Photo by Aniko Kiezel
No Way L.A. DOWNTOWN CAN’T FOLLOW PATH TO SKID ROW
A
fter a decade of looking for encouraging news about Sacramento’s homeless crisis, I’ve found some: Compared to downtown Los Angeles, Sacramento has no homeless crisis.
RG By R.E. Graswich City Beat
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I visit downtown L.A. every couple of months and have watched its vibrancy sink into an abyss of misery, poverty, crime and wasted lives. Tents, doorway sleepers and garbage are everywhere. Recovery will take years. If L.A.’s anguish makes Sacramento look hopeful, it also carries a warning. As Mayor Darrell Steinberg says, “Los Angeles is a cautionary tale.” Before the pandemic, about 4,600 homeless people lived in L.A.’s dystopian wasteland east of Main Street between Third and Seventh streets. The slum covers 50 blocks
and almost 3 square miles. Welcome to Skid Row. For 50 years, Skid Row was a containment zone. Flop houses, rescue missions and soup kitchens served derelicts, felons, lunatics and drug addicts. Tourists and office workers steered clear. Police considered it a cesspool of violence and vice. An invisible wall surrounded Skid Row. The pandemic breeched the wall and shattered it. As offices closed for COVID and social-justice protests disintegrated into looting, parts of downtown L.A. near Skid Row—thriving
neighborhoods—were obliterated. Restaurants, bars, hotels, bakeries, sandwich shops, clothing stores, gyms, record shops, florists, nail salons, coffee roasters, hairdressers and art galleries boarded up and left. At least 145 downtown L.A. businesses closed. Now their sidewalks are filled with tents and people in cardboard boxes. The historic Skid Row boundaries of Main Street and Third Street are gone. Homeless camps blossom on all corners. By comparison, Sacramento’s homeless crisis is fragmented and small. The city’s Skid Row flows away from Downtown toward North 12th Street and the River District. Dingy single-room occupancy hotels that served transients and ex-cons are reborn as low-income housing. Sanctioned campsites feature toilets and showers. Sacramento follows a new strategy, designed by Steinberg to thin out homelessness, spread the problem around and make it less obvious. Under Steinberg’s plan, each council district—there are eight—will support some type of services for unsheltered people. The Great Homeless Dispersal is underway. It’s the mayor’s most clever move in a crisis that has defined his two terms. The dispersal comes weeks after a federal judge in L.A. ordered authorities to find shelter for Skid Row’s entire population. Judge David Carter sided with downtown L.A. business owners and residents who said officials abdicated their duty to clean up the mess. The judge wants L.A. to stop wasting tax dollars on
