City’s Commitment to Skid Row Housing Falters

Members of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s powerful Community Redevelopment Agency board openly expressed doubts on Monday that the city can keep its 10-year-old commitment to provide housing for the poor on Skid Row.

“To me it seems better to disperse the low-income population throughout the county,” board member Irene Ayala said. Board vice chairman Christopher Stewart said that “if you look at the future,” much of Skid Row will be developed for light industrial and commercial uses and will not have the inexpensive single-room-occupancy hotels that are a feature of the area today.

Board members spoke at a meeting with a study group from the Urban Land Institute, a national organization that has been asked to study a growing controversy over preservation of the hotels. The study group met with the redevelopment agency board on the first day of a four-day fact-finding trip.

The meeting was significant because it provided the clearest indication yet of a growing feeling on the board that the city will be unable to continue its policy of assuring cheap housing on Skid Row in the face of business development.

A Major Player

That will be important in setting future city policy on Skid Row and its residents, many of whom are homeless. The redevelopment agency is a major player in the future of Skid Row. It has provided money for rehabilitation of single-room-occupancy hotels and, through its redevelopment powers, including the right to condemn land, has promoted the rehabilitation of Little Tokyo. It has financed emergency services for the growing number of homeless on Skid Row.

Those actions were taken to implement a 1976 city policy, part of the downtown Los Angeles redevelopment plan, that ordered the creation of a safe residential area on Skid Row.

In the last five years times have changed. The fish processing industry has boomed because of health-conscious Californians’ love of seafood. The wholesale toy industry has found a home in Skid Row area warehouses. And property owners in expanding Little Tokyo want to enlarge that commercial and residential area into Skid Row.

Two years ago, Bradley said in an interview that he was interested in more commercial growth in the Skid Row area. And Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, whose district includes Skid Row, has always favored upscale commercial and residential development in the area, the last big undeveloped stretch of downtown Los Angeles.

At Monday’s session, Harold S. Jensen, chairman of the Urban Land Institute delegation, told board members that he sensed from interviews here that “the CRA may be backing off from its policy of saving and expanding Skid Row hotels.

“Unless you expect the poor to disappear,” he said, “the problem will remain.”

None of the five board members present, a majority of the seven-member body, defended the 1976 policy.

Frank Kuwahara said there will be no solution to the housing problem on Skid Row until “there is a way to stop the flow of people” moving into the area.

Both Kuwahara and Ayala described Skid Row residents in unfavorable terms, Kuwahara referring to “the undesirable, the homeless, the drug users . . . the peddlers.”

Stewart said the agency, under heavy pressure to use funds for downtown library restoration and expansion of the Convention Center, is limited in the amount it can spend for renovation of Skid Row housing, including bringing old hotels up to new earthquake standards.

After the meeting, however, another Bradley Administration official made it clear that redevelopment agency members would face opposition in City Hall.

Dan Garcia, chairman of the Planning Commission, which is in charge of rezoning of Skid Row and other parts of the city, said his group would be reluctant to take any zoning action that would have the effect of precipitously dispersing Skid Row residents.