Homeless Crackdown Spurs Rush to Hotels : Housing Agency Accused of Aggravating Problem, Moving Slowly to Provide Shelter

Working his way through a box of chocolate doughnuts, B. J. Link, 28 and homeless, paused to lick a finger and ponder fate.

Nope, he said, the latest threatened crackdown on the homeless on Los Angeles’ Skid Row--scheduled to start today--won’t bother him much. “I’m not worried about it really,” he said. “I’ll go over to the other side of Chinatown ... in the woods by Elysian Park.” But if police do pull people off the street, “it’s not going to solve the problem. The jails are already overcrowded.”

Despite the calm of a few such as Link, the past week could be called the stampede on Skid Row.

By all accounts, that’s what happened last Friday when about 200 people began flocking to the Panama Hotel on 5th Street.

Lured by easily available referral slips and apparently spurred by anxiety over the planned crackdown on homeless people camped on the sidewalks, the crowd was competing for about 65 rooms available from the Single Room Occupancy Housing Corp., an offshoot of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency that renovates and operates hotels on Skid Row.

Paradoxical Actions

This rush for rooms was the latest round in a long-running saga involving SRO’s controversial role on Skid Row. It was also an indication of the complexities involved in housing the homeless in a city that has opened emergency shelters for--and conducted “street sweeps” against--the homeless.

“We really underestimated the response, we had no idea there would be such an overwhelming turnout,” said Nancy Mintie of the Inner City Law Center, explaining that center staffers working in separate locations inadvertently handed out more referral slips than there were rooms available.

Street Market Developed

The referral slips reportedly became one of the hottest tickets in Los Angeles, selling for $5 each on the street.

(On Wednesday, Mayor Tom Bradley said an “urban encampment” for the homeless was being readied near downtown and that the had asked police not to arrest the homeless after officers ran out of housing vouchers. Police are supposed to offer vouchers for city- and county-paid shelter at area hotels--including those run by SRO and others that accept welfare clients--before making arrests. It was not clear Wednesday how much housing will be available for the estimated 1,000 to 10,000 people sleeping on Skid Row streets. Public interest attorneys were seeking court action Wednesday to halt the sweeps, at least temporarily.)

For about the past year, SRO has been a source of ire for some other social service providers on Skid Row. Over the past few months their criticisms have intensified--mainly that the agency has moved too slowly in renovation and has exacerbated the housing shortage by closing hotels to fix them up. The agency’s executive director, Andy Raubeson, also has become more of a target, primarily because he supported city action against homeless encampments earlier this year.

Most recently, critics such as Mintie and John Dillon of the Chrysalis Center, a private self-help organization on Skid Row, have been irked by SRO’s reports that its vacancy rates were increasing while many people were living on the streets.

Vacancies Debated

For much of this year, SRO has reported vacancy rates from about 15 to more than 50 rooms in its two largest hotels, the Panama and the Russ in the area of 5th and San Julian streets. These hotels house a largely transient and homeless male clientele whose fees are often paid for by the county welfare system.

SRO spokesmen had blamed the vacancies on warmer weather, dispersal of the homeless beyond Skid Row and temporary increases in shelter beds.

Mintie and Dillon said their efforts to get people into SRO’s hotels last week were partly to demonstrate that street people do want shelter. But homeless people often don’t seek or get shelter because of red tape and delays in assistance programs such as Los Angeles County’s General Relief program that provides vouchers for hotel stays, they explained.

“Housing needs to be a real option rather than a theoretical option,” especially when the homeless are threatened with arrests, Dillon said.

City Pays for a Week

Under SRO’s emergency program, the city pays $8 nightly for up to a week’s stay at an SRO hotel, so long as applicants are sober and not under the influence of drugs, said Raubeson, who noted his hotels have been full or nearly full the last few days. After a week, clients go back on the street if their vouchers are not renewed or they don’t find another government agency to pay their bills.

“It seems that there is more demand than supply if you make the eligibility requirements liberal enough,” Raubeson said, referring to the fact that those seeking shelter don’t have to fill out forms, have vouchers or meet other bureaucratic requirements.

Mark Loard, 40, has been staying at the Russ Hotel for about six months. He has lived on Skid Row “off and on” since 1980, he said. And he is ambivalent about the looming crackdown.

“You never know what’s going to happen out on the streets,” he said. “We know there’s drug deals and crime and that the police have been tied down by politics. The flip side of that is that a lot of these (homeless) people can’t help themselves. And both sides are right.”

A few minutes after Loard talked to a reporter, two men were seen engaged in an apparent drug deal a few steps from the front door of the Russ.

Created four years ago, SRO was initially seen as a relatively quick fix for housing problems on Skid Row. It was also viewed as a key factor in stabilizing the area’s population by providing permanent housing for long-term residents.

Since then, however, the agency has set aside most of its available rooms--about 400 out of 610, according to Raubeson--for voucher clients paying $8 per night, or a maximum of $240 per month under some voucher payment plans. Thus, transients provide SRO, which earlier this year had to cut its operating budget, with more income than permanent residents, who pay monthly base rents of $143 to $185.

In the meantime, the problem of homelessness--and media attention to it--increased dramatically, here and nationally, making programs such as SRO much more visible.

Other Cities Doing the Same

In fact, hotel renovation programs such as SRO’s are in progress in cities all over the country, including San Francisco and New York. The drying up of federal public housing funds has also given programs such as SRO higher profiles.

Since 1983, SRO has acquired nine hotels, shut down six of those and completely renovated and reopened one. Purchase of a 10th hotel, the Ward, is expected to be completed next month.

By the start of the new fiscal year July 1, SRO will have spent or been allocated nearly $20 million for purchase and renovation of hotels. With a total of nearly 1,000 rooms, SRO accounts for about one-sixth of the hotel rooms on Skid Row.

The agency’s current projections call for renovation of the 58-room Harold Hotel--now closed--to be finished this fall. The 38-room Leo and 63-room Golden West hotels are scheduled to be reopened by about March. The 57-room Ellis and the 79-room Regal are slated to accept tenants around the middle of next year. The 60-room Florence Hotel was reopened last August after being closed for about a year.

1989 Completion Scheduled

The remaining hotels--the Panama, the Russ and the Annex--have stayed in operation and SRO will keep these hotels open during renovation. The Ward also will remain open while it is renovated.

All rehabilitation work, including that on hotels that will remain open, is scheduled to be finished by mid-1989.

Critics say this pace is too slow. SRO staffers and supporters respond that after an admittedly slow start--mainly due to contractor-related delays and cost overruns at the Florence--the agency is on track.

James Wood, chairman of SRO’s board of directors said: “We feel a great deal of pressure (to complete renovation) and it’s self-imposed. We know we’re behind schedule. We feel we have the advantage of knowing why we’re behind schedule so that doesn’t make it a mystery to us.”

Alice Callaghan, who operates a program for families and children on Skid Row, is one of several social service workers in the area who find the closed hotels an insult.

Closures in Dispute

“People are camping on sidewalks in front of closed hotels,” Callaghan said. She advocates a crash renovation program that would get the hotels open as quickly as possible.

Raubeson defends the closures as regrettable but necessary.

“We have closed right now about 250 units, and those hotels that we closed were all seriously deteriorated and should not have been kept open,” he said.

“In fact, hotels that we have kept open, such as the Russ and the Panama, are very, very maintenance costly because they were in such bad condition. I don’t think we closed down anything that was marginal. We closed places that were demonstrably unsafe.”

Two other charges frequently leveled by Callaghan and others are that SRO rents, for voucher clients and permanent residents, are too high and that by setting aside most of its rooms for transients the agency is contributing not only to homelessness but also to the anarchy of the streets.

(Another comparable hotel in the area has monthly rents ranging from $135 to $155.)

Approach Is Common

Raubeson maintains that by its nature Skid Row will always have a significant transient population and that serving voucher clients meets a community need. Brad Paul, who has worked on studies of single room occupancy hotels and is involved in a San Francisco neighborhood rehabilitation program, says that the Los Angeles approach to renovation is a common one.

“The real answer to preserving SROs is to buy SROs,” he said, noting that this type of inner-city hotel is being torn down at a rapid rate all over the country. “The downside is that you can’t rehabilitate them all at once. . . . (But) I can understand people at a local level being frustrated.”

Alex Kuloff, 94, is a resident of the Russ Hotel. He said he began living in the Skid Row area in 1929. These days he feels like a prisoner, he said, as he sat near a security guard in the lobby watching the passing parade. “I used to go out all the time. Now I never go out anywhere,” he said, citing his fear of the streets.

Around the corner at the Florence Hotel, Willis Marshall, 65, recalled that he was robbed of $120 about a year ago.

“Two guys took me like a sack of potatoes and threw me against the wall,” he said. “I get off the streets before it gets dark.”

Ironically, the issue that sparked the greatest disenchantment with Raubeson and SRO may now be a non-issue.

When Raubeson supported sweeps of the homeless earlier this year as part of a crime-fighting strategy, he angered other workers in the area.

But he says he’s opposed to the latest proposed crackdown.

“I think it is an unwise public policy,” Raubeson said. “The city is not in a position to guarantee that each of those persons can be housed. . . . What I support is police action that arrests criminals. I don’t support the city arresting people to solve a social problem.”

At the Russ, a 35-year-old man who identifies himself only as Michael said he supports the new crackdown. And he noted that the city’s latest action comes after plenty of warning. “They’re not bushwhacking anybody . “