Squatters Vow They Will Resist Effort to Remove Shack City

Under pressure from the city, the owner of a downtown lot where about 60 homeless people have erected a clapboard shantytown agreed Wednesday to clear the site, but some of the squatters vowed to remain until arrested.

“They’re going to have to take us out of here,” said Ted Hayes, the organizer of the settlement dubbed Justiceville. “We are not going to succumb to their injustice.”

The Skid Row shack city has become a political hot potato for local officials since street people began moving onto the lot at Gladys Avenue and 6th Street shortly after a temporary downtown Tent City was taken down at the beginning of the year.

Even some advocates for the homeless have been critical of conditions at the shantytown, which officials say is in violation of health, building, fire and safety codes. There also have been reports that the site has become a base for drug activity.

Former Playground

Samuel Anker, an attorney for Orient Investment Co., the owner of the lot, said Wednesday that the property--a former privately operated playground for Skid Row children--will be posted with “no trespassing” signs today. The lot also will be fenced.

“They don’t have permission to be on the property,” Anker said. “They have been asked to leave.”

The city attorney’s office had threatened to file criminal charges against the owner because of the violations.

Hayes, a former auto detailer who left his wife and children in Riverside to become “homeless by choice,” portrayed the coming showdown as a symbolic event for all of the county’s estimated 30,000 homeless. “It’s time homeless people stopped being pushed around,” he said.

May Become Police Matter

Anker said that if the squatters refuse to leave, it will become a police matter.

Capt. Bill Wedgeworth of the Police Department’s central area has been consulting on the matter with representatives of the mayor and downtown Councilman Gilbert Lindsay. He said he hopes to avoid arresting the settlers, who for one reason or another, have not fit into traditional help programs offered the homeless.

“I think alternative housing is something that should be explored,” Wedgeworth said. “But no one has come up with a viable alternative. It looks like it’s going to come down to (police action.)” But Wedgeworth said he did not know when police would move.