5 Skid Row Hotels Are Ordered to Clean Up : Security: Zoning official tells owners to crack down on drug dealing and prostitution, and to add guards. Businesses say action is unfair.

A city zoning administrator has ordered a massive cleanup of hotels in downtown’s skid row and admonished politicians and charities that conditions in the dilapidated neighborhood have been allowed to fester for far too long.

In a stinging series of orders, associate zoning administrator Daniel Green advised the owners of five hotels that they must crack down on drug dealing and prostitution, hire security guards, install video monitoring equipment, increase outside lighting and undergo police counseling on how to deter crime.

Green this week declared the Ross, Lyndon, Simone and San Julian hotels public nuisances, citing the damning testimony of neighbors, police and fire officials. Property owners have until Oct. 4 to appeal the decisions before they become final. The owners of the fifth hotel, the Madison, previously agreed to abide by new terms and it was not found to be a nuisance.

A few of the orders are controversial, including requirements that some of the hotels fingerprint and photograph all guests and visitors who venture beyond the lobby. Another condition for some forbids room keys to be taken outside the building.

“It’s ridiculous and outrageous,” said Jim Bonar, executive director of Skid Row Housing Trust, which operates the Simone Hotel. The nonprofit trust is the second-largest operator of single-room units in the city, with 17 buildings and 1,000 rooms.

“We offer dignified, beautiful, permanent housing for people on skid row and manage it well,” Bonar said. “It appears he has taken whatever he has found at any of the sites and attempted to paint everyone with a broad brush. We will refute his findings and show they are wrong.”

The abatement orders follow an unusual series of public hearings in August involving 12 hotels and five markets and bars that were alleged by nearby residents to be crime magnets.

Decisions on the 12 remaining establishments are expected in coming weeks, and many skid row activists expect them to include at least some of the same restrictions.

City officials say that the hearings kicked off one of the most wide-ranging efforts to corral crime in a specific Los Angeles neighborhood. And Green noted that prior to the public hearings, not a single nuisance abatement case in the 50-square-block skid row area had ever been initiated by the city.

His abatement orders, Green said, are “an unprecedented and dramatic effort to change the laissez-faire attitude that prevails in the area.”

But Green said his actions are just the tip of the iceberg. He challenged city leaders and charity providers to reassess the needs of skid row and offered several suggestions: more police, no more portable toilets on the sidewalks, security guards at meal feeding locations, a ban on sales of single cans of liquor, and rethinking the policy of concentrating so many needy people and service providers in such a small area.

Green said he hopes that his opinions will serve to jump-start a rehabilitation of part of downtown Los Angeles where more families are living and more people are working in the toy, flower, food and garment industries.

The abatement orders represent a major victory for the mostly poor residents of the area who had complained that the daily affronts to their quality of life were virtually ignored by city officials.

Green agreed, pointing out in his written comments that behavior “in and adjacent to some of the nuisance businesses would never be tolerated in Hancock Park, Beverly Hills or most other communities.”

Zelenne Cardenas, director of United Coalition East, a skid row drug abuse prevention program that led the protests against the hotels and markets, said her group will have a party to celebrate the outcome of the first cases.

“We’re thrilled,” she said. “Although we don’t see this as the fix of all social ills in skid row, it is the first attempt to create some standards for how businesses operate.”

The conditions set by Green vary with each establishment. Some must provide 24-hour security guards. Others are proscribed from renting rooms for less than one week at a time. Most are also required to erase graffiti, clear trash daily and dispose of needles and syringes properly.

Some hotel owners have argued that they are being blamed for crimes outside their establishments and over which they have no control.