Los Angeles: New Plenty, New Poverty

February’s street-side conflict between city authorities and the homeless on Skid Row reflected a larger social problem facing Los Angeles for the years ahead, a tension caused by the paradox of economic growth and a stubborn underbelly of poverty.

As late winter chill turned into balmy Southern California spring, the episode has been put aside, dismissed as an uncharacteristic burst of mean-spiritedness by a usually liberal Bradley Administration. Other news has replaced the unpleasant pictures of sanitation crews taking apart sidewalk encampments put up by the homeless, city workers using big trucks and operating under police protection.

Those few days, however, gave Los Angeles a small taste of the social dynamite underneath the surface of a city that appears to be increasingly prosperous in its expanding role as a Pacific Rim capital, the economic giant reaching from here to Asia.

For some of the causes of Skid Row trouble are rooted in the conflict between the city’s increasing economic strength and its growing number of poor, many of them immigrants drawn here by this century’s greatest influx of foreign-born to the United States.

And that tension extends far beyond the boundaries of Skid Row, those relatively few blocks east of downtown. It is in San Fernando Valley, the Westside and other parts of the city.

Skid Row is an old part of Los Angeles. For years it was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind place for drunks and drifters. Then, in the 1970s, its population began to change. Laws preventing the arrest of drunks and the incarceration of the mentally ill increased the population. The decline of basic industry--and a loss of low-skilled jobs--added to the growing population. By the 1980s, Skid Row people roamed through downtown and the homeless were found in almost every section of the city.

Economic growth in the Skid Row area in the last five years changed the situation even more. Asian business people, drawn to Los Angeles by the growing Pacific trade, invested heavily in Little Tokyo. A few blocks away, other Asians, including immigrants, opened toy companies, wholesale and retail. In addition to this Pacific Rim-based growth, the local fish industry nearby suddenly began expanding as health-conscious Americans changed their eating habits.

Such downtown growth was encouraged by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, in charge of economic revitalization for the area. Led by labor leader James Wood, CRA saw Skid Row area growth as a chance to increase the number of steady, low-skill trade jobs in the city to replace work lost by the closing of auto and tire plants in South-Central Los Angeles.

As all this was happening, the immigrants were arriving, a great many of them poor people who entered illegally from Mexico and Central America. Other immigrants came from Asia. All needed work plus housing and were thrust into competition with the poor people already living here.

Unfortunately, the city’s supply of low-cost housing was diminishing as developers focused commercial attention on poor but convenient neighborhoods, such as the area just west of the Harbor Freeway.

Latinos moved in increasing numbers to once solidly black South-Central Los Angeles. They and blacks competed for space in slum apartments. Meanwhile, Pico-Union, a neighborhood near the junction of the Harbor and Santa Monica freeways, grew into a slum, as crowded and oppressive as the tenements that housed an earlier generation of immigrants. Some of the losers ended up on the streets and families joined the ranks of the homeless.

On Skid Row, the business people had created a new Central City East organization and backed the sweeps against the homeless. Skid Row workers who had long been providing services to homeless individuals and families protested the city’s heavy-handed approach. Common sense prevailed and the city modified its methods--but the problem remains.

The Skid Row sweep was simply a graphic example of citywide social tension caused by need amid plenty, the loss of low-cost housing and a scarcity of unskilled jobs.

Just last week, a place for homeless families, the Valley Shelter on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, celebrated its first year. Out-of-work families watched from the balcony of an old motel as Mayor Tom Bradley congratulated the volunteers whose work and money made the shelter possible.

Churches, synagogues, generous individuals and help from the city and county created the shelter. But its backers admit this is just a small step. A bigger step occurred the week before when Bradley and Board of Supervisors Chairman Mike Antonovich met to try to end the feud between the city and county over care for the homeless.

Still to be faced, however, are long-range answers to the basic questions raised by the Skid Row sweeps--the need for more inexpensive housing and for the city’s Pacific Rim prosperity to trickle down to sidewalk level in the form of low-skill, permanent jobs.