Homeless Camps Thrive on L.A.’s Most Expensive Land : Survival: Weak economy has stalled redevelopment of Crown Hill and pushed more people onto the streets.

Some of the poorest people in Los Angeles are living on the city’s most expensive real estate, on vacant lots near downtown where makeshift cardboard and plastic shelters stand on land worth millions of dollars.

On any given day, nearly 100 homeless men and women live in camps scattered on a hill just across the Harbor Freeway from the skyscrapers of the financial district. Each morning the homeless make fires and cook in battered pots and pans, watching as brokers arrive at the Pacific Stock Exchange.

“(We) got a whole little civilization going on down here,” said Sean, a 40-year-old Vietnam veteran with crystal blue eyes who lives in a lean-to of plastic sheets. “It’s a whole other society with its own code of ethics.”

The growth of the encampments says much about the uncertainties of urban development and recession-era economics. The real estate slump has delayed construction on the lots, which are slated for high-rise office buildings. At the same time, the depressed economy has increased the ranks of the urban poor--an estimated 177,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County.

In another era, the poor may have found shelter in the area’s faded apartments and wood-frame houses--but speculators have razed more than 1,000 housing units in the neighborhood just west of the Civic Center since 1984.

“You’ve displaced thousands of poor people and created nothing in its place,” said Mike Davis, who has written extensively on downtown development. “Every piece of slum housing (in the community) is sacred because it’s the only thing that stands between a poor family and the streets.”

Developers call the vacant property Crown Hill, the name it had at the turn of the century, when it was a neighborhood of elegant Victorian mansions and home to the Southern California elite. Now the homeless call it “the mountain” because all the homes have been knocked down, leaving behind a rugged, grass-covered hillside.

“I’d rather sit on top of this mountain in peace than to be there downtown where everyone is killing themselves,” said Rodney Stephens, 34, who lives in a shelter made of plywood and old mattresses overlooking the Civic Center. “You’ve got a good view, so your mind keeps from locking up.”

Like many other camp residents, Stephens said he came here to find peace and escape the dangers of Skid Row, with its drug-related stabbings and random violence. The Crown Hill camps have the quiet feel of the countryside--even though they are only a mile from downtown welfare offices and shelters the homeless rely on for basic needs.

Women who live in the camp have strung clotheslines between old palm trees that sway in the gentle breeze. At twilight, Stephens sits on an old couch and takes in the majestic panorama of a winter sunset, the lights of the Music Center and downtown skyscrapers shinning bright against a deep orange sky.

“I’m locked into poverty,” Stephens said. “What can $341 (from a monthly welfare check) do for you but keep you in poverty?”

Stephens does not know it, but just one square yard of the land beneath his feet is worth about $900, more than double the amount of his monthly welfare check. He and about 40 other men and women are camped on Crown Hill lots that were sold for $24 million in 1988, according to property records.

Many encampments are scattered across a 7.8-acre parcel owned by Cathay City Development, a Hong Kong-based company. Terry Lee, who manages the property, says Cathay City plans to build a hotel on the land, along with residential, retail and office space.

Those plans have been placed in limbo by the sluggish economy, he said. The office vacancy rate in downtown Los Angeles exceeds 20%, the highest rate in years. Building an office tower makes little economic sense. So for now only homeless people will live on Crown Hill.

“I sympathize with these people because they really have no place to go,” Lee said of the homeless.

Nearly everyone living in the Crown Hill camps can remember when they had a real home with a roof and four walls. Many camp residents lived, until recently, in the tenements just west of downtown near MacArthur Park.

Juan Cruz, a laid-off restaurant cook, became homeless when he could no longer pay the $340 monthly rent on his one-bedroom apartment.

The fateful day came in June. He gathered his belongings and walked five blocks from his Witmer Street apartment to the encampment. Plywood boards and a discarded mattress became his new home.

“I wasn’t used to living outside like this,” said Cruz, a short, stout man of 40. “I felt strange, I was afraid, I didn’t trust anybody. After two or three nights, I felt better. It’s really not much different from living in an apartment.”

Cruz might try to put the best face on his predicament, but his tired eyes and forced smile betray a different truth.

Most of the belongings he salvaged from the apartment are gone, he admits, probably stolen by other homeless people who ransacked his tent when he was off looking for work.

He is alone in this country and none of his relatives in Mexico--including his wife and four children--know that he is homeless. Somewhere in Mexico City, his family is locked in its own struggle to survive without him and without the money he used to send home while he had a regular job.

“If I can find a job like I used to have, then I can get an apartment again and better my situation,” he said in Spanish. “I can send money home again.”

The property owned by Cathay is within a larger redevelopment zone called Central City West, where planners foresee office buildings, hotels and condominiums that will stretch from the Hollywood Freeway south to Olympic Boulevard. It will also include low-income housing to replace some of the units lost after decades of demolitions.

But this year, hardly any projects will move forward.

“Unfortunately, we’re all subject to our free market system and that’s where it’s at right now,” said David Grannis, executive director of Center City West Associates, a property owners association.

Property manager Lee says that until Cathay City breaks ground he feels an obligation to try to keep the property clean and free of the unsightly homeless camps. The effort, he acknowledges, is largely futile.

“When I go up there and talk to them, I ask them to leave,” he said. “They leave. But when I’m gone they come back. You put up a fence, but it’s useless.”

Each fence he puts up gets torn down, with the homeless using the material to build their shelters, he said. Frustrated, he calls inspectors at the city Department of Building and Safety to chase the men and women away.

Thus, every two months or so, the homeless are rousted from their shelters and tents and told to move. They accept this, carrying what belongings they can to a freeway underpass or a Skid Row street corner. A day later they return to the safety and comfort of the old camps. Everyone involved--the homeless, the property owners and city officials--recognizes that this has become a hopeless, meaningless game.

“It’s a Band-Aid approach to the problem,” said David Trujillo, chief field deputy for Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents the area. “We’re just moving the homeless around from one place to another, from one lot to the next.”

Because of the shortage of affordable housing, more people showing up in homeless camps throughout the city, said Patricia Huff, homeless services coordinator for Los Angeles. In the downtown area, even someone working full time can find themselves homeless, she said.

“If a person is gainfully employed and making minimum wage, 60% to 75% of their income is going to rent,” she said. “They can’t afford that. They are evicted and are on the streets.”

Demolition of 10,000 housing units throughout the downtown area has contributed to an escalating spiral of homelessness, said Gary Squier, general manager of the city Housing Preservation and Production Department. The housing shortage has raised the average rent of a one-room apartment to $500, pushing many poor people onto the streets.

This year, new encampments have appeared in Westlake and the neighborhoods just west of downtown Los Angeles, Huff said. In groups of three to 40 people, the homeless have created dozens of small, transient communities.

“It’s a matter of protection and survival,” Huff said. “You don’t really survive on these streets alone for a long period of time.

Just north of Crown Hill, another collection of homeless men and women live on a vast swath of open fields. Here too, dozens of homes have been destroyed to make way for downtown development, creating nearly 50 acres of vacant property stretching from 3rd Street north along the western edge of the Harbor Freeway.

Although vacant, the area still bustles with the activity of dozens of homeless men and women trying to eke out a living. Some make regular trips to the welfare office for checks and food stamps. Others, such as 38-year-old Allen (Cowboy) Stewart, scavenge through the streets for cans, bottles or any other refuse they can put to use.

Ralph Middleton, 50, earns his living by painting. A damp, cavernous concrete building at the base of Crown Hill--once a transformer building for trains of the Pacific Electric Subway--is his studio and temporary shelter. Here he makes abstract oil paintings, which he sells for about $20 each.

“I’m working toward pure expression,” the artist said, describing his work. “I’m looking now at the environment, the city and the dynamics of the city.”

Middleton complains that his work is often interrupted when city employees and police sweep through the area, throwing away his brushes and artist supplies. “You have sentimental things that might be junk to everybody else,” he said. “Those things get lost and you can’t replace them.”

Across 2nd Street lives one of the area’s more affluent homeless residents. Maximo Viera, a 65-year-old retired banquet waiter, lost his Pasadena home three years ago. Now he parks his large motor home on Boylston and other streets north of Crown Hill.

On most days Viera sets up a lawn chair on the pavement, leaning back against his motor home while reading a newspaper. Except for the urban desolation around him, he looks a lot like an elderly tourist on vacation.

“I liked Pasadena, but everywhere I went with my motor home, they told me I had to get out,” he said. Here, amid the vacant lots, no one complains about him. “My son comes every once in a while and brings me a bottle of Scotch because he knows I like it and I can’t afford it.”

Back up on Crown Hill, dusk brings many visitors to the homeless camps. A few men arrive to sell and use crack cocaine, exchanging the drug in quick, furtive transactions.

Elida Tejada, a native of El Salvador, ignores the drug deals and tends to a fire. She squats by a concrete wall, all that is left of the structure that once stood on the property.

“Life is hard here,” the 30-year-old immigrant woman said. “When it rains, all the clothes get wet. Over there (in El Salvador), you think that when you get here everything will be beautiful and life will be easy. But I suffer more here. Over there I never did without things. Here, there are times I think we might not eat.”