Making skid row safe: for better or worse?

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MAKING SKID ROW SAFE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE?

by
Natasha Garyali
____________________________________________________________

A Professional Project Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Natasha Garyali
ii

Table of Contents

Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii
Skid row: Past and Present .................................................................................................. 1
Safer City Initiative and Skid Row ..................................................................................... 7
Policing Skid Row: The Unintended Consequences ........................................................ 12
Figure 1: Poster on jaywalking ..................................................................................... 15
Figure 2: Reported robberies during 2006-2008 ........................................................... 18

Making Skid Row Safe: Curbing Crime or Gentrifying? ................................................. 20
Future of Skid Row ........................................................................................................... 23
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 25

iii

Abstract

When the Los Angeles Mayor‟s Safer City Initiative (SCI) was launched in
September 2006, it was hailed as the perfect prescription for success. It contained, among
others, two much-needed ingredients -- law enforcement and housing initiatives -- to
tackle the problems of one of the largest, most neglected and complex composition of
homeless people in the nation, the residents of Los Angeles‟s Skid Row. City officials
believe SCI was needed to create a safer environment but others argue that Skid Row did
not need stricter law enforcement, although it requires a police presence. Advocates for
the homeless are urging that the city comply with its promise of providing adequate
housing as a part of the initiative. This becomes particularly pressing as the nation‟s
economic collapse deepens, and more people head towards Skid Row in search of food
and shelter.
1

Skid row: Past and Present

One of the most fascinating things about walking in downtown Los Angeles is the
seamless transition from the luxury lofts with courtyards brimming with fountains and
tranquil Zen gardens to the dirty, urine-stained and blighted neighborhoods of Skid Row.
Under a 1976 city policy, shelters for the homeless were to be concentrated into the 50-
block confines of Skid Row, not physically far but psychologically distant from the hope
of redevelopment along the Central Business District. Office buildings and commerce
began to encroach on Skid Row. Its residents lived through the containment until some
industries, notably toy wholesalers, garment manufacturers and fish processers moved
into the area in the early 1980‟s attracted by low commercial rents. In many ways that
represented the first step towards gentrification of the area. Development and
encroachment went slowly until 2002, when the Central City Association (CCA) a trade
association representing business became involved in city policy in major way. Hailing
Downtown Los Angeles as being on the “cusp of an urban Renaissance,” CCA argued
that “only by dispersing homeless services throughout the city can we properly manage
the public health and safety (Blasi, 2007, p. 2).”
This argument fell flat with skeptical residents and business interests in other
areas of the city who feared that encouraging homeless people to move to their
neighborhoods would have severe repercussions on property values. Various civic
organizations made it clear to the LA City Hall that they opposed the spread of services
2

to avoid the homeless. This attitude in the neighborhoods across the city persists till
today.
“We had plans to regionalize services and quit the containment action that Skid
Row has been in,” Rev. Andy Bales, CEO of Union Rescue Mission, says with a
distressed look on his face. “What has happened instead is that chronically ill people
from Orange County and mental hospitals are being dumped off on Skid Row, adding to
the greatest human tragedy.”
The density of the population in Skid Row is beyond imagination. In an area of
0.85 square miles, Skid Row occupies about 0.18% of the land area in the city and about
7.6% of the city‟s homeless population, a density which is 42 times the city average
(Blasi, Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities
Initiative on Skid Row, 2007, p. 8).
Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor who has written extensively on the issue of
homelessness in Los Angeles says, “Skid Row is worse than a slum in Brazil. The people
there at least get to keep their favelas (a Portuguese word for a shanty town), but in Skid
Row you have to take down your favelas every morning at 6 a.m.”
The city enacted its sidewalk sleeping ban in the early 1900s as a way to fight
vagrancy. In 2002, when the LAPD Chief William Bratton arrived on the scene, he
attempted to remove tent cities that cropped up in massive numbers in Skid Row at night.
His move was stalled, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit
against the move in 2003.
3

In an April 2006 ruling in favor of ACLU, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
stated that since the city was short of overnight shelter space, arresting homeless people
for sleeping on the sidewalk was “cruel and unusual punishment” (A Dream Denied: The
Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities). After this ruling, the ban was enforced
by LAPD officers only during the day.
Under a legal settlement in 2007, the city could reinforce its ban on sleeping on
sidewalks at night, only if it built 1,250 units of supportive housing for the homeless
(Hymon & Zahniser, 2007). Half of these low-income units were required to be
constructed in downtown. Fulfillment of this action, city officials‟ believe, will take
around 3-5 years. Till then hundreds of Skid Row residents will continue to live at night
on the sidewalks, in cardboard boxes, carts, and few lucky ones in a mobile shelter called
an EDAR (short for Everyone Deserves a Roof). EDAR is a covered contraption that
looks like a cross between a shopping cart and a pop-up camper (Groves, 2008).
As the density of Skid Row increased, so did the proliferation of crime. Over the
years, the Los Angeles Police Department has been increasingly called on to deal with
Skid Row‟s issues of homelessness, drugs, prostitution, assault, alcohol and mental
illness. The department‟s action over the years has been less than welcoming. In 1987
Police Chief Daryl Gates sent word out to the homeless people in Los Angeles to either
get off the streets of Skid Row in seven days or face arrest (Blasi, Policing Our Way Out
of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row Los Angeles,
2007, p. 21).
4

Then City Attorney James Hahn refused to prosecute those arrested so long as
there was inadequate shelter, and the Los Angeles Times of that era editorialized that
homeless people “need safe shelter, not jail cells. Mayor Tom Bradley and Chief Gates
should call off the arrests” (Blasi, 2007, p. 21).
Nearly two decades later, Mayor Antonio A. Villaraigosa announced a new
policy, the Safer City Initiative. Launched in September, 2006, and spearheaded by the
mayor and Chief Bratton, the Safer City Initiative was based on New York City‟s broken
window theory that small signs of disorder invariably lead to more serious crimes.
Sleeping on a sidewalk for example would be linked with drug use. While proponents of
the theory claim its effectiveness, those who work with the homeless firmly believe that
its historical use has been to justify law-enforcement crackdowns on members of
marginalized communities, especially poor people of color (Hoffmann, 2007).
The initiative at first garnered support among the area‟s residents because it
promised to encompass both enforcement and shelter enhancement as integral
components of a program aimed at making Skid Row safer. The enforcement component
was swiftly delivered, with an additional 50 patrol officers being assigned to the 50-
square blocks of Skid Row, along with 25-30 additional narcotics officers and mounted
police for crowd control (Blasi, Has the Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row Reduced
Serious Crime?, 2008, p. 2). However the promised “enhancement” – more shelter, drug
treatment, and services for the mentally ill homeless – essentially never came (Blasi,
2008, p. 2). To go along with about $6-million worth of additional police resources,
which were mostly concentrated in those 50-square blocks, City Attorney Rocky
5

Delgadillo contributed $100,000 of his department‟s funds to create a “Streets or
Services” (SOS) program (Blasi, 2008, p. 3). This was aimed at providing misdemeanor
arrestees with the opportunity to enroll in rehabilitation programs. Ironically the
enhancement component, including the SOS programs, failed to match up with the
enforcement component of the SCI both in magnitude and resources.
And the problems worsen. The homeless population in Los Angeles is changing
from people who are poor, drug addicted and mentally ill to those who are recently fired,
unemployed and victims of foreclosures.
The increasing numbers of working-class families are joining Southern
California‟s existing homeless population of 73,000 in Los Angeles County (2007
Homeless Count Reports Over 73,000 People Remain Homeless in Los Angeles County,
2007). The county had an unemployment rate of 10.1% in January and foreclosures rates
in California are among nation‟s 10th highest foreclosure rates. As the homeless
population swells, the density increases at a rate that hasn‟t even been guessed at by city
officials and those who serve the poor.
While missions have expanded their services to accommodate the waves of
families that have descended on the downtown area, the charitable donations to such
organizations have gone down significantly. Rev. Bales of Union Rescue Mission says
that his organization is trying to keep up efforts to add beds and services, even while the
economy is tanking, because, he says, “if we don‟t, who will? Certainly not the state,
county or the city.”
6

According to Rev. Bales, city and county officials are stunned by the recent turn
of events. “You would think that they would come up with an emergency plan, figure out
a way to buy the houses in foreclosures and give it to people who need them, but they are
stunned, like a deer in the headlight,” he adds.

7

Safer City Initiative and Skid Row

Carol Sobel is a National Lawyers Guild attorney who won a major lawsuit last
December against the LAPD for conducting unconstitutional searches of Skid Row
residents. She believes that one of the major drawbacks of the Safer City Initiative has
been the lack of proper programs to provide food and shelter for homeless people. “No
money was allocated for the programs and two years later the situation is the same, even
though the last two years were the good years when there was money in the city,” she
says.
A 2007 report by a consortium of local universities on approaches to end
homelessness in Los Angeles found that the worsening economy, shortage of affordable
housing and cutbacks in welfare programs were all contributing to a rise in homelessness
in the county, and Skid Row was left to bear the brunt of the burden (A Reality-Based
Approach to Ending Homelessness in Los Angeles, 2007). The report said that even
though the number of homeless people had declined by nearly 16 percent since 2005 to
73,702 in LA County, there was still not enough affordable housing to meet the demand.
Citing example of the city‟s plan for low-income housing, which called for 4,000 units to
be built annually between 2001 and 2006, the report found that since 2001, the city had in
fact lost more than 11,000 affordable units.
Furthermore, while the county did little to make up for a deficit of 5,000
emergency beds and 14,000 transitional beds in hospitals, the general relief payments for
the county‟s unemployed and disabled people has continued to amount to $221 a month
8

for the last 25 years (2007, p. 6) . The $2,652 a year for a single adult was far below the
federal poverty level of $10,400 for a one-person household.
“I know people think I am a little bit of a broken record, but the city found 60
million for the zoo when it wanted to,” says Sobel, citing as an example, city zoo officials
who decided to invest nearly $42 million on an elephant sanctuary. “It makes you wonder
where your priorities are as a city. Is your priority finding shelter for the people or is it
finding more elephants for the zoo. You know for me it is just that simple,” she adds
touching her forehead, which is laddered with expression lines.
Sobel believes that the only way to tackle homelessness is by providing housing.
She believes that the city must invest in permanent supportive housing to stabilize the
growing numbers of needy. However the problem is, she says, in the good years the city
didn‟t spend money and has acted contrary to the idea of providing permanent low-
income housing. She argues that even though the prices of property are dropping, the city
is still not moving towards acquiring property and is missing the opportunity to provide
housing for the poor.
Sobel is also critical of charitable missions on Skid Row that supported the Safer
City Initiative after it was launched. She says that missions are actually opposed to
permanent housing. She then quickly corrects herself. “I won‟t say „opposed,‟ but they
don‟t facilitate it much.” Rev. Bales of Union Rescue Mission agrees with her. He argues
that some people at other charitable organizations on Skid Row are not working hard
enough to improve the conditions of the homeless.
9

“They want to keep the conditions bad so that they can raise money for their
organization or programs,” Bales further adds with a hint of irony. Rev. Bales recounts
the countless number of letters he has written to the city, county and state pressing them
to acquire more permanent housing for the homeless. “I would love to see the day when
Skid Row has permanent supportive housing, and we are no longer needed,” he adds with
a sigh.
Kevin Michael, a community organizer for United Coalition East Prevention
Project (UCEPP) and a recovering addict who has lived on Skid Row for six years, shares
similar sentiments. “It has been documented that people who have housing are more
likely to engage in treatment at some point and so they are less likely to go back to
prison,” he says. And housing gives them better chances at employment, education and
recovery. If homelessness is the issue, Michael argues, the solution is housing and not
more law enforcement. Michael points to a flyer glued to the door of his UCEPP building
in Skid Row that, he says, succinctly expresses the Safer City Initiative‟s lack of balance.
Imprinted in bold letters were two statistically relevant statements: $6 million per year
could provide housing subsidies and services for 350 homeless people. Jail costs $63 per
day; housing and services cost $45 per day.
“I see the homeless people as being treated more like a waste management
problem rather than human problem,” says Gary Blasi, the UCLA law professor,
describing the condition of one mentally-ill woman named Amy Moody who lives on
Skid Row. Moody has been arrested nearly 50 times for offenses related to sitting on the
10

sidewalk at the exact same location of 6
th
and Towne Street. She recently got convicted
on 17 counts of sitting on the sidewalk and faces six months of jail for each one of them.
“So you can figure out how much money the city has spent by arresting her 50 times.
Leave aside the humanity of it, as a public policy matter it is just stupid, the allocation of
resources,” says Blasi.
Rev. Bales of Union Rescue Mission admits that while the Safer City Initiative
may not have dramatically altered the shelter and services gap on Skid Row, it has
definitely improved the environment. “I could not walk outside on the streets after a
board meeting, or walk to the bank without breaking up a knife fight, and I have broken
up many,” he says. “Sadly they go unnoticed because victims don‟t often report them,
specially beatings and rape.” Bales says he‟s still pained by one such incident. A man
died of a heroin overdose, and while Rev. Bales was waiting by the body, two women
walked up to him and said how often they would get raped on the streets by him.
“A woman has a 70 percent likelihood of being raped within her first two weeks
on Skid Row,” Rev. Bales adds, citing that as an important aspect of the Safer City
Initiative. In his experience, LAPD officers have saved the lives of many people. He tells
another story of a man who had run from a halfway house, had broken parole and had
landed in Skid Row. “He was sleeping on a cold sidewalk and shivering with pneumonia
when the officers saw him and took him to the hospital,” says Rev. Bales. “Officers like
Capt. Jodie Wakefield,” Bales says, “care deeply for people on streets. I call her when
there are those instances when I see an officer who is acting towards a homeless person
the way they will not act towards you and me, I tell her, „hey, your officer didn‟t treat this
11

man like a human being and he should have listened to their report and taken it
seriously,‟ and she listens.”
Capt. Wakefield was area commanding officer for the LAPD‟s Central Division
before she was transferred in January 2009. Capt. Wakefield considers her last four years
in the Central Division, first as a patrol commanding officer in 2005 and later as area
commanding officer in 2007, as the most rewarding of all jobs she has had so far in
LAPD. But the position came with its fair share of challenges. Recounting the horrific
images that she saw on Skid Row when she was assigned the patrol position in 2005,
Capt. Wakefield says, “I saw a lot of people dying from overdoses and natural causes
because they weren‟t being treated; victims of violent crime were higher.” Wakefield and
other officers in 2005 felt they could do little to make a difference due to the sheer
number of homeless and the lack of sufficient resources.
While the Safer City Initiative provided some much-needed support and safety to
the homeless population, the severity of the law enforcement crackdown and its
unintended consequences cannot be ignored.

12

Policing Skid Row: The Unintended Consequences

“Hey, how you doing, brother,” Kevin Michael, the community organizer shouts
out as we pass through the desolate streets of 6
th
and Main. His sharp voice resonates in
the quiet surroundings. In the opposite direction, a tall, lanky man wearing a striped shirt,
patched with dirt and grease and dusty brown pants torn in various places, waves his
hand. As the two men draw closer, Michael blurts out, “how often do police stop you and
ask if you are on parole or probation?” “All the time,” came the reply from the man
whose name is Tracy. “You see what I am saying,” Michael looks at a reporter as he
continues talking to Tracy. “You know they (the police officers) have a new lawsuit and
they are not supposed to be confronting residents without cause. We will be doing some
training soon about it and we will get together,” Kevin says, placing his hand firmly on
Tracy‟s shoulder.
Michael has been involved in creating awareness among homeless people and
other residents on Skid Row of their constitutional rights. “The police cannot randomly
stop people in this community, or anywhere, because you do have the right to privacy
under the Fourth Amendment, the right against unreasonable searching and randomly
asking people if you are on parole or probation or stopping you for jaywalking,” says
Michael.
Last December, the ACLU won the long-running case against the LAPD, known
as Fitzgerald vs. City of Los Angeles. The court‟s order restricted officers‟ ability to
search people caught jaywalking, sleeping on the street or citing them for minor offenses,
13

such as littering. It also barred them from unduly detaining Skid Row residents for
warrant checks. The agreement reached between the ACLU and LAPD also prohibits
officers from handcuffing subjects unless there is reasonable suspicion that “a subject
poses a physical threat to officers or others, may destroy evidence, flee, or otherwise
interfere with the officers‟ legitimate investigation” (Winton & Dimassa Mia, 2008)
However, in practice this doesn‟t necessarily safeguard rights of the people on
Skid Row, Michael points out. Citing one of the four arrests that occurred a few weeks
after the agreement, Michael says, “I saw them stop Lavanda and waited till they finished
hand-cuffing, searching and citing her. When I asked police officer Davis, wasn‟t there
an injunction about this, he looked visibly upset about it.” Justifying his arrest, the officer
told Michael later that he had arrested the woman because he suspected that she had a
felony warrant issued against her. “But it turned out to be her sister, it wasn‟t her,” says
Michael.
These events continue to haunt him as a rude reminder of the difference between
having a law and implementing it. Michael was left dumbfounded when he “watched how
the LAPD officers blatantly and intentionally violated the Fitzgerald ruling.” He adds, as
his voice rises with contempt - “Through their actions they were saying that „screw with
what the court is saying, this is the way we have been doing and this is the way we will
always be doing‟.”
Capt. Jodie Wakefield disagrees. “If we find officers who have not articulated
well or have violated somebody‟s right, we hold them accountable,” she says.

14

Many times, she adds, “you cannot find the complainer and when you find them, you find
out that they didn‟t make the complaint, somebody made it for them, and that they didn‟t
have a problem with the officer.”
Gary Blasi who has published several studies on the Safer City Initiative program,
argued that the “unintended consequences of the program have negatively impacted the
homeless and mentally disabled people in Skid Row.” In his report on „The First Year of
the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row‟ which was published shortly after the initiative
completed its first year, Blasi cited some stark numbers.
According to the report, the Los Angeles Police Department wrote about 12,000
citations in the first year of the Safer City Initiative, the great majority of which were for
pedestrian violations, primarily signal (“Walk”/”Don‟t Walk”) violations. These
pedestrian citations, the report further, mentioned were 48 to 69 times more frequent in
Skid Row than elsewhere in Los Angeles. Also citations issued to indigent and mentally
disabled people unable to obtain legal help or represent themselves at a hearing inevitably
lead to arrest warrants, with penalties -- the “bail/fine” for a pedestrian signal violation of
$159 – represents a heavy burden for a General Relief Recipient with a monthly income
of $221 (Blasi, Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer
Cities Initiative on Skid Row Los Angeles, 2007, p. 5).
The pedestrian citations irked the homeless advocates and residents of the
community so much that it was not uncommon to find flyers like these (see Figure1)
mounted on the doors and entrances of various organizations in and around Skid Row.

15

Figure 1: Poster on jaywalking

The overall number of arrests also spiked to 750 per month in 2006 under the
Safer City Initiative (Blasi, 2007, p. 32). Half of these arrests were related to drug sales
and possession offences with the median amount of drugs seized being 2.5 grams or 0.9
ounces. Carol Sobel, the National Lawyers Guild attorney, says that nowhere in the city
does the LAPD issue arrest warrants with such frequency. “The net effect is that,” she
adds, the Skid Row residents get penalized twice, “because a conviction record means
that they are excluded from housing, food stamps, and they are almost cut off from all
public benefits.” Sobel notes that most of those arrested for drug-related offenses have
mental problems. Here is her description of a typical drug bust: “Police officers in plain
clothes walk up and say -“„hey you got a rock? I got $20,‟and this developmentally
16

challenged guy turns to the guy next to him and says he wants a $20 rock and passes it on
and, boom, you are arrested.” Adding to the injustice, she says, the mentally ill or drug
addicts are charged with selling and not possession, which is a felony. “They go to state
prison, but do they get treatment in state prison, do they have any money when they come
out, can they get a job? No, is the answer.”
Rev. Bales of Union Rescue Mission does not agree with Sobel on this point. He
says his brother, a former drug dealer who went to prison for 8.5 years and is now living
with the Volunteers of America, is getting his food stamps. What Rev. Bales is
completely sure of is what would happen to Skid Row if SCI were to be discontinued. “If
the drug dealers even know that the SCI police are going to be off for a day, it quickly
reverts back to what it was a – Mardi Gras on crack,” he says with obvious distress as he
walks to a window overlooking Skid Row. Looking out at the streets where pockets of
men stand together in one corner, Rev. Bales says, “we have drug dealers who are very
violent, they show up, shoot people and beat them to death, so I don‟t know what the
people lobbying against SCI are talking about.”
“It has been the single most effective program to address the criminal predator
population in Skid Row area,” says Estela Lopez executive director, of the Central City
East Association (CCEA), who in the past encountered people fighting with each other
with knives, selling drugs in open or practicing prostitution on the sidewalk on a daily
basis. “My office is in Skid Row, and I know there is a sense among the people who work
and live here that it is a safer community. Is it safer 100 percent? No community is, but
we are on our way to a much safer community with SCI,” she adds.
17

Contrary to the views of Rev Bales, Capt. Wakefield and Estela Lopez, both Gary
Blasi and Carol Sobel believe that the concentration of police officers in Skid Row is a
misuse of resources and that Skid Row is not the violent place it is portrayed to be.
Analyzing the effects of the Safer City Initiative on robberies in Skid Row, Blasi
calculates the effect size, which he writes is the “size of the effect being produced, in this
case, the number of robberies being prevented or deterred, the costs of obtaining that
effect, and how those effects compare with other results, the same resources might have
obtained elsewhere.” In his report Blasi writes:

In the one year after Safer City Initiative began, robberies declined by 41% in the
control area (part of Central Area outside Skid Row). If Skid Row had
experienced the same decline, we would expect that Skid Row would have seen
robberies decline to 226 (41% fewer than the 386 seen in the year before the SCI).
However in fact, SCI area saw only 175 robberies. Attributing the difference (226
-175 = 51) fewer robberies per year to the 50 additional SCI Task Force officers,
meant that each officer was responsible for a reduction of just (over) 1 robbery
per year) (Blasi, Has the Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row Reduced Serious
Crime?, 2008, p. 10).

The report also compared Central with six neighboring areas from January 1 to August
23, 2007 and 2008 (See Figure 2).

18

Figure 2: Reported robberies during 2006-2008

Clearly 77th and Rampart had many more robberies than Central. Also the number of
robberies in the Central Area was a small fraction (4.6%) of the 13,445 robberies reported
throughout the city in 2007. Blasi concluded his report by stating that the reduction in
crime rates in Skid Row was not achieved solely with the efforts of the Safer City
Initiative.
Sobel makes similar points. She says that Skid Row was one of the lowest violent
crime areas in the city before the Safer City Initiative. Out of the 1,346 arrests made by
the SCI Task Force from September 2006 to April 2007, only one was for homicide.
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
Central Rampart Northeast 77th
Street
Newton Hollywood
Three-Year Reported Robberies 2006-08
2008
2007
2006
19

Citing an incident from last year, she says that one of the people killed last year
was run over by a motorist who backed up at the sidewalk where a homeless man was
sleeping. “You can say that,” she says, “the person should not have been sleeping on the
sidewalk, but one could also argue that one should not be driving on the sidewalk.”
While talking with some of the homeless residents living on Skid Row, I found
that they felt squeezed out of their comfort zone, the one and only place where they had
been assured a meal and a shelter. Some like Tracy cite being constantly stopped by
police officers and others narrate their daily experiences of not being allowed to sit or
sleep on the sidewalk. “How long can you keep standing,” asks one homeless woman,
pointing at the signboard above her head that states: No person shall sit, lie, or sleep in or
upon any street, sidewalk or other public way. “If we don‟t sleep here, where do we sleep
then?”
“If they catch you sitting, the officers in their police car honk at you till you stand
up, they just station themselves around that street to make sure that you don‟t sit down,”
says a homeless man as he walks by trolling his cart, which displays a card. It is a
common sight in Skid Row to see homeless people with shopping carts with a card
declaring that the cart belongs to them. It might say something like; “John Oates, please
don‟t take it.”

20

Making Skid Row safe: Curbing Crime or Gentrifying?

“Is there some displacement? Certainly,” LAPD Chief Bratton, said at a news
conference in October 2007 as he pointed to the drop in Skid Row crime. “But what‟s
wrong with that in some respects? Why should one square mile of the city be impacted by
something that‟s effectively a countywide problem? So if there is displacement, all well
and good,” was Bratton‟s answer (Duke & Richard, 2007). His comments not only fueled
a debate over the approach of the city and police towards homeless people but also,
critics said, marked their ignorance of the chronically ill population in Skid Row.
According to Los Angeles Police Department‟s spot counts of the homeless
people since 2006, the population of Skid Row dropped from 1,391 to 750 people in 2008
(Andrew & Cara, 2009). Rev. Bales of Union Rescue Mission believes that “the majority
of the population who left Skid Row immediately after SCI came into effect in 2006 were
not homeless people, but drug dealers, gang banging kinds.”
The drop in deaths from 94 in 2005 to 60 in 2008 in the Skid Row area (Andrew
& Cara, 2009)

and the general perception of LAPD officers „pushing‟ homeless people
out of Skid Row through unlawful arrests and harassments are seen by the homeless
advocates as the effects of gentrification. However Capt. Wakefield, the former area
commanding officer for Central Division, believes that the police officials‟ efforts go
beyond policing. She says, “We put people in the jail because they do criminal acts, and
by doing so we are actually helping them clean up their acts.” Addressing the contrary
notion that some homeless people and advocates harbor against the police officers, she
21

says, “you will find many people saying that cops are just picking on us but you will find
an equal number of people saying that they saved my life because they paid attention and
put me in jail.”
These changes in Skid Row come at a time when Downtown Los Angeles is
experiencing rapid growth, which has come about since the passage of the Adaptive Reuse
Ordinance in 1999. This measure allows for the conversion of vacant office and
commercial space into residential use (The Downtown LA market report & 2006
demographic survey of new downtown residents, 2007). The urban transition has
continued with the development of projects like STAPLES Center (1999), the Cathedral
of Our Lady of the Angels (2002), and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), along with
the construction of more than 7,000 new and converted housing units since 1999 (2007,
p. 4).
Several high-profile projects and new residential complexes in Downtown are
bringing a wave of new residents to Downtown. The changing demographics of the area
have created a great demand for loft spaces. Many of these new residents are young
professionals without children who are more open to living in an urban environment than
families with children.
Developers feel the “juxtaposition of high-end lofts and homeless people asking
for handouts will give L.A.‟s Skid Row trendy, urban, edgy, noir flavor that is so
marketable (Harcourt, 2005).”

22

Elisa Taylor, a real estate agent for Little Tokyo Lofts says that people who have
never seen homeless people or lived around them are scared of them at first, but then they
learn to be more aware, understand their problems and are willing to help them out. “It
was quite a frightening experience for me as I had never seen homeless people before,”
she says narrating her first encounter with the homeless people in New York City, which
she visited as a teenager. “But then,” she adds, “I was stunned to see these well-dressed
men and women walking out of these multimillion dollar buildings on to the streets
where homeless people camped on.” Talking about the comparison of Downtown LA
with New York City, she says that Downtown has several similar qualities to New York
City and developers are therefore cashing on the image. “It has a character, culture; you
can mingle with people from all walks of life and you don‟t have to drive if you are
working in Downtown,” says Taylor, mentioning that much has changed in the last three
years of development around Downtown. She expects to see an increase in the younger
professional crowd settling in the downtown in the coming years, attracted by the new
developments and the eclectic experience that will be unique to this neighborhood.
And as the rush by developers to get a share of the downtown continues to
squeeze out the homeless, the broken promises on housing continue. LA Weekly, last
March exposed billionaire and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling‟s pledge to
build a homeless center in Skid Row as an empty gesture. Sterling, wrote LA Weekly, had
taken no known steps to actually finance the $50-million project nor had he carried out
any routine protocols that must be followed for any major social-services or construction
project to be approved in Los Angeles.
23

Future of Skid Row

“The long-term solution to Skid Row, unless the only effort is to disperse people
by force, is to prevent people from going to Skid Row, by providing for their needs and
communities,” says Blasi. Past experiences with the officials‟ from the mayor‟s office,
have if anything, misplaced his trust in the policies surrounding homeless people.
Remembering an earlier encounter with one of the Mayor‟s top aides, Blasi says that in
response to a direct question as to whether the housing policies for homeless people will
be on the Mayor‟s agenda at some point, the aide had replied: - “No, at the most we can
work with two things.” One of them, Blasi mentions was schools and the other one was
police.
According to Steve Olivas, the city‟s policy director for homeland security and
public safety, SCI is really a law enforcement strategy based on the theory of reducing
crime, while the residents of Skid Row face other significant problems in terms of lack of
affordable housing, and health-care issues. These problems are compounded by having
health and other services provided through the county. “We have had limited county
involvement, and since there are so many players, it is difficult to bring all of them to the
table in a coordinated way,” Olivas says.
Responding to the question of the future of Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row,
Olivas, who is responsible for implementing the SCI program for Mayor‟s offices, says a
“lot of it frankly depends on LAPD Chief Bratton‟s assessment of when we reach what is
called a tipping point.” He adds, “the idea is to clean the area and reduce the crime
24

enough that you can start pulling out the resources, but as of now there is no set
timeline.”
Olivas and Blasi both agree that the crackdown on Skid Row can be seen as a
welcome respite or an act of cruelty, depending on who is talking. However, no one
disagrees that a large number of people living on the streets of Skid Row continue to
suffer.
As the economy continues to deepen and more people head towards Skid Row in
search of food and shelter, the problem of homelessness ceases to be a problem of Skid
Row and its residents but becomes a reflection of poor management by city, county and
state officials.
Blasi describes the experience of a United Nations official who was devastated
seeing the state of people in Skid Row, even though he had visited some of the poorest
countries in the world. “He had never thought he would see anything like this in America.
He called it a refugee camp for poor people of color and that is not a bad description.”

25

Bibliography

A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities. (n.d.). Retrieved
March 2, 2009, from National coalition for the homeless:
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/casesummaries_1a.html

A Reality-Based Approach to Ending Homelessness in Los Angeles. Los Angeles.
Andrew, B., & Cara, D. M. (2009, January 27 ). Homeless deaths on skid row have
decreased. Los Angeles Times .

Bales, Andy. Personal interview. 14 Feb. 2009.
Blasi, Gary. Personal interview. 13 Mar. 2009.
Blasi, G. (2008). Has the Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row Reduced Serious Crime? Los
Angeles.

Blasi, G. (2007). Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer
Cities Initiative on Skid Row. Los Angeles.

The Downtown LA market report & 2006 demographic survey of new downtown
residents. (2007, February ). Retrieved Jan 21, 2009, from Business Improvemnet
District: http://www.downtownla.com/pdfs/econ_developments/DCBID_Report-2005.pdf

Duke, H., & Richard, W. (2007, October 4). Bratton admits skid row displacement. Los
Angeles Times , pp. B-2.

Groves, M. (2008, December 10). Upgrading from a cardboard box for the homeless. Los
Angeles Times , p. Column 1.

Harcourt, B. (2005). Policing L.A.’s Skid Row: Crime and Real Estate Development in
Downtown Los Angeles [An Experiment in Real Time]. Chicago.

Hoffmann, J. (2007, Sept/Oct ). LAPD Gentrifies Skid Row. Retrieved Feb 15, 2009, from
Color Lines: http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=244

2007 Homeless Count Reports Over 73,000 People Remain Homeless in Los Angeles
County. (2007). Retrieved January 16, 2009, from Los Angeles Homeless Services
Authority:
http://www.lahsa.org/docs/press_releases/2007%20Press%20Release%20for%20Homele
ss%20Count.pdf.

26

Hymon, S., & Zahniser, D. (2007, October 11). Deal on sidewalk camping reached. Los
Angeles Times , pp. B-1.

Winton, R., & Dimassa Mia, C. (2008, December 19). LAPD, ACLU agree on
restrictions for skid row searches. Los Angeles Times , pp. B-4.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract When the Los Angeles Mayor's Safer City Initiative (SCI) was launched in September 2006, it was hailed as the perfect prescription for success. It contained, among others, two much-needed ingredients -- law enforcement and housing initiatives -- to tackle the problems of one of the largest, most neglected and complex composition of homeless people in the nation, the residents of Los Angeles’s Skid Row. City officials believe SCI was needed to create a safer environment but others argue that Skid Row did not need stricter law enforcement, although it requires a police presence. Advocates for the homeless are urging that the city comply with its promise of providing adequate housing as a part of the initiative. This becomes particularly pressing as the nation's economic collapse deepens, and more people head towards Skid Row in search of food and shelter.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

It’s a business: the influence of Christianity on the streets of Skid Row

Asset Metadata

Creator Garyali, Natasha (author)

Core Title Making skid row safe: for better or worse?

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 04/28/2009

Defense Date 03/30/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag ACLU,broken windows theory,Carol Sobel,downtown Los Angeles,Gary Blasi,homeless,Homelessness,LAPD,Los Angeles,Mayor Antonio A. Villaraigosa,OAI-PMH Harvest,safer city initiative,Skid Row,UCEPP,Union Rescue Mission,William Bratton

Place Name Los Angeles (city or populated place), Skid Row (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Pryor, Lawrence (committee chair), Dow, David (committee member), Miller, Donald E. (committee member)

Creator Email garyali@usc.edu,mgaryali@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2138

Unique identifier UC1269053

Identifier etd-Garyali-2855 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-221605 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2138 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Garyali-2855.pdf

Dmrecord 221605

Document Type Project

Rights Garyali, Natasha

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu