Skid Row Area to Get Toilets for Homeless

Two dozen portable toilets will be installed around Los Angeles’ Skid Row as early as next week, but the pattern of the potty installations will make more sense to political insiders than to the homeless men and women who are supposed to use them.

Under a compromise approved Monday by the city Board of Public Works, the long-sought public toilets will be placed on sidewalks around the 9th City Council District, where Councilwoman Rita Walters supports the program, but not in the 14th District, where Councilman Richard Alatorre opposes it.

The action makes the bulk of Downtown eligible for the $53,000 six-month trial program, except for an Alatorre-represented swath that thrusts into the heart of Downtown from roughly 7th Street south to Olympic Boulevard and from Hill Street east into Alatorre’s Eastside district.

To Alatorre and his staff, the exclusion of the sidewalk toilets is a reasonable response to complaints from business people, who say the unsupervised privies will make their troubled neighborhood even less desirable. But Walters and her aides called the compromise “absurd,” saying the toilets should improve public health, along with the look and smell, of all of downtrodden Skid Row.

Monday’s vote by the Board of Public Works culminates a struggle that began in 1992 when a nonprofit agency, Las Familias del Pueblo, tried to place toilets on sidewalks.

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Then-Mayor Tom Bradley blocked that move and instead opted for a program to keep a few permanent toilets in nonprofit offices open 24 hours a day. But homeless advocates say the problem of public urination and defecation has continued, and Alice Callaghan of Las Familias del Pueblo has continued to push for the program.

Advocates who felt the toilet problem was not hitting bureaucrats close enough to home staged a four-hour blockade of a City Hall men’s room in May. The protest succeeded in getting Mayor Richard Riordan’s office and others to focus on the public toilet question.

The final details approved Monday allow business owners adjacent to the toilets to lodge protests about designated locations. The Board of Public Works will hear such appeals and decide whether to install the toilets.

The compromise prohibits toilets on public property in Alatorre’s district, but allows as many as three of the outhouses on private lots where owners gave consent.

“To put the toilets on the sidewalks without supervision would maximize the danger to the homeless and to the adjoining business people,” said Bonnie Sue Brody, an Alatorre aide.

Brody also told the Board of Public Works that Skid Row business owners already struggle with administrative regulations and should not be forced to attend public hearings in an effort to remove the toilets.

Alatorre “doesn’t want them to have these near their properties and to be an attraction for the kinds of crimes and other problems we have already seen in that part of the 14th District,” Brody said.

Charles Woo, president of a business group called the Central City East Assn., said hearings to remove unwanted toilets would “create an undo hardship on business people” and are not in keeping with Riordan’s pro-business agenda.

Some representatives of agencies providing service to the homeless also opposed the program. Mike Neely, director of the Homeless Outreach Program, said the toilets could become hiding places for “predators who want to prey on our more fragile population.” He argued for more permanent facilities.

Callaghan said that most social services agencies and many businesses are ready to try the portable outhouses, which are similar to those used at construction sites. “It may be a disaster, but this is a pilot project and we at least have to try something,” she said. “No one has come up with anything better.”

She said the loss of Alatorre’s district does only partial damage to the program. Five toilets that had been planned for the 14th District will be moved across San Pedro and 5th streets and into the 9th District. With three more toilets going on private property in the 14th, the net loss will be about half a dozen toilets, she said.

But Walters still was vexed by the political distribution of the privies, which she hadn’t been advised of in advance.

“I’ve heard people suggest that more people will come because of the toilets,” Walters said. “Well, the streets are already full of homeless people. People say drug dealing and prostitution will come, but there is already horrendous drug dealing and prostitution on the Row.”

What will change, Walters said, is that “streets and alleys will be cleaner and people will have a place to go to the toilet.”