Attorney Seeks Justice for the Poor of Skid Row

Some people cringe at the mere mention of what sits on Nancy Mintie’s desk.

Mintie is Skid Row’s only attorney, an advocate for the poor and powerless seeking justice for people who cannot afford a lawyer, often in cases as ugly as the evidence on her desk.

“One of my earliest remembrances is of reading a book about the first woman doctor in the U.S. and how she had to pass herself off as a man to get into medical school,” Mintie, 30, recalled one recent morning when a score of people lined up outside the nonprofit Inner City Law Center, as they do three mornings a week.

Some clients are mental cases, their asylum the streets, who are so crazed they cannot fill out the bureaucratic forms required to get financial aid and medical care. Others long ago poured their spirits down the neck of a bottle. Many are Spanish-speaking refugees from poverty and civil war.

“I can always remember the fact that suffering drove me crazy, particularly when the suffering was the result of injustice,” she said.

Mintie grew up in Downey, the second of seven children in a middle-class Irish Catholic family. Her parents are Republicans, and Mintie said she remembers making a speech in 1972 supporting the by-then unpopular war in Vietnam. (One sister is a former world record holder in the women’s half marathon who now models, another is an artist, one brother is a writer, another brothers sells insurance in Kansas, a sister works in a department store and another sister is in college.)

Mintie set out to become a concert pianist after graduating second in the 1972 class at Rosary High School in Fullerton, a Catholic girls school. She got a music scholarship to Loyola Marymount University, which led to visits to the Malibu home of the late composer Roy Harris, where she played his finely crafted piano and sampled the gracious life that could await her.

But after one year she gave up her scholarship and began, increasingly, to work with the poor until that task filled her life. Eventually she followed her brother Dan, now a Seattle writer, into the Catholic Worker, whose members live communally, feed the poor and agitate for social change. Each worker gets $5 a week in spending money.

She and her husband, artist and photographer Ardon Alger, plan to move out of the Catholic Worker home soon, and she expects to make the Inner City Law Center, which she founded, a separate entity. Her work in the courts, she said, is not compatible with the Catholic Worker vision of separation from the affairs of the government.

By 1979, Mintie had graduated from UCLA Law School and after passing the bar exam on her first try she began representing the down and out of Skid Row.

Marsha Jones Moutrie, one of Mintie’s law school instructors, said she saw many law students driven by a desire to get rich, but Mintie “is driven by her principles. Materialism, she doesn’t even think of it . . . she is very practical when she wants to accomplish something and that has required her to become accustomed to the idea that she has to do certain things to get the money she needs to run the center.”

When Mintie started the center she rode the RTD and often showed up late for meetings. Today she drives an aging Honda Civic, a gift from a client who joined the Army to get a job. “You can’t run a law practice without a car,” Mintie said the man told her.

Mintie gets no salary, although some of her staff members are modestly paid. Her office serves about 3,600 people annually on a budget of about $70,000, 80% of it from a federal grant administered by the city. Last fall the city recommended terminating the grant--even though Mintie served 360% more people than required--because poor record keeping lowered the center’s score in an otherwise strong evaluation. Other Skid Row nonprofit organizations and several poverty lawyers protested, and the grant was renewed. Now Mintie is trying to establish a broad-based board of directors who can raise funds for her work.

Her work includes lawsuits that forced the county to improve aid to the homeless by making it easier to get a voucher for a hotel room and to stop issuing vouchers for the very worst hotels. Now she is pressing a suit so the children of Skid Row can sleep safely at night. That suit seeks repairs, extermination of rodents and compensation for some of the residents of the hotel. On her desk, in a battered trailer next to the Catholic Worker soup kitchen, Mintie keeps evidence in that lawsuit.

Mintie thinks that no parents want their child to see the foot-long rat preserved in a jar of formaldehyde on her desk--or get bitten by it while they sleep.

In one Skid Row hotel a client of Mintie’s killed nine of the ugly creatures in just one night with traps under her sink. A city health inspector saw the freshly killed evidence, but the building remains free to rent rooms.

“Here we are in one of the richest cities in the world and we have 30,000 homeless people,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, “while many other countries with far fewer resources than America do very well for all of their people.

“We don’t have to have people living in the streets, deliberately jaywalking in front of police cars so they get a night in jail,” said Mintie, one of the leading spokespersons for the occupants of Tent City across from City Hall before it was torn down last week. “I am a great believer in empowering people, in getting them on their feet so they can earn their own way. We have so much wealth in this country, but we have lost our faith that we can have a strong economy and social justice,” she said.

Mintie believes not caring for the temporarily homeless leads to massive waste of lives and taxpayer money. “The hard economic truth is if we don’t take care of the homeless they become ill and get put into County Hospital at a cost of hundreds of dollars each night,” she said.

One of Mintie’s clients worked in a restaurant, supporting herself, a grown daughter and an 8-month-old grandchild. But when the grandmother became ill and needed time off for surgery her employer let her go. The grandmother finally sought welfare and got put up in a stinking, rat-infested Skid Row hotel that had filthy bedding and no hot water.

Mintie said her client decided the streets were better than the hotel and moved into a park at 6th and Gladys streets where several dozen people sleep each night. Soon the woman’s leg became infected and “now she has lost the use of her legs because she faced the terrible choice of whether to be on the street or in a terrible and unsafe hotel,” Mintie said. She has helped the woman get emergency medical care and is now trying to get her daughter on Aid to Families With Dependent Children. “To have a whole class of people unemployed and unproductive who gradually deteriorate from lack of sleep, warmth and food and eventually become seriously ill--running up huge medical bills--to have this open running sore in our society has got to be far more costly than a decent and humane system in which there are jobs for people,” she said.

The poor people of Skid Row need an attorney, Mintie believes, because the government often fails to provide promised services and because “so many people take advantage of them. I have a client who works as a trimmer in a garment shop for $8 for 9 1/2 hours of work. How can anyone live on that? How can we allow that?”