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."
Skid Row is also a haven for prostitutes, drug addicts, and a rich assortment of criminals. One fifth of the city's narcotics arrests were made on Skid Row in 2005. And Los Angeles jails release 1,600 prisoners a month directly into downtown. There are thousands of parolees, including hundreds of registered sex offenders, living on "the Row," which is also a breeding ground for infectious diseases like AIDS and hepatitis. And because of the availability of so many services, hospitals frequently dump indigent patients there. Similarly, cities all over Los Angeles County, now the homeless capital of the nation with 90,000 transients, point their street people in the direction of Skid Row.
But that's starting to change, albeit slowly. Los Angeles is in the midst of a sweeping downtown revitalization that is headed Skid Row's way. Spurred by huge developments like the Staples Center arena, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the upcoming $1.8 billion Grand Avenue project, downtown has become a giant construction zone. From the lofts in the historic Rosslyn Hotel to the apartments of the converted Pacific Electric Building-both on the fringes of Skid Row-more than 7,000 new housing units have been added to downtown since 1999, with many more in the works. Martini bars and trendy bistros are moving in. The area is starting to feel, well, hot. "We have managed against all odds to make this happen," says Carol Schatz of the Central City Association, which represents more than 400 local businesses and has been instrumental in fueling downtown's rebirth. "But we believe we could have even more downtown investment ... if it weren't for the Skid Row problem."
Enter Bratton, who has a bit of experience with urban disorder. As New York police commissioner, he was instrumental in taking back Times Square from prostitutes and street swindlers and making way for its commercial rebirth. He also cleared Gotham streets of the windshield-washing "squeegee men" who would materialize at traffic lights to ambush unwitting drivers. Relying on the "broken windows" approach to policing-stop the small crimes first and it will be easier to prevent big ones-the NYPD stepped up arrests in Times Square for crimes like littering and loitering. Residents started walking the streets again, and businesses began to flourish.
Stay the course. Skid Row, OK, is not Times Square. The LAPD, by any measure, is vastly understaffed. And while the city of L.A. has begun to set aside more money for the homeless, New York outspends L.A. in that area by more than 10-fold. But Bratton's approach is essentially the same: Reduce the crime on Skid Row and clean the place up, and then there's at least a foundation in place to tackle the underlying causes of homelessness-theoretically, anyway. "This city has turned a blind eye to the scale of the Skid Row problem, because it was out of sight and out of mind," Bratton told U.S. News. "But it's in full view now."
In September, Bratton added 50 more cops to the 350-person Central Division, which includes most of Skid Row. Serious crimes dropped almost immediately and are now down 18 percent for the year. There have been more than 3,000 arrests since September, the vast majority for felony narcotics charges. "'The Show,'as they call it down here, is over," says Captain Smith. "The drugs, drinking, prostitution, and hanging out by the campfire with your buddies is finished." Since September, the LAPD has also been walking a legal tightrope by enforcing a sidewalk sleeping ban during the day, which means that tents and other improvised shelters must be collapsed from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. The number of people sleeping on the street dropped from 1,876 in mid-September to under 1,200 in December. It's a start. The streets are now cleaner, and the sidewalks, once so crowded with tents and cardboard cities that they were impassable, are clear. Many homeless people have complained of being hassled, and homeless advocates have accused the cops of harassment. But others are thankful. "It's better this way, safer, and you can walk on the sidewalk," said Frank (who didn't want his last name used), who says he's been on the street for 2
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."
Rays of hope. That has proved to be a difficult task in a county where not-in-my-backyardism is so strong that the city of Santa Clarita had actually planned to bus its entire homeless population to Los Angeles. (The plan was aborted last year after bad publicity.) "People need to be realistic. Every elected official needs to accept permanent supportive housing in their district," says L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district includes Skid Row. "Two thirds of Los Angeles County is not in compliance. If I were a lawyer for the ACLU, I'd be looking at that."
But there is some good news. Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row recently bought Hope Gardens, a former retirement home in the San Fernando Valley, to provide housing and services for elderly women and for mothers and children. With day care and other services, women living at Hope Gardens would be able to go to school while their kids were cared for. The project was nearly done in by local opposition, even though it is separated by several miles from the nearest neighborhood. It is the kind of place Crystal Harper, 33, and the hundreds of other mothers with children on Skid Row would welcome. "My kids are terrified to go outside down here, and so am I," said Harper, as she waited outside the Union Rescue Mission for the school bus with her 6-year-old son. Harper is in a yearlong "second step" program, which includes job training and other life skills. She and her two children share a room with another single mother and her kids. Harper believes she could turn her life around if she could catch her breath away from Skid Row.
Hope Gardens will happen. And so will several other small projects here and there around the county. A recent vote by the county board of supervisors will direct $100 million toward new homeless programs in the next year. And Villaraigosa has proposed to the City Council that $4.6 million in new money be spent to fund 372 beds at emergency shelters. The mayor has also pushed for help from the state. But when it comes to the big fix-long-term supportive housing-the best hope went down the drain in the November election. Measure H, a bond issue that would have created $1 billion for supportive housing, fell just short of the required two-thirds majority. "There is plenty of goodwill," says Douglas Mirell, a commissioner on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. "But ... it will be at least two years before we see another bond measure like that."
In the meantime, Skid Row will continue to bedevil the City of Angels-especially when the sun goes down, the tent cities go up, and the homeless try to find their way in the dark.
This story appears in the December 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.