LA’s infamous ‘homeless neighbourhood’ has become a critical location in the city’s attempts to transform its downtown heart. But how do the people who actually live there feel about this blighted, vibrant community?

In the centre of one of the world’s most high-profile cities lies a concentration of desperate poverty unlike any other in the developed world. Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a common name for a once-common form of down-and-out quarter in American cities, persists as the last neighbourhood of its kind.

Skid Row’s very existence illustrates a major planning mistake the southern Californian metropolis made in the past. The struggles over what to do with it now reveal the extent of the challenge facing LA in its current transformation into a denser, more traditionally urban city. It’s no exaggeration to call Skid Row one of the main battlegrounds for the future of Los Angeles.

The neighbourhood went from metaphorical to literal battleground last Sunday when, on a rare rainy day in this city, an altercation with Los Angeles Police Department officers resulted in the death of a 45-year-old resident. Known locally by the name “Africa” or “Cameroon”, he was shot by several officers after allegedly grabbing one of their guns; beyond that, facts about the precise sequence of events have been slow to emerge.

Homeless man shot dead by LAPD had a secret past, like everyone on Skid Row Read more

We know the victim lived in a tent; he’d pitched it near the corner of San Pedro and 6th street. Every Angeleno has seen these tents – always between the hours of 9pm and 6am, when police look the other way about camping on the streets. One wrong turn out of a trendy night spot or the Disney concert hall and you can find yourself in another world, where encampments of the drug-addicted and mentally ill spill out on to the sidewalk for block after block after block.

“The contrast is shockingly stark,” says Brigham Yen, a downtown Los Angeles real-estate expert and chronicler of the area’s revitalisation on his site DTLA Rising. “On one block you can see the new downtown: all these new restaurants and bars and shops. Then you go into Skid Row and it’s the bottom of anything you can think of. The smells — that’s the part that will get you.”

Shanks Rajendran’s documentary Los Scandalous offers an up-close-and-personal look at the pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and hustlers of every type who work Skid Row by night. “Driving through for the first time, I was in complete awe,” says the Australian filmmaker, whose shock at seeing such a place in “America, the greatest country in the world” led him to start recording all he saw and heard there.

Rajendran filmed what he calls “the game” of Skid Row, played not just by “the drug dealers and people looking to exploit things” but by the public safety officers “who go around looking for dirty homeless people who have crept out and tell them to go back”, in an effort to maintain the rest of downtown’s new “clean, touristy image”.

In Rajendran’s time in the neighbourhood he saw no direct eruptions of violence. Rather, “they all work together to avoid the police” – having long since fallen into the ritual of scattering when patrols passed by and then returning to their usual spots. “It’s sad, because Skid Row residents have accepted their position in society. Everybody in Los Angeles has accepted it, I’d say.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Actor Susan Hayward prepares to film a scene for I’ll Cry Tomorrow in Skid Row, 1955. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Skid Row is widely regarded as the greatest obstacle to the rebuilding of a first-class downtown in Los Angeles. As of 2014, the downtown area had a residential population of 52,400 and rising, up from just 27,849 in 2000. Skid Row accounts for 17,740 of that total, while estimates put the number of homeless there between 3,000 and 6,000 – an incredible 10% of the current population.



Yet downtown Los Angeles has, on the whole, made the most impressive recovery of any American central city in the 21st century. Hollowed out with most of the others by the mass exodus to the suburbs that followed the second world war, its prospects for a turnaround looked the bleakest for decades thereafter. Even Reyner Banham, the architectural historian known for his contrarian enthusiasm for LA, titled one chapter of his much-cited Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “A Note on Downtown” because “that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A protester outside LAPD headquarters

His book came out in the early 1970s, the era in which a coalition including LA’s then-mayor Tom Bradley and the Community Redevelopment Agency made the fateful decision to concentrate county resources for the homeless downtown, in the area that would become Skid Row. More than 70 non-profit and government organisations participated in this grand project of centralisation in this famously decentralised “city without a centre”, filling that absent centre with shelters, medical facilities, soup kitchens, rescue missions and a host of other services for the truly impoverished.

At the time, Skid Row made sense. It corralled all that would attract “undesirables” into a part of the city without much of a population beyond daytime office workers, pensioners, and the homeless and semi-homeless hotel-dwellers already there. It lay far from coastal enclaves like Santa Monica or suburban hinterlands like the San Fernando Valley, which were home to more politically important constituencies.

“At that time, downtown was a ghost-town,” says Yen, “a big rug to sweep the county’s homeless problem under.” But now that downtown has become one of the most desirable areas in the region, deserving of a whole book rather than a mere note, all that looks terribly shortsighted.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kokiri Lab, Jinsoo An’s ‘hackerspace’ in Skid Row. Photograph: Andrew Yoon

Despite having so far lost about 10 square blocks to encroaching new development, Skid Row shows remarkably little in the way of visible gentrification (apart from isolated projects such as a mild renovation of the King Eddy, supposedly one of Charles Bukowski’s preferred watering holes). But with its predictably lower rental prices, it offers opportunities to young, non-homeless “urban pioneers” such as Jinsoo An, who moved into a San Pedro Street building formerly used by a film production company. In his Skid Row space, An has set up both his home and an operation called Kokiri Lab, a hi-tech “hackerspace” dedicated to the development of wearable technology.



From what he describes as his “paradise in the ghetto”, An witnesses firsthand the city’s Sisyphean effort to keep keep Skid Row at least somewhat tidy. “Once a week, a whole army of cleaners come and bulldoze all the trash from the streets and ask the homeless people to pack up their stuff and leave. I’d heard how much it costs to have people living in the street and couldn’t understand why those costs exist. Now I see it in action.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Skid Row Housing Trust’s 102 pre-fabricated modular apartments

But An says it doesn’t take long for his street to regain its layer of “garbage, piss, shit — everything combined together ... I never used to look forward to the rain, but now I enjoy walking back to my place most after a storm. It lets me breathe.”

Just as a few bold individuals such as An have come to live in or near Skid Row, a few bold businesses have set up shop as well. “Skid Row has actually prevented downtown from becoming too mainstream too quickly,” says Yen. “If there wasn’t a Skid Row, you would already see all the big chain stores. Those are going to come anyway, over time, but I feel like it gives independent businesses that aren’t afraid a chance to take root first.”

Of course that small positive of Skid Row, Yen argues, doesn’t outweigh its considerable negatives. “I don’t think it should exist, period – not only for developmental reasons, but for moral reasons. It’s not healthy. If the goal is to get people out of poverty, it doesn’t make sense to have an area conducive to poverty. These people can never escape, because all they see around them is poverty.”

Describing the neighbourhood as a zone of “failed humanity”, Yen lays the blame squarely at the feet of Los Angeles County, as “all of Skid Row’s services are provided by county tax dollars, and the county government failed miserably in how they dealt with the homeless issue to begin with”. He sees a decentralisation of Skid Row, and thus a more even distribution of services for the homeless across the county’s 4,751 square miles, as the only way of alleviating both the problems within it and the intensifying friction with the surrounding city.

Keeping Skid Row for the homeless does have its advocates – albeit sometimes advocates who live far from Skid Row. They easily forget, Yen says, “that the people they’re ‘supporting’ are living in squalor, dying from diseases, living in the most filthy conditions you could imagine in the United States. They aren’t using their brains; they’re using their hearts. They frame it as the big, bad developers coming into downtown and the evil people who want to live there pushing these victims away. But if the ‘rich hipsters’ hadn’t come in and put the issue back on the political radar, the homeless would continue to live in perpetuity as forgotten people.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Skid Row overlooked by the rest of downtown LA: ‘The contrast is shockingly stark.’ Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

While some express their concerns for Skid Row from afar, others concentrate their efforts right here in the neighbourhood. Pastor Kevin Haah co-founded New City Church, whose congregation consists, by design, of both “Skid Row residents and loft dwellers” and meets just blocks from the site of the recent shooting. The improbable idea to bring these two vastly different, downtown economic strata together in one house of worship came to Haah while he was ministering on the streets of Skid Row in the early 2000s; a time when, as bad as the place can look now, “it was much worse”.



“Actually,” says Haah, “Skid Row is not as dangerous as one thinks it is. It’s not controlled by a gang, for example. The whole community isn’t out on the street. Most of them are trying to walk the road to recovery. A lot of them are struggling, but this is a recovery community. Of course, a lot of people are perpetuating in poverty and addiction, but there’s opportunity. There’s a lot of food in Skid Row. There’s not enough housing, but nobody goes hungry.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ex-LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa serves lunch at the Los Angeles Mission Easter celebration in Skid Row

Haah remembers that, when downtown Los Angeles began its comeback, “the assumption was that low-income housing would all turn into swanky lofts, squeezing the Skid Row people out. I don’t think that has happened. There’s been building of new low-income housing since — I don’t like to use the word ‘gentrification’. A lot of it looks great, and it’s much more positive in terms of the environment.”



Right now, most residents of Skid Row harbour less ire toward the loft-dwellers than they do the LAPD. “When something like this happens,” Haah says, “emotion flares up and a sense of distrust develops.” He characterises the local reaction to Sunday’s shooting as “outrage. There’s a lot of anger. From a lot of angles, it’s difficult to swallow – the multiple shots, the number of officers involved – but at the same time, the facts are more complicated. They’re sinking in, but the emotion is still raw.”



Yet Haah expresses optimism about the future of Skid Row and its place in downtown — a future that does not involve its dispersement across all of Los Angeles County. “Skid Row is not going anywhere. It’s the biggest centre of social services in Los Angeles. But it’s going to bleed; the inner section will become less clear.”

And as those boundaries between Skid Row and the new downtown continue to blur, Haah emphasises the need “not to see them as one versus the other. We’re in a community together. We need to get along, but my vision is bigger than that: we need to appreciate one another. We don’t need the loft dwellers to help the people of Skid Row, who have amazing things to contribute to the vitality of downtown. There’s more spiritual vibrancy in Skid Row than anywhere else, period.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘In Skid Row there’s street life: people walking, groups congregating, fully utilised parks.’ Photograph: Ted Soqui Photography/Corbis

The tension that exists between the stakeholders of Skid Row and the rest of downtown Los Angeles looks unlikely to dissipate by itself. This holds especially true as property values rise not just on all sides of Skid Row but within it, and as the city maintains its historically poor track record of building permanent supportive housing for the homeless — the reason it puts up with Skid Row’s overnight tent villages in the first place.



Yet in a sense, says Yen, Skid Row has realised LA’s long-deferred dream of a bustling sidewalk culture. “There’s a lot of people out. Funnily enough, it’s got a scene like you would expect in New York. There’s street life: people walking, groups congregating, fully utilised parks. From this urban standpoint it’s very interesting, but obviously you can’t look at it without seeing the poverty.”



“Many people who live in the neighbourhood are friendly,” says Brian Tompkins, director of social enterprise at the Weingart Center, right across the street from where last Sunday’s shooting took place. “They recognise me and say hello. I watch some take care of their little section of street like it was their home.

“On the other hand, many things break my heart. Watching people manifesting mental illness, screaming, cursing, flailing, soiling themselves, living out some real or imagined nightmare. Watching young people show up on Skid Row looking ordinary, and then observing them over weeks and months as they become skin and bones, faces pocked with sores, teeth deteriorating. Seeing people deceased on the street.”

The first steps that “regular people” have taken back into Skid Row may, to some, make the future look brighter than at any time over its grim past four decades. But the rest of the transition – now surely an inevitability – is going to be painful. The big question that remains, as the community in and around Skid Row deals with the aftermath of its highest-profile tragedy in recent memory, is just how painful it has to be.

