Low-key police enforcement is now aimed at stopping ‘cardboard condos.’ : ‘Hiding’ Homeless Scatter Again

Living on the streets has never been easy.

To keep safe and clean and fed with little or no money has always been a challenge for those on Skid Row. But now there is one more impossible task for Los Angeles’ homeless: They have to be invisible.

That is what it takes to keep on the right side of the law and to keep one’s few belongings out of the maw of a city sanitation truck, according to homeless activists.

Since the well-publicized and much-criticized sweeps of Skid Row last year, city police have maintained a lower-key but equally effective program of stopping “cardboard condos” from sprouting on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

And now, one of the last of the major encampments is about to be razed by state officials.

Police Warning

After months of camping at a former state building site on 1st Street between Broadway and Spring Street, a group of about 75 men and women who have erected makeshift homes of society’s flotsam were warned Monday by state police that they were to be moved at 6 a.m. today.

State officials looked the other way for several months until public complaints about the dirty camp mounted. With the closing of the camp, the homeless are being turned out into the streets of Los Angeles where the Police Department will not tolerate their setting up house in public.

“Last year the word was ‘Get out of town,’ ” said Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a homeless service organization. “This year the message is ‘You can sleep on the sidewalk when no one is looking.”’

Authorities see the problem in a different light. “We’re trying to avoid encampments like in ‘86,” said Sgt. Larry Thompson, the Police Department’s Skid Row coordinator. “There’s no set policy. We don’t say we’ll sweep on (certain) days every week. . . . We’re just trying to respond to hot spots.”

At the 1st Street camp, the tents, packing crates and cardboard lean-tos that cannot be hauled away by their owners will be torn down and carted away. The clotheslines will be taken down, the impromptu latrine sanitized, the shopping carts loaded and guided back on the streets.

The homeless say they will scatter again, just as they did when a city-sponsored camp was closed last September, just as they did when the city banned sleeping on Venice Beach last winter and just as they did when the city’s first Tent City was closed in 1985.

“I’ll just go somewhere else,” said Arthur, a middle-aged man who has been at the camp for several months, echoing the words of nearly everyone. “What else can I do?”

“They’ll spread out,” said homeless activist Ted Hayes, who has been working with people at the site. “But eventually they’ll gather together in a clump. . . . These encampments will go on until there is a solution.”

Some of these people have been camping together at one site or another since the first Justiceville encampment on 6th Street in 1985.

“People come here for security,” said one man who asked not to be identified. “When you are on the street, you are on your own.”

But at a camp, there is strength in numbers and some measure of protection from street punks, hoodlums and the police, camp members said.

“It’s better (here) because there’s more protection--from the law and from spectators,” said Edward, who with his fiancee Janet has been staying at the site for about three months.

“People here look out for each other,” said Tyronne, who like most of the others declined to give his last name.

At the camp, the homeless can leave their few belongings while they attempt to get day work, deal with various government offices for assistance or just try to get a meal.

Once word of the camp spread, several charity groups and individuals began to regularly bring food, everything from bag lunches to hot meals. On Sunday three groups brought meals to the camp, Tyronne said.

The 1st Street site also offered the bonus of running water from an old pipe. On Wednesday, as office workers scurried about the surrounding streets, a steady stream of homeless washed clothes and hung them to dry in trees in the shadow of City Hall.

There had been a second water pipe at the site, but state officials saw it in use and shut it off permanently several weeks ago, according to camp members.

It was that kind of increased visibility and scrutiny that led to the camp’s demise.

Officials said they received numerous complaints in recent weeks from the public and from state workers who had to clean up around the area, said Bobbio Sanchez, a building manager with the state Department of General Services.

If the camp had not been in the state’s jurisdiction and out of LAPD purview, it likely would have been closed much sooner. State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) made appeals to the General Services Department asking that they give the camp as much latitude as possible.

Now the homeless will have to find another out-of-the-way place in the game of hide-and-seek with authorities.

Hayes said most of this camp’s inhabitants will likely just “move around, learning from lessons of the past: stay low, hide.”

Thompson of the LAPD said, “When we see a (structure) 24 hours a day for three or four days, it causes others to start coming in and then they set up clotheslines and fires in the gutter.” To avoid that, the police will move quickly to ask the squatters to pack up their belonging and move along.

Typically, Thompson said, police are tolerant about what goes on at night when the office workers in the neighborhood are gone. But if the lean-tos and tents are still standing by 9 a.m., patrol cars and trucks will respond.

A year ago when the police first began clearing the sidewalks, they were accompanied by bulldozers and high-ranking city officials. It became a publicity nightmare for city officials and played a role in forcing the city to open its own official camp, which housed 2,600 people. After three months, it closed and the homeless were returned to the street.

But then the rules were different: No more tents and cardboard homes would be tolerated.

“They’re not using the heavy equipment, so it doesn’t appear as vicious,” said Margaret Holub, a homeless activist with the Inner City Law Center, about the continuing police practice.

But the effect of the city’s policy of clearing the sidewalks without offering the people a place to go, she said, is just as inhumane now as it was last year.