Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT DOING BUSINESS ON SKID ROW : ‘It’s Like a Third World Country’

The area I represent is referred to as Skid Row. The business community doesn’t like to call it that because it doesn’t really help business, but that’s what everyone else calls it.

It’s like a Third World country. On the corner of 5th and Crocker streets at any time of the day you can find anywhere from 50 to 100 people milling about. Open trash bins have been turned into bonfires. People have created a sort of tent village. There are tents or cardboard homes leaning against the sides of the buildings. You have people walking by selling drugs. You have prostitutes trying to make money. There is a sense of unreality that you are in the downtown of the city of Los Angeles.

And yet there are thriving businesses down there; you have the Flower Mart, the Produce Mart; almost all of the seafood that’s distributed within the county of Los Angeles comes from this area. This is a neighborhood that creates more than $7 billion in gross income and employs more than 40,000 people. This isn’t an area that I think the city wants to neglect. Look what happened to Detroit and other major cities that have neglected and ignored their downtown businesses: They’ve left and the downtown has turned into a ghost town.

And yet that might happen here. The homeless problem and everything associated with it--the crime, the drugs--makes it nearly impossible to do business. You can’t really bring clients into the neighborhood. You have to pay your employees hazard pay. Even trying to get people down for an interview--they don’t even want to stop and get out of their car! And you have to have your employees, especially female employees, escorted to their cars.

You watch people day in and day out defecating on your doorstep, urinating on your doorstep, just walking around, obviously deranged, yelling at you from across the street, maybe waving something--maybe it’s nothing more than their hand, but it’s intimidating.

And the majority of people that work in the seafood industry are women. They come in at two, three in the morning, usually on the bus, and have to walk to their facility when it’s still dark out.

One of our board members was recently hit over the head--I think he got 12 stitches--by a homeless individual wielding some kind of bat. It’s very difficult to justify asking employees to come in day in and day out and deal with all this.

We’ve had business people come up to someone sitting on their property and ask them to move along and the homeless people on the sidewalk have said: “Well, we’re going to burn down your building tonight.” The rights of the few are taking over the needs of the many. We have to start looking at what the community and the city as a whole need to do to better themselves.

It’s gotten to the point where these businesses are looking very seriously at other cities. Cities like the City of Commerce or the City of Industry are providing a huge incentive for people to leave. S. E. Rycoff (a restaurant supplier) is a perfect example--they moved to Orange County and took about 1,000 employees and $2 million to $3 million a year in tax money with them.

And the way the city and county have dealt with this has been unfair. We have been the homeless dumping ground for the entire city of Los Angeles and the county as well. There’s no other Skid Row in the county, except for homeless in Santa Monica.

We believe the city’s homeless problem has been dumped on it by the bigger businesses in the western part of downtown. The large white-collar businesses there needed the homeless cleaned out, so the politicians and the bureaucrats dealt with it by moving the problems east. You’re not going to starve in Skid Row. You can eat three or four free meals a day there. The city and the county have concentrated all of their services--whether it be alcohol rehab, drug rehab, low-income housing--in a five- or 10-block area. Most of the $300 million that this region has spent on the homeless in recent years has gone into this one compact area, encouraging the homeless to be centralized.

Instead, the homeless problem and its solutions need to be decentralized. We need to reintroduce these people back to “normal society” because Skid Row is not a neighborhood in which people recuperate; they stay there.

With Mayor (Richard Riordan) speaking about the importance of business and (President) Clinton talking about the need for industrial manufacturing jobs, they should wake up to the fact that this is one of the city’s biggest industrial areas--if not the biggest--and they should be finding ways to reinvigorate the neighborhood. It doesn’t need a lot, it just needs to be treated like the rest of the city.

Unfortunately, the business community is always perceived as being heartless and uncaring on this issue. But we’re the ones who have to deal with this every day. And after years of this you ask, “Why is this occurring?” My tax dollars should be solving this problem.

It should not be OK that people are living on sidewalks. It shouldn’t be OK to the county reps, it shouldn’t be OK to the City Council. It’s not OK.

In Downtown L.A., four blocks away from City Hall, six blocks away from the County Hall of Supervisors you have a Skid Row that is worse than a Third World country. And that’s not OK for the United States of America.

Tracy Lovejoy can be reached at (213) 766-6010, extension 23.