Homeless Often Take a One-Way Street to Skid Row

On his release from Chino state prison in July, broke and with no home to go to, Demetrious Williams got on a bus and headed for downtown Los Angeles. The career burglar had previously lived in the Crenshaw area and the Inland Empire, but he had only $200 in “gate” money and needed a quick place to shower and sleep. There seemed few alternatives but skid row, where more than 60 social agencies crowd a 50-block expanse.

Months later, out of work and with few prospects, he is still downtown at a homeless agency on a forbidding stretch of skid row, trying to dodge drug dealers and crime that could land him back in prison.

“If you don’t have family very close or friends, you have nowhere to stay but the streets,” said Williams, whose thick eyebrows and mustache are flecked with gray. “In prison, I heard about the services word-of-mouth. A lot of people know about skid row.”

Although parolees like Williams are not the only faces of skid row, they symbolize how the central city area has become a dumping ground for the region’s down and out.

State officials estimate that 2,000 parolees are on downtown streets, but the area also draws out-of-work families with children, emancipated foster kids, poor workers led to the area’s low-cost single-room hotels, ex-cons who can’t find work and criminals who see the row as a sort of Wild West show into which they can blend.

Now, however, business owners, police and even some advocates say conditions have gotten out of hand and that other law enforcement agencies, hospitals and charities must stop sending to skid row the troubled people the rest of Los Angeles County can’t handle.

Part of the new scrutiny is altruistic, a response to increasing numbers of homeless living in squalid street encampments. Ambitious redevelopment plans and an influx of upscale loft residents also are major driving forces, say business leaders and advocates.

The Central City Assn., which represents business interests, recently proposed laws to prohibit sidewalk encampments and stricter ordinances banning public urination and defecation. City Councilwoman Jan Perry has already introduced motions to restrict the homeless from sleeping in front of businesses and to limit outdoor meals, following the passage in Santa Monica of similar ordinances.

Law enforcement agencies last week conducted sweeps of skid row, arresting about 200 for parole violations and other crimes.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division created a special team to tackle street problems such as trash bin fires associated with the homeless, enlisting a neighborhood prosecutor from the city attorney’s office.

“It’s time for all of those who share a concern about the homeless and about our neighborhood to look at this crisis in a new way and do something about it,” said Central City Assn. President Carol E. Schatz.

For years, the concentration of social services on skid row has attracted more and more homeless people, who in turn have attracted more services.

Besides those in hotels and shelters, at least 4,000 may be on the streets, city officials say. Now there is virtually nowhere else in the city for the destitute to turn, heating up tensions with business owners in the toy, flower and garment districts and even on Bunker Hill and in South Park.

It is an environment that feeds on itself, experts say. Service providers in the area recount tale after tale of out-of-town police cars letting transients out on sidewalks in the middle of the night and of parole officers wanting to leave newly released offenders at their doorstep.

Hospitals release indigent patients, sometimes in wheelchairs or stretchers, on a regular basis at the Downtown Drop-In Center, a 24-hour facility operated by the Volunteers of America on San Julian Street, said its director, James C. Howat.

And police agencies deliver drunks picked up for public inebriation from across the county to a separate VOA program on nearby Crocker Street, he added

“They are at a loss to know what to do with them,” Howat said. “This is probably the only area of the city where there are services for them.”

The area is also a magnet for the so-called day visitors -- drawn from East Los Angeles, the Valley, the South Bay and South-Central -- to do drugs or shoot craps on the street with little risk of being caught.

“The homeless service network is an important part of the city’s work, but difficulties arise when you get too many people concentrated in one area, which is what is happening in downtown,” said Michael Dear, a USC geography professor who has studied homelessness.

Skid row’s notoriety spreads beyond city boundaries.

In 1996, Jacksonville, Fla., cops infamously put a homeless man on a bus to L.A.’s skid row. The disabled Vietnam vet ended up being taken in by LAMP, an organization for the mentally ill homeless. The group helped him obtain his veteran’s benefits.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department releases dozens of indigent prisoners from the nearby county jail each day. Many of the former inmates suffer from addictions or mental illness and never leave downtown.

The problem got so bad that Sheriff Lee Baca proposed erecting an open-air shelter near the jail, an idea that has met with resistance from some business owners. He has installed another program at the jail’s release center, with the Volunteers of America manning a booth to steer inmates toward support services and away from skid row.

But last week’s headline-grabbing police sweeps only accentuated the perception of the area as a dangerous frontier.

From 30,000 to 40,000 parolees are released back to Los Angeles County from state prisons each year, and some studies estimate that as many as 50% are homeless for a period of time.

Some ex-cons fall back into crime, but many are trying to stay clean even though they say few programs are available to help them reenter society.

In Sacramento and Oakland, an experimental program that requires parolees to attend reorientation sessions and provides support services has reduced recidivism and homelessness, said Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Heimerich. The program is not yet available in Los Angeles.

Housing vouchers are available for some parolees, but priority is given to those at highest risk of being rearrested, such as sex offenders, Heimerich said.

Williams had never been homeless before hitting skid row. He has experience as a warehouseman, a forklift driver and a trucker and has filled out dozens of job applications. But there have been no offers for a 50-year-old ex-felon.

In his time on skid row, he has witnessed the downward spiral of others like himself.

“They lose faith in something good happening to them and resort to drinking and using drugs just to function from day to day,” said Williams, who has caught pneumonia since his release and struggles to speak without hacking. “It ruins reality for them, and they wind up staying down here. Some stay to the point of going insane.”

When Diane DeFrancisco, 51, was paroled from the California Institute for Women at Frontera recently after an 18-month stint for drug possession, she got on a bus and came to skid row because “I knew if I had to sleep on the sidewalk I could.”

She settled on Towne Avenue in a tent, renting out one side for $5 per half hour. She had to move when two women sleeping on the street nearby objected to her presence, feeling she might be a prostitute who would steal some of their business.

DeFrancisco -- small and wiry with close-cropped hair -- escaped downtown for a while, renting a room in Tujunga until a fight with her landlady. The scrape landed her back on skid row, this time in a transient hotel.

“I’ll be down here till my parole ends in March, then I want to go back home to Chicago,” she said.

Mike Neely is executive director of skid row’s Homeless Outreach Program, part of which provides services for parolees. Many of them, Neely said, are suffering from mental illnesses and released from prison with no medications.

They are angry and agitated and they can fall into what Neely calls a homeless paralysis, unable to see anything beyond day-to-day survival.

For many, the problems associated with homelessness -- sidewalk encampments, panhandling, drug use -- have reached a critical mass, affecting public health and safety.

But crackdowns in the past have been short-lived. And Neely and others say some of the problems of skid row stem from deliberate policy decisions.

When the railroads came downtown in the 1870s, a large transient population of railroad men and packing plant workers stayed in single-room hotels, said Donald R. Spivack, deputy administrator of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

The temperance movement brought the first missions to the area, and the Great Depression turned transient workers into the transient unemployed, many of them alcoholics.

In a 1976 report, the Los Angeles Community Design Center outlined a policy of “physical containment” of homeless people and services on skid row to lessen their impact on the rest of downtown. That policy has been more or less followed for 27 years. As a result, many facilities were added or refurbished.

It is a community, Spivack emphasized, with about 6,500 single-room hotel units housing about 8,000 people.

“It’s a neighborhood like any other although it is not treated as such. But it is entitled to the same considerations as anyplace else,” he said.

But Spivack agreed that the city and county have to look at ways to disperse services.

Los Angeles Police Capt. Charles Beck, commander of the Central Division, said the behavior accepted on skid row would not be tolerated anywhere else.

“I think now people want something more for Los Angeles,” Beck said. “There’s a lot of revitalization, and they see the core of the city as an asset. Maybe that wasn’t in the city fathers’ minds 30 or 40 years ago when they placed all of the services in one place.”

What’s needed, he added, is “the collective will of society not to let people live like this.”