Befouled Businesses Near L.A.’s Skid Row Seek Relief in the Law

Wander a few blocks southeast of Los Angeles City Hall and you’ll catch a briny whiff from the seafood processing plants. But it’s a pungent, distinctly human odor that troubles the business owners of Central City East.

Jammed into a few square miles alongside the city’s highest concentration of homeless people, the industrial district surrounding skid row long has doubled as a toilet for the down and out.

But business owners only recently discovered why few people are prosecuted for relieving themselves in public. There’s no law that says you can’t. At least not on the books in Los Angeles.

“We were stunned,” said Tracey Lovejoy, executive director of the Central City East Assn., a business organization representing the gritty but bustling area. “Like everyone else, we just assumed it was illegal.”

The group is now lobbying for a city ordinance to make public urination and defecation misdemeanors, punishable by fines as high as $1,000 and up to six months in jail.

The proposed legislation has angered homeless advocates and revived a decade-old battle over portable toilets on skid row. Critics question the wisdom of tying up police officers, courts and jail cells to punish indigent people for whom a fine is no deterrent.

Even the business owners admit that laws alone aren’t the solution. But with pressure on the city to polish its act in advance of the Democratic National Convention in August, supporters are incredulous that Los Angeles has stricter bathroom laws for pets than it does for people.

How is it possible that the municipal code fines dog owners who don’t scoop up after Fido, but says nothing about human beings who relieve themselves on the street?

Turns out that while many cities have crafted municipal legislation to combat the practice, Los Angeles traditionally has relied on state pollution laws instead. One old standby is California Penal Code Section 375, which prohibits illegal dumping of any “liquid, gaseous or solid substance” that is “nauseous, sickening, irritating or offensive.”

But because those statutes refer to bodily functions only euphemistically at best, some city prosecutors have concluded that state lawmakers never intended environmental codes to apply to bathroom behavior. The upshot is few arrests or citations. Not to mention some potentially odd enforcement inequities.

For example, state law does explicitly prohibit urination and defecation on public transit. Thus it’s easier for police to cite people who relieve themselves inside city buses than outside of them.

“Our hands are kind of tied,” said Sgt. Silva Atwater of the LAPD’s Central Division. “It has gotten to the point where we are really reaching for straws.”

It’s the stuff of scatological satire, but it’s no joke to business owners in Los Angeles’ urban core, who recognize that quality-of-life issues have been critical to other cities’ effort to revitalize their crumbling centers.

New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani gained national attention by cracking down on squeegee men, panhandlers and graffiti taggers. So-called business improvement districts, or BIDs, with their merchant-funded security guards and sanitation crews, have rejuvenated aging commercial strips nationwide.

Balancing the Needs of Businesses, Citizens

Los Angeles business owners have embraced the concept as well, using BIDs to nurture creeping redevelopment in areas such as Hollywood and downtown. But they contend that their cleanup efforts are only part of the equation. While many are sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, they say the city must get serious about tackling nuisance crime if these areas are to return to their former glory.

“Clearly we need to balance the social service needs of our citizens with the economic needs of our businesses,” said Kerry Morrison, executive director of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. “But behavior like public urination works against everything we’re trying to accomplish down here. . . . We’d welcome an ordinance with some teeth in it.”

Nowhere is the drumbeat louder than Central City East, an old-economy cluster of food, flower and toy wholesalers, small manufacturers and warehouses that has become ground zero for the city’s potty politics.

Social services have become so concentrated in the district that a single half-square-mile area now contains 66 missions, welfare hotels, soup kitchens, clinics and shelters. What hasn’t kept pace is public restrooms. Just 26 city-funded portable privies serve an area frequented by an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 homeless people.

Not surprisingly, the product of those messy mathematics winds up in the surrounding streets, alleys and sidewalks. Public urination is practiced so openly as to be unremarkable to those who dwell there.

“In front of God, the police and everybody,” said Pat, a wizened woman wearing a black stocking cap and an expression of resignation as a man urinated near her makeshift shelter on 5th Street. “That’s how they do down here.”

City crews hose down sections of the area daily, creating runoff so septic that it must be sucked up with special vacuum trucks to keep it from escaping down street drains into the ocean. Tests showed that a single 3.5-ounce sample of this runoff contained 1.3 billion fecal coliform bacteria, the highest level city biologist John Dorsey had ever encountered.

“It’s a serious public health concern,” said Dorsey, assistant storm-water manager with the Bureau of Sanitation.

Buying Disinfectant by the Barrel

The area’s business community is now demanding more from the city than a daily dousing. Buoyed by a shipshape economy and a wave of enterprising Asian entrepreneurs, the neighborhood’s land values and employment are rising. Property owners in late 1998 banded together to fund their own BID-operated security and sanitation teams.

That’s how they discovered that public urination is essentially unenforceable in Los Angeles. Working with other downtown business organizations, they convinced law enforcement to craft explicit new language for the municipal code. That proposed urination and defecation ordinance is now wending its way through the council’s committee process. It is expected to reach the full council for a vote later this year.

That day can’t come soon enough for business owner Jess Markey, a third-generation printer who operates a rambling facility on a tough stretch of Crocker Street. Before the BID cleaning crews started making their rounds, he dispatched an employee armed with rubber gloves, a scoop and a high-pressure hose daily to clean human waste from his plant’s exterior. Like ink, hospital-strength disinfectant is something he has always purchased by the barrel.

A stocky, cheerful fellow whose plant is barricaded behind metal doors and razor wire, he talks breezily of burglaries, car break-ins, drug dealing and other challenges of doing business in the urban core. He knows some of the area homeless people by name. But don’t get him started about how they use his neighborhood as a de facto latrine.

“The street is not a toilet,” he snaps. “It’s that simple.”

Actually, nothing about this issue promises to be simple.

Homeless activists say the push for an ordinance is just the latest mean-spirited attempt by business owners to outlaw homelessness.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California last year filed a class-action suit on behalf of 12 indigent plaintiffs, accusing four downtown BIDs of using their security teams to harass and intimidate street people in violation of their civil liberties.

The BIDs have denied the allegations and both sides are now working with a mediator to settle their differences. But activist Ted Hayes, founder of the homeless enclave Dome Village, is already threatening legal action against the city if the urination ordinance is passed and used selectively against the homeless.

He says he’s as dismayed as the business owners at the scatological anarchy that reigns on skid row. But the solution, he contends, isn’t more laws. It’s more restrooms. Permanent, safe and clean ones.

Striding down San Julian Street, Hayes throws open the doors of graffiti-stained portable toilets to reveal their filthy insides.

“Look at this. No paper. No seat. Garbage everywhere. Stench,” he shouts with indignation. “It’s no wonder people are going in the streets.”

‘Are We Going to Put Them All in Jail?’

Improving the toilets is one thing on which business leaders and homeless activists agree. The Central City East Assn. has long favored installing European-style, self-cleaning public toilets downtown. Costing up to $250,000 each, the high-tech loos are already in use in San Francisco, which has offset their cost through an advertising deal with the vendor.

City officials here are now examining that program and others. Some say Los Angeles would be better off focusing its resources on upgrading facilities rather than casting a legal dragnet over indigent piddlers.

“Clearly [public urination] is unacceptable behavior,” Councilwoman Laura Chick said. “But what good will it do to fine people with no financial resources? Are we going to put them all in jail?”

Business owners counter that better toilets and better laws are needed. An ordinance would bring Los Angeles in line with other big cities, giving it a weapon that could be used selectively to combat urban blight. They also say it will send a message about public civility, something law enforcement officials have begun thinking about now that L.A.’s potty loophole has been exposed.

Perhaps wary of encouraging smelly new forms of protest at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, some would like to see the municipal code updated sooner rather than later.

“The last thing we want to read in the newspaper is how it’s OK to urinate in public in Los Angeles,” said Assistant City Atty. Richard Schmidt, who helped write the proposed ordinance. He added with a chuckle, “Don’t let the World Trade Organization protesters hear about this.”