Robertson Pushed L.A. for Skid Row Shelter : Labor Employs City Hall Clout for Homeless

Thieves Corner is a part of downtown Los Angeles that street people learn fast to avoid. Life anywhere on Skid Row is tough, but the bonfires that sustain life on the row are stoked at Thieves Corner by a nasty brand of junkies and desperadoes.

This weekend Thieves Corner--at 5th and San Julian streets--became the unlikely focus of political efforts to help homeless men and women who cannot find shelter in missions and county-sponsored hotels. Many of the city’s new homeless find the area too risky and prefer to stick closer to City Hall or leave downtown altogether for the suburbs.

Late Friday, however, trucks began delivering lumber. Volunteer carpenters and craftsmen started work Saturday, and Mayor Tom Bradley delivered coffee. By sundown on Sunday, walls were raised and plywood laid for a temporary shelter for 100 to 200 homeless people.

The shelter, which is the first built under city auspices since federal officials last year said Los Angeles leads the nation in homeless residents, is the result of an unusual sequence of events that shows the political power wielded in City Hall by local labor leaders.

The project was not conceived in the vast city and county departments that are supposed to watch out for the welfare of citizens. It was hatched in discussions between Bradley and William Robertson, executive secretary of the county Federation of Labor. The talks began when two large tents for the homeless were pitched across the street from City Hall during the holidays.

“The mayor and I talked twice in the last two weeks about the situation,” Robertson, a close Bradley adviser and former city commissioner, said Friday. The tent city, as the unofficial shelter was called, “really focused us in on the problem, no question about it,” he added. “Any enlightened person was aware of the problem, but that brought it to the forefront.”

Robertson, 65, had been homeless himself during a period of alcoholism in his late 20s. He assigned an assistant, Jim Wood, to find a way to supply temporary, emergency shelter for people living in the rain and cold downtown.

The fact that Wood is chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency, and appointed by Bradley, did not hurt. By last Tuesday, Wood had a plan to use vacant agency land, an agency contribution to purchase insurance, and donations from labor to put up a building. The mayor approved, and the plan was disclosed Wednesday.

In the days since, Wood and veterans of Skid Row agencies and missions have won approval from fire and building inspectors and lined up cots and blankets. Oxford Construction Co., a major downtown developer, acted as purchasing agent for the lumber and other materials. Wood said labor unions from the AFL-CIO and the building trades will donate the cost of those materials.

Thieves Corner was chosen because the redevelopment agency had land there and because it was convenient to a hotel recently purchased by the SRO Housing Corp., a private arm of the agency, that could be tapped for electricity.

“This is ground zero in Skid Row, we know that,” Wood said. “But there was no other place to go. We had to move fast.”

Plans call for the shelter to open by midweek. But the speed involved poses some political risks.

The Skid Row Development Corp., another private arm of the redevelopment agency, has agreed to run the shelter. But the money for operating costs such as utilities and salaries for guards--perhaps as much as $300,000 by the time the shelter closes in June--has not yet been obtained.

City officials have pledged to cover some of the costs, but no one is certain where that money will come from. The city would like county officials to pay some amount, and private grants are also being sought.

Fear of Disease, Violence Also troubling some city officials is the threat of some incident--such as a fire or an outbreak of disease or violence--at the shelter that could backfire politically for Bradley, who is seeking election to a fourth term.

The Skid Row Development Corp. already runs a successful shelter, Transition House, but the clientele there is more stable and not as tough as those expected at the new shelter.

“There’s a chance it will all blow up,” Wood said. “It’s a plywood structure, and that’s a risk too. Do we feel at this time the risks are acceptable? The answer is yes.”

While the Civic Center tent city was up, attention was focused on the number of homeless in Los Angeles, and the problems here were shown to the rest of the nation by the media. Bradley never went across the street to the tent city, a spokesman said, but he took its residents’ plight seriously.

“This is fantastic,” Bradley said at the construction site Saturday. “I’m really impressed with the speed with which the labor union representatives have put up this temporary facility. This is not only going to be so far superior to what anybody had ever expected, it will have all the building and safety provisions. . . . It will be the answer to our problem in terms of temporary housing.”

Jeff Dietrich, a member of the Catholic Worker organization who has aided Skid Row homeless for more than a dozen years, said the new shelter is not the answer. But he praised the effort.

“There haven’t been any new beds opened since Transition House almost three years ago,” Dietrich said. “This is exciting that public entities are moving on an emergency basis. When these beds fill up and there’s still people on the streets, they will see it’s even more of an emergency than they thought.”

Before the work began, regulations and city codes that would have posed problems to an ordinary development were worked out, including some that seem paradoxical in such a situation.

Rules that require parking, for instance, had to be waived, and a document had to be filed declaring that there would be no negative environmental results from the project.

“Almost nothing could negatively impact 5th and San Julian,” Wood said.

All day Saturday and Sunday, the crews worked under the supervision of foreman Elmer Griggs, a master carpenter. An extra layer of fire wall was added to the outside, under orders from the Los Angeles Fire Department, and sprinklers will be installed throughout. Portable toilets will be added outside, and showers and meals will be provided at the nearby Weingart Center, a homeless shelter run by the Volunteers of America.

Lenard Brown, 30, who lived two weeks in the Civic Center tent city, showed up Saturday to help build the new shelter. “There’s a lot of people who really appreciate this, and that’s from my heart.”

He said he ordinarily avoids the roughness of Thieves Corner by paying admission to sleep in a movie theater on Broadway that is always crowded with the homeless. “Any night I have $1.75, that’s where I go,” he said.

Brown said he slept Friday night between the stacks of lumber on the shelter site. He was put to work Saturday morning on the foundation.

Homeless people watching the construction work said police made several arrests in the vicinity on the day before work started, and towed several cars from a vacant lot across the street. As the building went up, however, life went on pretty much undisturbed.

Across in the vacant lot, an old man cooked a pair of knackwurst on a barrel fire. A couple of times during the weekend, self-proclaimed missionaries set up tables for sidewalk soup lines or handed out food from car trunks.

“You got to blend in and try to get along,” said Joe Fisher, who said he plans to move out of the turn-of-the-century Harold Hotel and away from Skid Row as soon as his county welfare checks begin to arrive.

“I drink a little wine with them, even buy them a little wine,” he said. “This is downtown, and the people here are down. You know what I mean? Down.”