it's on safe legal ground in enforcing a sleeping ban during the day. But virtually everyone agrees that the only real solution is to offer more supportive housing, where those with mental illnesses and drug addictions can get help. Services also need to be spread throughout the county. That way, the financial burden can be shared, and the growing numbers of homeless women and children can be placed in a better environment. Homeless people with drug problems would also be farther away from Skid Row's temptations. "The city can take the easy route and say all the crap is already here on Skid Row, so let's just make better crap," says Gilmore. "Or, it can make the hard decision to fund supportive housing, with services, and to distribute it geographically rather than create a ghetto."
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