Childhood Dies on Skid Row

One of the most violent communities in the United States is located just a few blocks from the gleaming high-rises of downtown Los Angeles.

More than 8,000 people live on the 55 blocks of Central City East commonly known as skid row -- the largest concentration of homeless people in the nation. Many of them sleep on the streets, with their belongings piled inside a shopping cart. Home is a cardboard box, surrounded by the sights and smells of trash, urine and feces and the constant presence of drugs and alcohol.

Not that long ago, few children lived here. From 1990 to 2000, the percentage of children on skid row jumped to 15% from 1%, and the percentage of women grew to 32.2% from 17.7%, according to a study by USC researchers. Today, homeless women and their children are the fastest-growing segment of the skid row population. Children there are among those individuals at the highest risk of violent death. Yet the response from our elected leaders is inertia, not outrage.

Some of the children of skid row sleep on the streets with their families. Others live in dilapidated welfare hotels infested with rats and cockroaches. Entire families sleep in a small, single room intended for one person. Often there’s no kitchen, and the bathroom is down the hall. Getting to school involves a two-hour bus ride, not to mention dealing with teachers and kids who don’t understand that your clothes are dirty because there’s no laundromat in your neighborhood.

Worst of all, the children of skid row are a captive audience, propositioned by sexual predators and exposed to the most degenerate forms of human behavior. They watch as paramedics extract yet another comatose individual from a portable toilet with a needle still sticking out of his arm. Used condoms and hypodermic needles litter the sidewalks where the children live and play.

The violence that most of us see only on TV is part of these children’s daily lives. This summer, several of the children in our community witnessed the murder of a neighbor -- a mother stabbed 17 times in broad daylight just outside the hotel where they live.

When disputes flare up, violence is the first resort. The children, who have nowhere else to go -- no backyard or park or community center -- are right in the line of fire. It is no wonder that so many of them anesthetize themselves with drugs and drown their sorrows with alcohol.

Some people believe that providing services to children will only encourage needy families to flock to skid row. But anyone who has witnessed the desperate lives of the children who live there understands that no one with other options would choose that existence.

In skid row, constant exposure to violence eats away at young people’s sense of self-worth. Violence deadens the natural resilience that otherwise can inspire mothers and their children to seek out opportunities for a better life.

Los Angeles has the talent and the resources to help our children. What we seem to lack is the vision and the political will. We must hold our elected officials responsible not only for what they do but for what they do not do. Let’s make the crisis of the children of skid row a major issue during the upcoming mayoral campaign. Because to neglect these children means sentencing another generation of young people to lives of desperation and despair.

The wave of gentrification is rolling skid row back toward downtown’s eastern edge and the railroad tracks that brought the original homeless men, itinerant farmers and railroad workers in the 19th century. In the 21st century, people are landing there again, but this time a large percentage of them are woman and children.