Restore Skid Row’s Portables

The ragged line of men waiting on Industrial Street for Midnight Mission’s afternoon soup run had no alternative. Without a toilet near, the men were forced to use the public street as their private restroom.

It’s a common enough sight--a homeless man urinating in full view of the city’s lunchtime crowd. Everyone pretends not to notice. Some mutter, “animal.” No one takes the man back to the office to use the restroom. On skid row, the stench of urine- and fecal-stained sidewalks presses into nostrils and makes everyone want to vomit.

It is not surprising that in 1997 the city’s Bureau of Engineering Stormwater Management Division found fecal coliform levels on sampled skid row streets to be as high as three times that found in raw sewage.

So high is the bacteria count that, rather than letting water from skid row street cleanings flow into storm drains, Public Works now vacuums the water and dumps it into the sewer system, where it will receive sewage treatment.

However, few streets and alleys are cleaned by the city. When it rains or businesses hose excrement into streets, fecal bacteria is coupled with organic matter already in storm drains, creating what one city engineer calls a “caldron of brewing bacteria that flows each day to the L.A. River and then out to our beaches.”

Because of the serious public health risk, 26 portable toilets were placed on skid row in July 1994 after an eight-year struggle by skid row activists. Then, seven months ago, most of the toilets were removed from their assigned locations throughout skid row’s 50 square blocks and centralized on a few blocks in the middle of the area. Nineteen were on three blocks alone.

Under pressure from skid row’s business association, which would like the homeless to just go away, a city department had unilaterally repositioned the toilets, ignoring the Board of Public Works’ regulations governing removal of any toilet from its designated site.

The Board of Public Works then likewise bowed to political pressure from newly elected Los Angeles Councilman Nick Pacheco and the area business association and refused to return the toilets.

Having no options, some of us rented a truck and returned the toilets ourselves.

Continuing to cave in to business interests, the Board of Public Works voted Sept. 17 to establish a task force to look at possibly eliminating the 26 portable toilets and finding an alternative that is acceptable to area businesses.

A week later, Associate Zoning Administrator Daniel Green called for the removal of all skid row toilets because drug users use them to shoot up in. That the toilets also are used for the purpose for which they are intended as evidenced by the fact that they are so full of human waste each day that the city has considered emptying them twice a day instead of once does not interest him. Eliminating the toilets will not affect drug abuse or end homelessness. It will just pollute the beaches.

Businesses on skid row always have opposed the toilet program. Yet these same businesses refuse to make their own bathrooms available to the area’s homeless and demand that police ticket homeless people who urinate in public.

The toilets were placed there because of compelling health and social need. For the Board of Public Works to consider eliminating or reducing what is already a woefully inadequate supply of toilets would mean that it is knowingly and intentionally exacerbating what its own staff identifies to be a serious public health risk.

It took eight years of relentless organizing before the 26 toilets were placed five years ago. That battle was fought by a handful of skid row activists concerned about the humane treatment of this city’s homeless.

If the number of toilets is not increased to the 60 or more needed to accommodate the area’s estimated daily fecal waste, and if additional toilets are not placed in similarly needy areas such as Broadway, the battle is likely to be joined by environmental activists and a public that is fed up with polluted beaches.