Skid Row Toilets

* Re “Befouled Businesses Near L.A.’s Skid Row Seek Relief in the Law,” May 30: Rather than ticket the homeless $1,000 and send them to jail for a costly six-month stay, the City Council should declare it illegal for the homeless to eat or drink. Burials are cheaper than the proposed draconian sanctions.

The very businesses demanding a law against public urination have opposed every effort to place toilets on skid row. They signed petitions and lobbied the council to remove the woefully inadequate number placed in 1994 after an eight-year battle.

The 26 toilets are used so much that they are cleaned twice a day. We don’t need $250,000 toilets throughout skid row’s 50 square blocks. What we need is a fourfold increase in the number of toilets.

ALICE CALLAGHAN

Las Familias del Pueblo

Los Angeles

* I am a 17-year-old activist who spent a recent morning with Ted Hayes touring the Central City East homeless encampments. I don’t think I have ever witnessed more tragic and painful examples of human decay. The shocking images of despondent faces, hundreds of cardboard boxes constructed as protection and privacy from surrounding homeless, piles of filthy debris and the ever-present stench of urine and feces will stay with me forever.

Enacting a urination and defecation ordinance with fines and jail sentences for the homeless is simplistic and futile. What is needed is simple: toilets.

As a society, how do we confront this dehumanizing situation? Law enforcement is not the answer. We need to place hundreds of toilets throughout the city and form a coalition of homeless cleanup crews to keep them sanitary.

ASHLEY PETERSON

Los Angeles