Scavengers, Homeless Scrap Over Scarce Skid Row Boxes
The scavengers and homeless who eke out an existence from the grimy alleys and sidewalks of downtown’s Skid Row are fighting over empty boxes.
“Everyday it’s an argument for cardboard,” said security guard Jose Medina, who patrols some of the area’s wholesale import businesses that flood trash bins with discarded shipping cartons.
In one of Los Angeles’ most desperate districts, castoff paper boxes are the lifeblood of a sub-economy. Here, cardboard cartons provide shelter from the elements. They serve as fuel for fires and as a place to sit. They are vessels for accumulated possessions. And they are a coveted form of currency--a means to a meal.
Partly because there are more homeless and partly because of bad economic times, these cardboard carcasses have become the objects of frantic competition. Droves of trash-pickers, hoping to earn a few dollars at a recycling center, are vying for the container scraps with legions of homeless.
“One goes to take it,” Medina said. “Then someone else says: ‘It’s mine!’ ”
With the demand higher than ever, there is a new problem--dwindling supply. Asian-operated toy and gift import businesses poured into Skid Row in the 1980s, feeding the river of cardboard. But with the recession and a nearly saturated market, the industry is not expanding as it once did.
“Every day there’s more competition” for boxes, said Joseph Gabriel, 50, who sleeps in a heap of cartons outside the Midnight Mission, a magnet for the homeless on the Central City’s ragged east edge. “You have to get there early. Everyone is looking in the alleys.”
Among those in on the hunt is Mike Morales. The East Los Angeles pensioner is struggling to make ends meet on a fixed income. He cruises Skid Row in a battered red pickup and, on a good day, he can stuff $6 or $7 worth of cardboard into the bed of his truck, right up to the roof of his camper shell. More and more, however, his competitors have already picked the trash bins clean. “Many people, many people,” Morales said.
The increase in scavengers such as Morales has created a small niche for middlemen such as Willie Anderson, who has lived on the streets for four years. Each morning, Anderson gathers up boxes along Boyd Street, where bleary-eyed street people often abandon their sleeping spots to wander off in search of food.
Anderson and a friend crush and stack the cartons, then wait for the scavengers to arrive with their pickups. He said they usually “give us one or two dollars.” Every afternoon, the street people begin searching for fresh boxes, and by evening 20 or 30 end up on Anderson’s block, with a new supply of cartons.
Some try to corner the cardboard market.
In an alley lined with trash bins off 4th Street, scavenger Osvaldo Lopez monitors his fine-tuned cardboard collection operation from a perch on an old bar stool. Grizzled and 62, Lopez supervises a young runner, whom he pays a few dollars to patrol the alley, up and down, snatching boxes the instant they hit the bins.
It is a minor marvel of recycling efficiency. By early afternoon the bed of Lopez’s sagging yellow pickup is piled 15 feet high with flattened cardboard, and the runner is using a ladder to stack more on top. Ten or 12 hours of this will bring Lopez $25 to $35 dollars at the recycling center--not much by most people’s standards, but a relative fortune on Skid Row.
Such tactics feed jealousies, which are exacerbated by language barriers and ethnic rivalries between the homeless population, which is heavily African-American, the Latino pickup truck scavengers and the Asian-American shop owners.
Some African-American street people complain bitterly that Asian-American businesses are steering cardboard to the Latinos. They also resent the Latinos, who possess the trucks needed to gather the cardboard and haul it to distant recycling centers. In addition, some scavengers grab cardboard boxes that the homeless leave unattended, even ever so briefly.
“You find (a box), you sleep in it and they come in the morning and pick it up!” hollers Tracy La Mar, his anger rising as he sits in one box outside the mission and helps guard a row of other cartons. “No foreigner can come and tell me what to do.”
Some on Skid Row say there is really no one to blame for the troubles in the cardboard economy. Everyone is just trying to get by. “It’s just first-come, first-served,” said Gabriel, one of the homeless sleeping on the sidewalk outside the mission. “Everything is business.”
