Homeless Live, Shoot Drugs Across From L.A. City Hall

A small drug village of mostly homeless men has sprung up like a wild mushroom on an abandoned lot in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall and the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

“I think it’s funny when I shoot dope and look at the court building and City Hall,” said Jeff, 34, a self-described heroin user for 14 years who bared his arm and prepared to seek a vein while gazing at the city’s most venerable institutions.

“It’s a beautiful view, and it’s more beautiful when I’m loaded. This is my favorite place to shoot up.”

Neither homelessness nor drug abuse is new in downtown Los Angeles. On any given night, an estimated 41,000 people roam city streets or sleep in shelters. Virtually overnight, gutted lots give way to cardboard townships. It’s like an urban tide: Homeless move in, officials raze their impromptu towns, homeless move out.

But this camp underscores how invisible the homeless have become--that they can live, smoke dope and shoot heroin next door to the established powers of the city.

And the special proximity is not lost on camp inhabitants, who say the locale makes their dwellings quieter and more secure.

“This is the safest place, that’s why we are here,” said one 55-year-old resident.

Gesturing toward City Hall, Criminal Courts and the Los Angeles Times and Times Mirror buildings across the street, Henry, 66, a former tailor, said proudly, “We got respectable neighbors here.”

Such encampments are illegal, and to keep from being kicked out, inhabitants of this village say they have crafted rules: no truly unruly behavior, no panhandling in the immediate vicinity and no breaking into the Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and other cars in the parking lot sandwiched between the Criminal Courts Building and the encampment.

“We don’t be bumming or begging people here. People are trying to catch a bus or go to work, and it just don’t look right,” Henry said. “And if [camp residents] get too loud or fight, they got to go.”

Henry, a short, gentle man who boasts of doing 500 push-ups daily, walks several blocks along Broadway before he starts asking for handouts. He doesn’t need much money; $6 a day covers the cost of beer and an occasional bar of soap, and allows him to chip in for snacks when his neighbors pool resources. He eats most meals at skid row’s Midnight Mission.

The predominantly Latino residents have other rules, too. They severely limit who can stay in their camp: They allow whites, but they exclude blacks. “This is just like a little town,” Henry said.

Shielded by a gray board fence, the camp at 1st Street between Broadway and Spring streets cannot be seen from the sidewalk. The best views of the lot, jointly owned by the county and state, are from the windows of the tall buildings that tower over it.

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Entrances to the camp are through the holes in a wire fence by the parking lot. Some residents on one recent morning were friendly, offering to show off their homes on the chipped concrete plaza, the remains of a state office building. Others were not. After one man began to shoot up, several inhabitants, fearful of such an act becoming publicized, chased out the visitors. In ensuing visits, residents sketched out the sometimes hazy tales of everyday lives.

The camp--20 lean-tos of wood, cardboard and plastic sheets--has divisions: Crack cocaine smokers live to the east toward City Hall, heroin shooters to the west toward the county law library. They don’t mingle much.

There is no running water. Beneath the camp sit two stories of what used to be an underground parking garage. Few people go to the second, rat-infested level; it has no light.

The first underground level is used as a latrine. The floor of the enormous cavern is dotted with human excrement, patrolled by thick clouds of flies. Getting high down there would mean drug-tortured nightmares, camp residents say.

Sergio, a 38-year-old former truck driver with dark, wolfish eyes, lives on the crack cocaine side of camp. He built one of a series of hovels that cling like lichen to the 3-foot cement wall that once bounded the plaza. The primitive lean-to next to Sergio’s bears a sign that reads: Hogar Dulce Hogar, or Home Sweet Home.

Twice a week, Sergio earns $25 a day putting fliers on the doorknobs of homes in suburban L.A. He also makes a little money renting out his lean-to. In exchange for $5 or a $5 rock of cocaine, Sergio said, he allows others to use his home to shoot or smoke the drug of their choice. But he is strictly a crack cocaine user.

“When I take my hit, it’s like a burst of energy,” said Sergio, who said he began smoking crack 10 years ago. “Nobody likes dope, but you get under the hand of the drug.”

Sergio, like most of the other residents, declined to use his full name, fearful of being arrested. Some were afraid that a newspaper story would mean being displaced. “I lived in a place like this in Portland, then they wrote about it and we had to move,” said one man.

Not everybody uses dope, residents say. But when a reporter walked through the plaza, men sprawled against the wall came to life, their hands skittering like roaches, covering up unsheathed needles and paper packets.

“About 70 percent use drugs,” said David, 36, who suffers chronic liver failure and is under doctor’s orders to stay free of alcohol and other drugs. He looks 15 years older than his age. His gaunt body shook uncontrollably though the temperature was in the 70s and he wore a jacket.

Some people, like Henry, embrace camp life. Others, like David, say they are ashamed of it.

David is a newcomer and one of a handful of Anglos in the encampment, having lived there three weeks, he said. The Orange County native said he recently returned to Los Angeles after visiting his mother in Canada. He is waiting for his Social Security check--a payment that he hopes will enable him to move out. It’s a common refrain at the village, where it’s better to say you’re waiting for a check than to admit this is your life.

Does his mother, a missionary, know where he’s staying?

“What mother would want to see her son living here? I have a very good mother; I wouldn’t want anybody to know I’m living here. I’m not real proud of where I’m at right now,” said the former mortgage broker.

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The place that David now calls home has long been one of the city’s embarrassing eyesores. Twenty years ago, the 13-story state office building was leveled after being declared unsafe from ravages of the Sylmar earthquake.

In recent years, county supervisors entertained grandiose plans for the site. But after waiting more than six years for developer Raffi Cohen to construct twin office towers, a child care center and a 1,200-space parking garage, county supervisors decided last fall to rescind their agreement with Cohen, who had fallen more than $1.3 million behind in rent and property taxes and done little to the lot.

County officials still hope to one day build on the land, working with a private developer or city officials, but such a project is several years away, said Chief Administrator Sally Reed. Officials plan to clean the weed-choked, debris-strewn lot, and they are considering the possibility of using the land to expand nearby parking facilities, she said.

“It will be cleaned up and look better than it looks today,” said Reed, who acknowledged that the homeless periodically live on the lot. “That’s why the facility needs to be secured.”

For city officials, homelessness is an intractable problem, a seemingly never-ending cycle of unmet needs, experts say.

“The authorities go out and try to provide alternatives . . . Then the camps spring up again after a few weeks. It’s a cat and mouse thing,” said Ruth Schwartz, executive director of the Shelter Partnership, which has conducted studies of Los Angeles’ homeless. “For every person we get off the street, somebody else falls out of housing.”

In the eyes of experts, Henry, who has been homeless for 10 years, is hard-core.

As a camp resident for eight months, Henry is one of the village elders. For him, the cluster of hovels has become home, a place far more peaceful than the encampment by the freeway at Figueroa Street, where he used to live. It’s also devoid of the fights and violence so common at homeless shelters, he said. In part, he believes that’s because the camp is not racially mixed.

“Here, nobody bothers you, and you don’t bother nobody,” said Henry, who moved to California from Texas 27 years ago. “Everybody takes care of each other.”

Henry, who suffers epilepsy and high blood pressure, says he doesn’t do illegal drugs. “I’m an alcoholic, that’s what I am,” he said. (The needle marks on his tattooed chest, he explained, are because a hospital nurse had trouble finding a vein.)

Henry doesn’t like other residents to talk of drugs before a visitor. Lies, lies, he said, dismissing such chatter.

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The camp is also a place where outsiders can purchase drugs.

Jeff stays at the camp when he cannot bear being too far from the drug that long ago claimed his soul: heroin.

Last Tuesday, with his wife waiting at the wheel of the car and their baby crying softly in the back seat, Jeff, his blond hair tousled, ran into the camp. He needed to buy drugs and shoot up, he said.

“I push my wife and baby aside all the time,” he said.

With a reporter and photographer standing nearby and City Hall as his backdrop, Jeff prepared to inject his drugs into his veins.

“Get out of here! Get out of here!” screamed one camp inhabitant, his gray hair streaming to his shoulders, waving his arms wildly as he chased Jeff, a reporter and a photographer from the village.

Jeff’s wife silently applauded.

“Maybe we won’t have to come here anymore,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Laurie. “I remember when my husband was energetic, full of life and ideas. He was fun-loving, spontaneous and had a great sense of humor. It’s like all of that has been stolen.”

The next morning was Henry’s laundry day. The elderly man scrubbed his shirts (purchases from Goodwill), a cap and socks in a bucket of soapy water. He hung the two shirts inside out on homemade hangers, tight rolls of newspaper with strings tied from either end so they form a hanger. Then Henry stuffed his cap with newspaper, so it would retain its shape while it dried in the hot sun.

Some of the camp inhabitants rent lockers downtown for $1 a day to store their more valued possessions, such as nice clothing. Henry doesn’t bother. He keeps what he calls his “Sunday pants,” a black pair of threadbare slacks, inside his lean-to. Pointing to a high-rise near City Hall, Henry explained that one recent Sunday, he put on his best trousers and took the elevator to the top floor of the hotel. There, he sat and read a newspaper. “They have a beautiful garden,” he said impishly.

Henry likes to watch people going to work in the morning. He likes the bustle of activity on the sidewalks outside the encampment. Sometimes, though, it makes him wistful.

“I wish I had a job,” he said. “If your dream don’t come true, you better hope your nightmares don’t come true.”