The Skid Row Sweeps: Staking Out Positions : They’re Keeping L.A.’s Homeless On the Move
Maury Greene was up early Tuesday, sweeping, cleaning, folding her tent and packing her gear. Another city sweep was expected on Skid Row.
Along with Greene, the other three dozen residents of the Towne Avenue settlement, which calls itself the “Love” camp, struggled to haul their mattresses, cardboard, plastic, tarpaulins and the makeshift barrel stove out of sight for the day.
By nightfall, they would be back, and the camp rebuilt.
“All we want is a chance to be together and support each other,” said the 39-year-old Greene, in trousers, a bandanna and the red USC Trojan shirt she always wears.
Camps like the Towne Avenue settlement have existed for years on Skid Row, but they have attracted greater attention in the last week as the city has staged a series of raids aimed at discouraging sidewalk shantytowns. Since the sweep began, five street camps have been hit.
The camps, traditionally a winter phenomenon when the population of Skid Row swells and shelters and missions are full, have gotten bigger over the last three years, some believe.
“I’ve seen it become bigger and more intense since I’ve been here,” said Police Capt. Rick Batson, commander of Central Division for about a year.
“It coincides with a decrease in housing, the rise in the cost of housing, and the influx of businesses on Skid Row,” said Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a Skid Row family day center.
Others believe that the camps are just more visible now because many of the alleys where people hid out have been fenced off by local businessmen.
The first camp to gain local attention was an outgrowth of the first Tent City, erected on state land across from City Hall in December, 1984.
When Tent City disbanded, about 60 homeless regrouped in a cardboard camp on Skid Row. Led by homeless activist Ted Hayes, they called themselves Justiceville, and equipped the camp with portable toilets and even a telephone. City officials, citing criminal activity and health violations, ordered the site cleared in May, 1985.
Unlike Justiceville, Skid Row’s current enclaves, with the exception of the Towne Avenue camp, are unstructured and without leaders.
“Usually when they start out it’s for safety,” John Dillon, director of Chrysalis Center, a self-help agency in the area, said of the camp dwellers. “They’ll start at three or four, then grow to 12 or 16. . . . Then it’s more than safety, there’s the whole thing of trust, of knowing the people.”
“They desire a sense of community,” Catholic Worker member Jonathan Parfrey said, and often will “choose that over an institution.”
Many camp residents refuse to stay in missions or to go to hotels, even when they can afford it, saying that they do not want to follow the rules there. “Many people cannot live a structured life,” said Midnight Mission director Clancy Imislund.
The street camp members pick their “spots,” as they are called, for a reason. One spot is beside Jack’s Market on 5th Street, which sells liquor but is also the only local grocery store with fresh food.
Another group set up housekeeping at 6th Street and Stanford Avenue, a block from the Gladys Avenue park, a previous encampment area, and a place used by charitable groups bringing free food and clothing. When the park, which was used by homeless as well as by reputed drug dealers, was shut down last month by the city officials, about 20 people moved to 6th and Stanford. Since the sweeps started, many of that group have merely moved across the street. The area still gets visits from outsiders with donations, according to Solomon Baptiste, manager of La Jolla Hotel on the same corner, so “They (the homeless) try to stay around here.”
A third, the Towne Avenue camp, popped up down the street from the Fred Jordan Mission, which has a reputation as a “good” shelter, and on a sidewalk that seems wider than most.
Another group settled close to the doorway of the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles Street, which lights up its sidewalks at night. The side wall and alley behind a blood plasma center on 4th Street became another enclave, with 30 to 40 regulars.
Central Division officers described the 10 to 12 sweep locations generally, as “divisional hot spots,” where narcotics traffic and reports of street robberies, thefts or burglaries from automobiles were common.
The existence of a public encampment, Batson said, “is and can be and will be a festering location of criminals.” Local workers and homeless residents agree, but say that only some of the settlements, not all, are pockets of crime.
“We’ve always had a lot of people hanging around,” said Jack Simone, who has owned Jack’s Market for 30 years, but due to recent activity outside, he added, “a lot of people are afraid to come to my store.”
The neighboring vacant lot, he said, had housed a makeshift settlement for the last year and a half, but when it was fenced off about a month ago, the group migrated to his sidewalk with mattresses, sofas and makeshift stoves.
Before the first of three sweeps since last week, he said, “They drew circles (on the sidewalk) and anybody who passed by had to throw money in or they got beaten.”
“It’s my experience that some of these little encampments are legitimate,” Imislund of the Midnight Mission said. The recently disbanded one outside his door was a “good” one of about six homeless people, he added, but he has had others spring up on the sidewalk or in the nearby alley that were “terrible places . . . preying, conniving, young strong men, taking dope, getting dope.”
The Towne Avenue camp between 4th and 5th streets, however, does not have a reputation either from police or the community, as a high-crime spot. It is the most unusual of the street enclaves in that it operates as a kind of commune, run by homeless for homeless, and includes women. Most camps do not.
“We thought, what can we do for ourselves,” Maury Greene said, “because it’s high time we be responsible for ourselves.”
In early January, the group, which had grown from a handful in the fall to more than two dozen people, decided to organize themselves. They set up a “duty roster” with the help of Adam Bennion, a 37-year-old Mormon priest and organizer with the Union of the Homeless, an organization with chapters in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia that seeks to change the image as well as the plight of homeless people.
Each resident is required to do chores such as cleaning, cooking, firewood search or security patrol. Two portable toilets were donated by the son of actress Debbie Reynolds, Todd Fisher, who had become aware of their efforts. The group assesses its members $2 a week to maintain the toilets.
‘Our goal is to create a model community,” Bennion said. “What we were trying to do is set an example. We see this as the training ground for bringing people back into collective situations.”
The union, which circulates a single-page newsletter called “Love,” hopes to train other groups to form their own “homeless block associations,” Bennion added, and to persuade the city to install portable toilets.
Many camp residents work, earning $20 to $40 a day passing out handbills or unloading trucks, but won’t go to a hotel with their money. Laurie, a slender 33-year-old who did not want to give her last name, said, “I’m not going to give everything I’ve earned for a room full of roaches, full of rats.”
