CRA Presses Its Skid Row Hotel Efforts

Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency Chairman James Wood, in response to an impending Skid Row housing crisis, said Friday that the CRA will look for more money to help fix 34 hotels whose future is in doubt because of non-compliance with the city’s earthquake safety ordinance.

The hotels contain about 26% of Skid Row’s dwindling stock of low-income dwelling units, according to a CRA study of Skid Row and its homeless population.

Wood would not say how much the CRA might spend on seismic repair work. However, the study indicates that it would cost the agency about $8.5 million to make required seismic improvements in 60% of the imperiled hotel rooms. The rest of the rooms could cost considerably more to upgrade because they are in buildings that do not qualify for CRA subsidized loans, according to the study.

The agency has already earmarked about $71 million, or 25% of its projected 1987 budget, for citywide housing projects. Moreover, the CRA has already agreed to help rehabilitate 1,333 dwelling units in 14 Skid Row hotels.

While pledging to search for more money for seismic work, Wood argued that a “significant” number of the people living in Skid Row are not interested in permanent shelter, and he implicitly questioned their right to the many public services made available in Skid Row.

Describing these people as “new urban pioneers,” Wood likened them to 19th-Century frontiersmen who lived off the land, disdained the trappings of civilization and engaged in “occasional banditry.”

“They’re like the people who rode out from St. Louis and made a life for themselves in the middle of nothing.”

The new breed, he said, takes “pride in their ability to function on the street, using the soup kitchens and the missions . . . trading in food stamps and (emergency housing) vouchers. . . . They would take jobs for $22 an hour, but they won’t enroll in apprenticeship programs or take minimum-wage jobs.”

Wood’s sentiments came as part of a rambling, emotional response to the CRA’s study of homelessness, and his views were neither supported nor contradicted by the study’s findings. Indeed, they seemed a bit beside the point, as he spoke in favor of increasing the CRA’s commitment to Skid Row housing rehabilitation.

He said the large number of mentally ill people in the area warranted CRA’s help. The agency’s study says more than 70% of the Skid Row population is suffering from chronic mental illness or from the effects of substance abuse.

However, Wood did agree with a recommendation by another agency board member, Irene Ayala, that able-bodied residents of subsidized Skid Row housing ought to be required to work.

About two-thirds of Skid Row’s 11,000 to 12,000 residents live in single-room occupancy hotels, about 2,200 stay in missions and shelters and about 1,000 sleep regularly on the streets or in parks and parked cars, according to the study.

The study maintains that about 25% of the hotel rooms available in 1980 are now gone and that the remaining ones often are occupied by more than one person.

Social workers fear that the city’s earthquake safety ordinance will cause hotel owners in Skid Row to tear down more buildings rather than make costly repairs, unless the CRA is willing to offer financial assistance.