Lin­da Valverde was an insur­ance admin­is­tra­tor for 20 years. She nev­er expect­ed to live in Los Ange­les’ Skid Row. Nei­ther did Michelle Autry, a dancer and writer who grew up in Los Ange­les and Sacra­men­to, Calif., and speaks five lan­guages. Joe Thomas, a Viet­nam War vet­er­an born in Spring­field, Ill., also didn’t plan to live in a sin­gle room occu­pan­cy (SRO) hotel in the area.

The Safer Cities Initiative has succeeded in keeping poor people off the streets. The vast majority of the 12,000 police citations issued in the first year of the program were for jaywalking.

But these three peo­ple, along with dozens of oth­er Skid Row res­i­dents, are mak­ing big changes in their com­mu­ni­ty. They are all mem­bers of an orga­ni­za­tion of poor peo­ple called Los Ange­les Com­mu­ni­ty Action Net­work (LACAN), a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion fund­ed by a vari­ety of foun­da­tions, indi­vid­u­als and the state of Cal­i­for­nia. This racial­ly diverse group of men and women are fight­ing against gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, the abus­es of land­lords and hotel own­ers, and the city of Los Ange­les. Sur­pris­ing­ly, they have scored real victories.

For Los Ange­les’ devel­op­ers, Skid Row – or, as it is more polite­ly called, Cen­tral City East – is a poten­tial bonan­za, locat­ed a half mile north­west of down­town and a stone’s throw from City Hall and the Coun­ty Hall of Admin­is­tra­tion. Until recent­ly, devel­op­ers could eas­i­ly con­vert a sin­gle-room occu­pan­cy hotel into mul­ti­ple con­do­mini­um units sell­ing at $1 mil­lion each.

In 2002, the city of Los Ange­les, in alliance with busi­ness inter­ests, intro­duced a rede­vel­op­ment plan. It called for the elim­i­na­tion of close to 4,000 units of low-income hous­ing in Cen­tral City East. Despite the large pop­u­la­tion of African-Amer­i­cans in the neigh­bor­hood, the real-estate indus­try mar­ket­ed down­town ​“lux­u­ry lofts” with ads that dis­played afflu­ent white peo­ple and the occa­sion­al Asian.

Busi­ness lead­ers and city offi­cials pro­claimed the plan’s benev­o­lence, play­ing on the stig­ma of Skid Row. Los Ange­les May­or Anto­nio Vil­laraigosa often stat­ed that rede­vel­op­ment and remov­ing peo­ple from the streets would ​“pro­tect” the poor from drug deal­ers and oth­ers who ​“prey” on the home­less. Oth­er offi­cials claimed push­ing poor and home­less peo­ple out of Skid Row would make the rest of the city take their ​“fair share” of social problems.

It can be dif­fi­cult to grasp that areas that are not pret­ty, like Skid Row, are home to peo­ple. ​“I feel like I fit in here, no one judged me when I came to this com­mu­ni­ty. I relat­ed to it, espe­cial­ly the women,” Valverde says. ​“They are here like me because of ill­ness, death. They had careers before they came here.”

Nation­wide, local gov­ern­ments rarely main­tain neigh­bor­hoods where SROs have his­tor­i­cal­ly been the only thing stand­ing between poor peo­ple and the street. Social sci­en­tists have doc­u­ment­ed that the loss of this form of hous­ing in the late ​’70s led to an increase in home­less­ness. Exploit­ing the belief that Skid Row res­i­dents were indi­gent – even though peo­ple have lived in the area for years – Los Ange­les banked on the idea that no one would care. Nei­ther the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty nor the city antic­i­pat­ed opposition.

Unlike­ly victories

LACAN fought against the pro­posed con­ver­sion of the SROs into lofts. In a cam­paign marked by intense polit­i­cal pres­sure and coali­tion build­ing, they scored their first vic­to­ry in 2006, when the city coun­cil passed a mora­to­ri­um on hous­ing con­ver­sions. In May 2008, the coun­cil passed a res­i­den­tial hotel preser­va­tion ordi­nance, which pro­tects 19,000 hous­ing units from demo­li­tion or con­ver­sion into more upscale accommodations.

“If it wasn’t for LACAN, [the devel­op­ers and police] would have swept down­town L.A. clean,” says Gen­er­al Dogon, a mid­dle-aged African-Amer­i­can man who has lived his whole life in Cen­tral City East.

LACAN’s defense of Skid Row res­i­dents also focus­es on the con­di­tions with­in indi­vid­ual SROs. The group mon­i­tors for abus­es, such as churn­ing (oth­er­wise known as the ​“28-day shuf­fle”), in which hotel own­ers demand res­i­dents leave after 28 days to pre­vent them from obtain­ing legal pro­tec­tions grant­ed to ten­ants. LACAN stopped such ille­gal evic­tions at the Fron­tier Hotel between 2002 and 2005. At the Alexan­dria, anoth­er SRO, the group won resti­tu­tion against the own­ers who dis­crim­i­nat­ed against minor­i­ty res­i­dents and the disabled.

Deb­bie Bur­ton, a LACAN orga­niz­er, moved to Skid Row in 2000 from the Watts neigh­bor­hood locat­ed in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les. She talks about the iso­la­tion of liv­ing in a hotel. ​“I was in this one room and see­ing no one doing any­thing about prob­lems,” she says. ​“When I got involved with LACAN I spent time observ­ing and open­ing my eyes to issues like afford­able hous­ing and to … abuse toward every­one in our community.”

War on the homeless

But just as the orga­ni­za­tion suc­ceed­ed in pre­serv­ing the neigh­bor­hood, May­or Vil­laraigosa and Police Chief William Brat­ton launched the Safer Cities Ini­tia­tive. Pre­sent­ed as a crime con­trol mea­sure, the city deployed a mas­sive police force to Skid Row and out­lawed sleep­ing or stand­ing in the street. The ini­tia­tive was approved in 2006, imme­di­ate­ly after the city coun­cil passed the mora­to­ri­um on SRO con­ver­sion, notes Steve Diaz, a com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er who grew up in a hotel in Skid Row. ​“It was a planned ini­tia­tive, an effort to clear the neigh­bor­hood,” Diaz says.

The Safer Cities Ini­tia­tive has par­tial­ly suc­ceed­ed in keep­ing poor peo­ple off the streets. Accord­ing to a report released by the UCLA Law School, ​“Polic­ing Our Way out of Home­less­ness,” as many as 125 addi­tion­al offi­cers were used to round up the home­less and push oth­er low­er-income peo­ple off the streets. Accord­ing to the UCLA report, dur­ing the first year of the ini­tia­tive, there were 750 more arrests per month than the year before in the same area. The vast major­i­ty of the 12,000 cita­tions issued in the first year of the mea­sure, from Sep­tem­ber 2006 to August 2007, were for jay­walk­ing. This is no minor incon­ve­nience for the poor – fines can be as high as $159. Because many peo­ple can­not pay the tick­et or are unable to secure legal help, pedes­tri­an vio­la­tions often lead to arrests.

The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia con­firmed res­i­dents’ charges that cross­walk times were reduced in Cen­tral City East, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for a dis­abled or elder­ly per­son to cross the street in the allot­ted time. Abus­es have also includ­ed phys­i­cal attacks by the police on peo­ple who refuse to move and seizures of the prop­er­ty of the homeless.

Pete White, LACAN’s co-direc­tor, tells the sto­ry of a home­less woman who began scream­ing at the cops when they seized her belong­ings, which includ­ed the urn con­tain­ing her mother’s ash­es. Accord­ing to White, the LAPD met her con­cern with laughter.

Although the Los Ange­les police denied bru­tal­i­ty, Police Chief Brat­ton told the Los Ange­les Times on Octo­ber 4, 2007, ​“Is there dis­place­ment? Cer­tain­ly. But what’s wrong with that in some respects? … So if there is dis­place­ment, [it’s] all well and good.”

The UCLA study, as well as Steve Lopez at the Los Ange­les Times, esti­mate that due to the intim­i­da­tion and arrests, 1,500 few­er peo­ple now live in Skid Row. LACAN has respond­ed to the city’s ordi­nances by form­ing a com­mu­ni­ty watch pro­gram, train­ing res­i­dents in how to han­dle the police, hold­ing numer­ous demon­stra­tions and fil­ing law­suits. On March 11, after find­ing city pro­ce­dures exhaust­ed, the group filed a civ­il rights com­plaint with the U.S. Depart­ment of Justice.

“Down­town used to be a dense com­mu­ni­ty, now there is no live­li­ness. Now it’s blank streets,” com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er Diaz says. ​“You walk and see no one. You used to see peo­ple around – friends and neigh­bors.” Yet he said the new­found sol­i­dar­i­ty between the res­i­dents against the police has ​“brought the idea of resis­tance to a dif­fer­ent lev­el, cre­at­ing a new culture.”

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