A head-on collision is drawing closer on L.A.’s Skid Row.
On one side are the developers who sell their lofts and condominiums so easily that prices have reached levels normally reserved for Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. On the other side are the 11,000 residents of the Row many of them living in SRO hotels, the more unfortunates camped out amid the unspeakable stench and danger of several city blocks where the only outsiders are cops, paramedics and social workers.
The developers insist they’re not out to displace anyone. Except you won’t find folks living on the wrong side of Main Street believing it.
“I’ve never seen coexistence work,” Alice Callaghan, the most visible advocate of Skid Row’s poor and homeless, said a while back on KPCC-FM’s “Air Talk” program. “When a gentrified neighborhood comes in they always want to get rid of the poor. In fact, if you go to the corner of Fourth and Main where the new housing has happened, private security guards run people off if they do so much as to light a cigarette.”
“That is absolutely untrue,” fumed Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Association, who appeared on the same program and pretty much acts as downtown’s chief booster. “Why would anyone want to pay market rates if they had a concern about rubbing shoulders with the homeless and street people?”
Isn’t it obvious? They’re paying market rates to get in on the downtown renaissance, with the hope and expectation that the homeless will drift somewhere else and developers could fully push into the 50-block area known as Central City East.
Thing of it is, that’s probably not going to happen. And while Schatz and her developer friends have lots of political muscle at City Hall, the Skid Row leadership, led by Callaghan and others, have something perhaps more important: an economic and social infrastructure that will be tough to dismantle.
These are not stupid people. They recognized years ago that the best way to influence a community is by owning a piece of it. Today, two non-profit groups operate roughly two-thirds of the single-room-occupancy hotels on Skid Row (thanks to considerable government help), and unlike some of the other property owners in the area, they’re not about to sell out to developers.
Pushing out homeless
What they do want, aside from more government help, is not to be hassled by the cops or those private guards who want to clear the streets. To be left alone, in other words. That had been the promise made by the City Council in 1976 when it adopted a redevelopment plan that was subsequently referred to as a “policy of containment.”
“The containment idea was not so much that you put a fence around Skid Row to keep people in, but you designate an area in which facilities and services will be encouraged to centralize and exist,” said Donald Spivak, former head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, in a white paper on the area.
Along with the housing component, the redevelopment plan included the establishment of light industry that could, presumably, offer opportunities for folks trying to remake their lives.
The housing part has worked reasonably well. But the businesses that set up shop in Central City East largely the toy and wholesale electronics industry were not much interested in hiring folks coming out of detox centers. Well, let’s be candid: They tried to push the homeless as far away as possible.
Little of this not-so-peaceful coexistence got anyone else’s attention in the early years. To many of us, downtown was roughly the stretch from the Harbor Freeway to Hill Street (with Little Tokyo to the north and what is now considered the Fashion District to the south being exceptions). Stay close to the new skyscrapers, we were advised.
Which is why this “policy of containment” worked as well as it did. No one wanted to set foot anywhere near Skid Row, certainly not the developers. That gave the non-profits an opening to cut deals and get the hotels renovated.
Actually, L.A.’s Skid Row goes back to the late 1800s when the area became a disembarkation point for hobos, fugitives and social outcasts who had been riding the rails cross country. Sunny California was their last stop, a land of opportunity, or at the least, a place to hide out for a while. (All the big hotels had their signs pointing east rather than west because that’s where the railroad stations were.)
The story might have stayed that way had it not been for developer Tom Gilmore’s bright idea that some of the older, vacated buildings in the area around Fourth and Main streets could be turned into trendy lofts. You know the rest: adaptive reuse ordinances got through the council, downtown became a favored spot among tattooed hipsters (also known as urban pioneers), Staples Center and Disney Concert Hall brought more folks into the area, and the real estate market took off.
There are now more than 12,000 residential units under construction for completion between now and 2013, according to the Downtown Center Business Improvement District, nearly all of them market-rate housing. The boosters will exhaust you with details on all this activity and not without cause. Wherever you turn, it seems there’s a construction crane, and with it a sign announcing some new project selling for some outrageous amount. But sooner or later, you turn a corner and the reality sets in.
A few weeks ago, members of our newsroom were given a tour by one of these boosters, who practically insisted on showing us his freshly reconverted loft that he said was worth around $500,000. Just as we turned the corner, however, there was an encampment of homeless. What about them, we asked?
‘Too big to fail’
Downtown’s more enlightened leaders know they have a problem and the thing is, they haven’t really figured out what to do about it. The Business Journal recently conducted an online poll that asked, “What would it take for you to consider living downtown?” More than a third cited “fewer homeless,” the most frequent response. OK, it was unscientific, but it’s probably not a bad approximation of the sentiment out there.
Trouble is Skid Row has become, in economic parlance, too big to fail. Its residents cannot be put onto buses and shipped to some other neighborhood, because there is no better place to take them. This is, after all, the largest service-dependent ghetto in the nation.
Its estimated population of 8,000 to 11,000 has created an economic infrastructure not only made up of various service organizations, halfway houses and hotels, but ruthless street-level businesses that provide drugs, cigarettes, liquor, prostitution and even protection.
Lots of well-meaning non-profits have tried, with some success, to transition residents into shelters and then train them for jobs. But much of the homeless population is too sick mentally as well as physically to stand a chance in the working world.
Dangerous? Well, if you mean is it a place where your life is at risk, probably not (as long as you don’t venture along certain notorious blocks). But neither is it a place near which the owner of a $700,000 condominium is likely to want to live. “There is a hard-core population of street people that if you offer them shelter beds they would not use them,” Callaghan admitted.
That’s why downtown development has its limits. That’s why even real estate people say that downtown is in the midst of significant overbuilding that will lead to empty units, foreclosures and lower prices. It’s not unreasonable to expect that in time today’s $600,000 unit will be available for $400,000, perhaps a bit less.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. And it’s certainly not to dismiss the lively community that is taking shape in the Banking District and other gentrified enclaves. But we’re not talking big numbers here. Downtown’s population is estimated at 25,000, which for a city of 3.7 million is not exactly a lot. Not nearly enough to justify the amount of attention and dollars going into its development.
Alice Callaghan is right: coexistence doesn’t work. And Skid Row isn’t going anywhere. It’s time to look beyond the inflated prices and developer promises and get real about what’s possible and what’s not.
*Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).
