Shelter Beds Stay Empty as Homeless Resist Confinement
For months, police have been ticketing the homeless on skid row for blocking sidewalks and jaywalking. They’ve been asking more homeless people for IDs and taking those with outstanding warrants to jail.
When they do this, officers remind them that right down the street, there usually are beds available in the area’s six homeless shelters.
It’s one of skid row’s most troubling dichotomies: Many homeless people--due either to mental illness or sheer stubbornness--prefer to sleep in tents, cardboard boxes or on the cold sidewalk.
Some refuse shelters because they don’t want to conform to zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policies curfews or attend prayer sessions. Some fear being robbed or attacked by other homeless. And others just want their freedom, said Leonard Schneiderman, professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Public Policy.
Police, who said they began rousting the homeless because of an increase in violent crime, said shelter resistance leads to more violence: Outdoors, the homeless are preyed on by criminals. Drug use, drug sales and prostitution are rampant.
This year, four homeless people have been murdered on skid row, a 50-block district east of downtown where about 11,000 live in cheap hotels or on the street. Another 32 homeless people have been victims of rape or sex crimes, police said.
The Central Division, which began tracking the number of beds available each night on skid row, said that between 50 and 300 beds in the area’s shelters are open each night. Officers have begun distributing brochures to the homeless with phone numbers and information on shelters and missions.
But they can’t persuade people like Ted Ivan, 39, to sleep inside.
“You can get stabbed in a shelter,” Ivan said. “You end up getting into fights. I would rather sleep outdoors, and I don’t want to be in by 8 o’clock.”
Ivan lives on Industrial Street, in a makeshift tent constructed of black plastic tarps. Nearly 50 similar dwellings line the street, with each tent housing three or four people.
He lifted a tarp and revealed 10 donated blankets and a collection of clothes and cookware.
“I like it here,” he said. “It’s freedom. I don’t got no responsibility.”
Said Sgt. James MacDonald, who usually finds about 300 homeless people outdoors when he begins his skid row patrol shift at 4 a.m.: “Wherever you go, there’s going to be societal rules. These people just don’t want to follow the rules. They want to do their own thing.”
Schneiderman said the anxiety and suspicion of the many mentally ill homeless exacerbate the problem. “Their life experience with other people has not always been nurturing.”
Twenty-three percent of homeless women and 19% of homeless men in downtown Los Angeles are mentally ill, according to a study by Perri Johnson of the Downtown Mental Health Center. Other studies have estimated the proportion of mentally ill people at up to half.
Schneiderman believes that no-drug rules drive too many homeless people away. “Every time you have a shelter that has a zero-tolerance policy, it is in effect setting up an eligibility standard for them to get into it,” he said. “It’s sort of like saying there’s a shelter, but the prerequisite you need to get into it is to be well, and that’s not really responsive to the population we call homeless.”
Johnson’s study found that 75% of homeless men and 54% of homeless women downtown are substance abusers.
Ezell Williams of the Los Angeles Mission agreed that such rules may be a deterrent.
“A lot of people don’t come into shelters and are on the streets because they have a problem dealing with authority and rules anyway,” he said.
Some Prefer to Sit in Day Room
The Los Angeles Mission can house 480 people, Williams said. Shelter is provided for five days at a time, but people must stay through the evening. They must check their belongings before entering the shelter, check in by 5:30 p.m., conform to the zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policy, and attend a chapel service.
Williams said the shelter is well used, but between the first and the 10th of the month there are usually more beds than usual available because that is the time when people receive Social Security or general relief checks.
“They may have money to buy food or a couple of nights in a hotel,” he said.
There are more than 1,200 beds among the six shelters in skid row. On Dec. 8, a Friday, police records showed that available beds ranged from one at Volunteers of America to 296 at the Union Rescue Mission.
Liz Mooradian of the Union Rescue Mission, which has 580 beds, said that many homeless prefer to use the shelter’s day room, which has chairs and tables and seats up to 400 men and 300 women, because they don’t want to check their bags.
“Some of the men, and we do have a couple hundred of them every night, will sit in chairs all night long,” she said.
The Union Rescue Mission also has a zero-tolerance policy, with an 8 p.m. curfew. Women’s beds are almost always full, but men’s beds don’t always max out, Mooradian said.
“They can come in and have a meal or a shower and leave,” she said. “But once they come in and spend the night, they are here for the night. And some may not want to do that because they want to engage in odd behaviors.”
Michelle Giles, 23 and homeless for a year, said she prefers living in a tent made out of a blue plastic tarp tied to a fence on Industrial Street rather than a shelter.
Giles lived in a shelter once. “It just wasn’t comfortable,” she said. She didn’t like being crammed in a room with 200 people, she was afraid people would steal from her, and she didn’t want to participate in rehabilitation programs, she said.
“It’s dangerous [on the street], but we all look out for each other. We share food. We share clothes,” she said. “It’s like family out here.”
Ted Ivan puts it more bluntly: “I’m a grown man; what are they going to tell a grown man to do for? I can take care of myself. I’m staying out of trouble and nobody is messing with me.”
