Evelyn Nieves

Banners hanging from formerly vacant office buildings that advertise high-priced lofts for rent; bulldozers digging foundations for skyscraper condominiums; uniformed Business Improvement District security guards who patrol skid row like police, routinely rousting sleepers; even the Port-A-Potties in downtown’s largest park, Pershing Square, which are reserved for people who use the park’s underground garage.

For decades, L.A.’s skid row was the repository of every hard-luck story in the book. Everyone from evictees to parolees to runaways with Hollywood dreams ended up in this quarter of downtown, eventually creating the largest encampment of homelessness in the nation.

Now, prodded by developers that they attracted with tax breaks, city officials are trying to remake the area. The catch is what to do with the homeless people. The number of homeless people in Los Angeles, at more than 48,000, keeps rising, while plans to find housing for those who need it most remain just that — plans, with no guarantees that they will materialize.

To Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the decades-old policy in the city and county of concentrating services for the poor on skid row is a failure, proved by the row’s crime, misery and encampments the size of small villages. In April, he and the county Board of Supervisors unveiled a 10-year plan to end homelessness in Los Angeles that included five “stabilization centers” across the county to provide temporary shelter and social services for those who need it.

But to advocates of poor people, what’s going on in and around skid row is not only potentially the largest displacement of poor people in the country, but also the starkest example of gentrification: a mean about-face where poor people who were dumped onto skid row for generations are now, when it is poised for a rebirth, being pushed away.

They point out that with all the dazzling new development planned — more than 150 ambitious projects — less than 5 percent of it includes affordable housing, and even that will be above the reach of the current skid row residents.

Pete White, the founder and co-director of one of skid row’s most vocal advocacy groups for the poor, the Los Angeles Community Action Network (or LACAN), say the city has a moral obligation to make sure that longtime residents of the row are served.

“Downtown residents who have been left here to suffer for decades damn well have a right to benefit from this renaissance,” he said, perched in his office directly across the street from the loft side of the Frontier Hotel.

For many years SROs, or single-room occupancy hotels, like the Frontier were the destination for people with nowhere else to go. In the early ’80s, when mental institutions were vacated, their former residents were sent to skid row. When parolees were released, they were sent to skid row. Until recently, hospitals in Los Angeles County have been known to discharge indigent patients onto skid row. In March, police video cameras mounted outside the Union Rescue Mission caught a van from Kaiser Permanente’s Bellflower Hospital discharging an elderly woman in her hospital gown and slippers onto a busy street, where she wandered, disoriented for several minutes.

Most of the poor in skid row lucky enough to have a roof — about 10,000 people– are housed in 240 residential hotels. But in recent years, more than 1,200 residential hotel rooms have been lost to market-rate development. Another 2,000 were slated for conversion when the City Council in May put a hold on the conversion of low-rent residential hotel rooms for one year. What happens next remains unclear.

L.A.’s downtown boom is a dizzying phenomenon. Seemingly every month or so brings more groundbreakings, new announcements of high-priced, high-income projects. In mid-June, the city unveiled plans for a $750 million, 1,000-room hotel complex, with a four-star Marriott and a five-star Ritz-Carlton, next to downtown’s Convention Center. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, in “The Bottoms” — the most infamous blocks of skid row — members of LACAN were videotaping city cleanup crews sweeping up homeless people’s blankets and clothes.

“The Bottoms,” the area of skid row where the missions and the street dwellers are concentrated, is a stunning slice of third-world poverty, a village of souls lost to the bottle and the needle, a depressing testament to human frailties, physical and mental.

This part of skid row, the center of the district’s crime and the obvious focus of news stories, is chockablock with men, but a startling number of women squat here too, including ones with gray buns and shawls. People lay themselves along the iron fences of the row’s little parks, sit in heaps of clothes and other belongings, hobble around with crutches, walkers and canes. Hard to look at, the streets are harder to smell. The worst blocks have the choking stench of human waste.

The bane of advocacy groups for the poor are five Business Improvement Districts, or associations advocating for businesses, in and around skid row. Each BID performs street cleanups and employs people who act as security guards, calling in what they see as trouble, complaining to the city when encampments block the sidewalks.

What groups like LACAN don’t like, they say, is the air of intimidation and harassment the uniformed security guards from some of these associations create. The other day, in The Bottoms, two men in red shirts on bikes from the Central City East Association were talking to a homeless woman in a tent. They had their cellphones in hand, as if they were about to make calls, but when three outreach workers from LACAN approached to ask what they were doing, they took off.

Two weeks ago, LACAN, the Catholic Workers and other skid row advocacy groups launched a protest when a cleaning crew from the Central City East Association asked homeless people to move out of their way so that they could steam-clean their streets. While police said the advocacy groups were hindering progress (“Why would anyone not want the streets cleaned?” said police Capt. Andrew Smith), Pete White said that the street cleaners were routinely dumping the meager possessions of those with nowhere else to go. LACAN, he said, had filed 20 property claims in six weeks on behalf of homeless people whose possessions were swept away.

“We’ve been told by police that they’re supposed to take away so-called items of comfort, like pillows and blankets,” White said. (But Smith, when asked, said there is no policy to remove such possessions and that police do not do so in any case.)

No one disputes that skid row has long needed drastic help. On any given night, according to advocacy groups for homeless people, 4,000 people are literally on the streets, in tents, tarps, blankets and cardboard boxes; another 3,300 are barely better, in transitional or temporary housing.

Police Chief William J. Bratton, who made his name in the mid-’90s with his “quality of life” initiatives as head of the New York City police department under Rudolph Giuliani, lobbied for the top job here by promising an approach to cleaning up skid row that had worked in cleaning up Times Square.

But that approach, which advocates for homeless people across the country criticized as callous, has stalled in Los Angeles. In April, a Federal appeals court panel ruled that arresting homeless people for sleeping on the streets when they had nowhere else to go constituted cruel and unusual punishment. (Bratton urged the city to appeal the ruling. He has also defended a policing theory he embraced, the “broken windows” theory, which posits that cracking down on so-called quality of life crimes like graffiti or panhandling can stem larger ones. Prominent social scientists have concluded the “broken windows” approach does not work.)

But Smith, the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Central Division, which includes skid row, said his officers are focused on hardcore crime.

“We’re not here to pick on homeless people,” he said. The officers who patrol skid row, all of whom ask for the skid row beat out of “compassion” and “a desire to make things better, made only 56 arrests between Jan. 1 and April 1 for sleeping on the streets, he added. Rather, the officers focus on felons. “We have 3,800 parolees in the 50 square blocks of skid row,” Smith said, “and something like 350 registered sex offenders. Where else do you have that kind of concentration?”

Plans for cracking down on skid row criminals include a legislative proposal that would add up to two years to the usual state sentence for selling drugs if the person convicted was caught on certain blocks of skid row. LACAN and other groups are lobbying hard to kill the bill, which they see as blatant discrimination against skid row residents who have drug addictions or are in other desperate circumstances that force them to sell drugs to survive.

The mayor and other city officials have also put a halt to more counseling and support services on skid row. Instead, the county recently set aside $100 million to spread services across the county.

Permanent housing for the homeless is a goal, but it appears a ways off. The 10-year plan to end homelessness comprises more than 200 recommendations, including building 50,000 units of affordable housing.

Also, in July, the City Council unanimously approved placing a staggering $1 billion affordable housing bond on the Nov. 7 ballot. If approved, it would create a $750 million grant and loan program for developers and a $250 million loan program to help working people buy houses. But the measure, which Villaraigosa has pledged to campaign hard for, faces a battle. It would raise property taxes on a ballot that has several other measures requiring tax hikes.

The chronically homeless in “The Bottoms” of skid row have learned to live on the streets in such a way that officials sometimes accuse them of preferring to stay outside. The other day, Smith said, there were empty shelter beds in missions while hundreds of people slept right outside them.

But Al Sabo, who passed up a shelter bed when he became homeless for the first time three years ago, says he knows why some people shun the missions.

“What people don’t want is to be treated like children,” said Sabo, a 61-year-old former newspaper editor who became homeless after a six-month coma and a yearlong hospital stay. He lived on the streets for two months.

Sabo said that some people, including himself, pass up beds in the well-meaning missions because they require that “you line up at such and such a time in the afternoon, get there by 8, leave by 6 in the morning, do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that.”

For the last three years, as he has tried to piece his life back together, Sabo has lived in the old Frontier Hotel. He started on the 10th floor, was moved to the seventh to make way for lofts, then to the fifth.

The Frontier once had 400 SRO rooms and now has about 190. Sabo said that most of those have been emptied as the owner of the property, Zuma Corp., readies the building for renovation.

Sabo, who shares a floor that holds more than 40 rooms with a handful of other tenants, said he has no way of getting to the loft side of the hotel and doesn’t care to, anyway. He has not been asked to move lately, so he reserves his energy for protesting the policies of nearby Pershing Square Park. Police tape prevents people from sitting on benches and the park is often closed for private events.

The other day, having just left the park, Sabo was still fuming. The police had told him, he said, that the benches were banded by tape so that people wouldn’t sleep on them. From experience, Sabo said, he knew that homeless people often stay up all night to ward off predators, then try to find a place to sleep during the day.

“Why couldn’t the city reserve a few of the empty buildings it’s been practically giving away, for homeless people to live?” he said. “Now that would be a plan, wouldn’t it?”

“Good audience!” he said, and people hooted some more.

It was Saturday night at Slab City, when people who live here will tell you that the best of the Slabs is on display. Not just the performers who play the Range, but also the audience. Everyone in this remote squattersville off the grid and off the map shows up: the hermits, the tweakers, the preachers, the old-timers, the newcomers, the families.

These weekly sundown concerts at Slab City, made famous by the 2007 film “Into the Wild,” are always packed come November, when trailered retirees from all over the country come here to live free for the winter. But in the last few years, the wretched economy has brought more people who’ve lost everything to Slab City than ever before, and the concerts fill up all the time. About 150 people show even in high summer, nearly double the summer population of Slab City just four years ago.

People come in a party mood, toting six-packs and fifths of whiskey and gin. Dogs roam the stage. Even the families who tend to park far from Slab City’s main drag, fearful that the Imperial County Child Protective Services will take their children away — it does happen — come to watch and perform.

“No, no, don’t talk to me,” a woman with three towheaded children of elementary school age said when approached on a recent night. But otherwise, she seemed happy.

Everyone seemed happy. And Slab City, which likes to bill itself as the last free place in America, a community built by hobos and hippies out of concrete slabs left by a decommissioned WWII-era Marine base, almost seemed like the carefree bohemian haven shown in “Into the Wild.”

The reality is more complicated, of course. People in Slab City are not just very poor, living off SSI checks, if they’re lucky; they’ve survived more than their share of hard knocks. As Patrick McFarland, the pastor of the Slab City Christian Center says, “Everyone here is damaged in some way.”

McFarland calls Slab City “the Last Stop,” the endgame for people who’ve played all their moves in society and have nowhere else to go. That seems fitting. Everyone in Slab City has some sorrowful story. Some can’t bring themselves to discuss it, while for others, the story gushes out right after “hello.” Someone they loved died a horrible death, they lost their children and money to divorce, their best friend robbed and cheated them. They got cancer.

Even the newcomers, who say, “It’s the economy, stupid,” when asked why they’re here, have complicated tales to tell. If you want to know how people end up in a squatters’ camp these days, the Range would be a good place to start.

“My sisters bought me this 35-foot camper after my mother died and told me to move out here,” said Glenn — just Glenn — who moved to Slab City last January.

He had been caretaking his mother for 15 years, he said; then, at 55 years old, he found he had nothing on a résumé to impress employers. No one would hire him. Plus, he had a drug possession conviction, for a small amount of heroin.

“I’m unemployable,” he said, sitting on sofa with his lab mix, Oprah. In a booming economy, he brooded, he would have a job. But 55 is so much older than it used to be. “I know a lot about computers, I can design websites, but who would hire me?” he said. “In a month, I get the last of my inheritance checks. And then what will I do?”

He is better off than most slabbers. His camper has a kitchen, a shower, access to the Internet. He does not rely on the ministries that come to Slab City to give him food. Still, he has found Slab City a difficult adjustment. He is neither a hobo nor a hippie. He does not like communal living. “I’m parked way over by myself,” he said.

Plus, after San Diego’s perfect weather, he was unprepared for the 125-degree days of August at the Slabs, when just walking from one end of his camper to the other took all his energy. He didn’t like the winter sandstorms, either, which send slabbers running with their arms over their faces, as though locusts were raining down.

Newcomers keep discovering that Slab City is not for everyone, or even most people. Charlie B — so many people in Slab City are coy about revealing their real, full names — had moved here last January. He had gotten divorced, then lost his job after he got cancer and couldn’t find another. And that was it. Life was too hard, and too short to keep trying to get by.

“My dream was to go out on Route 66,” said the 55-year-old native of East Tennessee. “I got here right before Christmas, before the sandstorms and the summer. It seemed just fine at the time.” Now, he is thinking of leaving by February.

James Edward, who moved his family to the Slabs nine months ago from Alabama to wait out the recession, said he and his wife were rethinking the move because of their children. A school bus takes their 11-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son to Calipatria, 12 miles away. But the children refuse to let friends see where they live, Edward said. And there are few other children in Slab City. “They hate it,” he said.

But “Drummer Gene” Malone, who ended up in Slab City three years ago after giving up his landscaping business in Staten Island for a woman in Oregon who left him, said his move was an unqualified success. He was free now. “It’s kind of like living in a carnival here,” he said. He had let his hair, mustache and beard grow, to odd lengths, and had stopped bathing.

“I’ve always been in bands,” Malone said, swigging Jack Daniel’s, slurring his words, “and now I get to play and not deal with anything else. What could be better than that?”

Some success stories here are genuine. Builder Bill, so dubbed because he created Slab City’s Range and co-founded its winter-only cafe, the Oasis Club, was an alcoholic, homeless in San Diego. Then, tired of being chased by police he knew by name, 12 years ago, he moved to Slab City.

He stopped drinking and started evaluating how he might live the rest of his days. Slab City was smaller back then, with maybe 50 year-round residents, and many of those were dying off.

“There was a kind of community here,” he said, “but they were such independent sorts that there really wasn’t a community. I thought, ‘I’m on the other side of 50. How the heck am I ever going to meet people, meet that someone, this way?’”

So he built the Range, using two old buses to hold equipment and the generators used to power the lights, the microphones and everything else. He built a refreshment stand out of scrap wood. He gathered old chairs and sofas from junk heaps.

Builder Bill, who created Slab City's Range Misha Erwitt

People started organizing shows at the Range. And Builder Bill, now 62, met his goal. “I met my girlfriend here,” he said.

Several couples have courted and married at the Range in the last 10 years, though the ratio of men to women here is about 10-to-1.

Among committed slabbers, the idea of community spaces became contagious. One slabber, who has since died of breast cancer, decided to create a library. She gathered books donated from local libraries in Imperial County and created the Slab City library, “Open 24/7″ on the honor system.

A few years ago, Builder Bill said, his girlfriend started the annual Slab City prom, where couples dress up in donated gowns and tuxes and vie to be king and queen of the slabs. The Range also hosts talent shows, plays, poetry readings.

And the Range has become a big tourist draw. The week before, a Danish film crew came to tape a concert.

The crew even staged a video op by having slabbers light a fire in a trash can off the stage and stand around it, just like they saw in “Into the Wild.” It was 99 degrees, but the slabbers obliged.

Builder Bill didn’t sing or play before he built the Range. And while Slab City seems to have more than its share of people who are musicians or at least musical, it keeps bringing out the performer in people.

The other night, one of the newcomers, a girl no more than 16 years old, probably younger, was introduced by her father, who was fairly busting with pride.

Like most performing slabbers, she sang a song she wrote herself. It went on and on and everyone was very polite. “No pictures!” the father barked at a photographer as she sang. But he encouraged everyone to applaud, and everyone did.

Three years of bad breaks later, Carranco had had enough. He revived an ’83 Dodge camper that he picked up for free and, with his girlfriend and five Chihuahuas, headed east, 155 miles from San Diego, to where the roads give up and the desert takes over.

Unwittingly, the 56-year-old Carranco had joined the latest wave of migrants to Slab City: refugees of the recession. Beaten down by a brutal economy, they’re straggling to this desolate outpost of societal dropouts to recover their wits and duck the national malaise.

Of course, Slab City is no city, and no picnic. Some 640 acres of state-owned sand and scrub near the Salton Sea, it offers no electricity, no sewerage, no running water. Once, it was a Marine training base. When it was decommissioned, nothing was left but the concrete slabs where barracks once stood. Gradually, people with souls to mend or demons to kill started camping on the slabs.

Maybe after the apocalypse the world would look like Slab City. Slabbers live in trailers, trucks and old buses scattered as though a twister had tossed them up and dropped them. Power comes from solar panels, batteries and portable generators — you’re rich here if you have one. Signs and structures are made from tires, wires and spare parts.

Until recently, only about 75 to 100 people called Slab City home all year, and they have their own sad stories to tell, usually involving breakups, bankruptcies or booze. But these days, they’re more interested in talking about the newcomers, who’ve swelled the ranks of the year-round population to about 200.

It says something about the state of the nation, slabbers will tell you, shaking their heads, when Slab City is becoming more of a refuge for the down and out than ever before.

“Some people come by foot,” said Ben Morofsky, who is 49 and has lived in Slab City for 22 years. “They’ve lost everything.”

Tent cities started cropping up all over the country once the recession began taking its toll, and a couple, like Dignity Village in Portland, Ore., or Nickelsville, in Seattle, are officially sanctioned by city officials. Dignity Village even makes prospective residents fill out applications

But there is no squat in the country like Slab City. Here, residents make the rules as they go along, and county and state officials let them be unless real trouble happens. Rarely does a sheriff happen by. It’s even rarer still that one is summoned. Utter detachment from the rest of society may be Slab City’s main attraction.

While there are no official statistics on Slab City — no one counts who comes and goes — judging from interviews here, the newcomers are trekking to the slabs from all over. Seattle to Staten Island, San Diego to Tennessee. Single men, mostly, in their 40s and 50s. But couples, too. Even a few families.

“It’s not the best place for kids,” said James Edward, who moved to the slabs nine months ago from Montgomery, Ala., with his wife and two children, 11 and 14 years old. Edward, 38 years old, was working as a regional manager for the Applebee’s restaurant chain, he said, for many hours and not enough pay. He looked and looked, he said, but could not find a better job. So he and his wife decided to ride out the economy at the slabs.

People come here out of desperation. But like Edward, many also want or need a reprieve from the newest normal, where workers toil longer for the same pay in jobs they hate but fear losing. They’ve heard of Slab City through the 2007 film version of “Into the Wild,” and like the rich pageant of life the movie displays.

“Into the Wild’s” Slab City is a hobo-boho Shangri-La. People live free and happy, selling books to tourists for a living, cooking communal meals. They take visitors to Salvation Mountain, a three-story sculpture made of clay, straw and paint that stands near the entrance to the slabs. They have nightly concerts, strum guitars, clink beers around warming fires.

That’s the Slab City that a 25-year-old woman who hitchhiked to Slab City from Kansas wanted when she decided she didn’t want to worry about paying bills all the time. It’s the Slab City that attracted a 48-year-old man who had left his landscaping business in Staten Island for a relationship in Oregon that failed, leaving him with nothing. “Into the Wild” showed him, he said, that there was a happy alternative to going back to Staten Island a bum and moving in with his parents.

Slabbers are friendly. And Slab City does hold weekly concerts. But it is hardly a romantic life.

Only the strong or the mad survive here. During the summer, temperatures reach 125 degrees in the shade, and the runty Joshua trees are precious and few. Just living is a full-time job. Water, which residents buy in the nearby town, is always being hauled, boiled or bottled. Everything is rationed, and chores like washing dishes or cooking take twice as long as in the real world. Bathing is a luxury, one indulged only when very necessary.

The broken-down town of Niland, five miles west, provides a grocery store and post office. For gas or more shopping, slabbers head to Calipatria, 12 miles south, Brawley, 25 miles south, or across the border to Mexicali, about 50 miles down, where a dollar still buys more than it does in the States.

Most slabbers survive on government checks, food stamps and donations from ministries. Come winter, when hundreds of trailered retirees, or snowbirds, descend on the slabs for the season, the regulars make money doing odd jobs for them. Some newcomers come with a little money in their pockets. Others, like Carranco, rely on the kindness of slabbers.

Carranco, with no cellphone or post office box, had been waiting for word from his girlfriend, who had an actual job and a place to stay near Palm Springs, for nearly two months. Then she came back, broke up with him, took their Chihuahuas and his food stamp card.

“Thank goodness for charity,” Carranco said, rocking himself on the remains of a recliner outside his lean-to. It was 105 degrees, getting dark and he had no source of power save for a solar light on top of his camper and batteries for his portable stereo.

A wiry man with sharp cheekbones, black hair to his shoulders and a growing beard, Carranco looks like an apostle from Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” After a couple of months, new slabbers look like they’ve lived here forever. The men grow beards, the women go gray. People age in dog years. Even the children.

Minister Patrick McFarland, who runs the Slab City Christian Center, a trailer more popular for its daily bread offerings than its sermons, has watched newcomers flee as if being chased.

“It’s kind of a raw experience,” McFarland said. “People don’t expect how hard it is.” He and his wife ran a ministry for outlaw bike groups in Joshua Tree, Calif., before moving here a year and a half ago. Then he was diagnosed with bladder cancer and had to leave for treatment. Back for six months, McFarland still seemed to be adjusting.

He was wondering, he asked an Imperial County sheriff’s deputy who had led an out-of-town visitor to the slabs, whether he could carry a firearm if it was concealed, or displayed?

Neither, without a permit, the deputy said.

“Then, I could carry a knife, I guess,” McFarland said.

The Christian Center had been burglarized a few times, Carranco said, as had his own encampment. The old-timers blamed newcomers who haven’t learned slabber rules.

Jerry Ray Jones, who has lived 62 years the hard way, 26 of them in Slab City, said any article should warn newcomers away.

When he arrived, he said, with a story too long to tell, only about 10 people lived in Slab City. They were bona fide loner types. Crack, meth and liquor brought more people to the slabs, and other reasons. Outright poverty was never No. 1 before now.

You’re a real slabber if you can stick out more than one summer, the saying goes here. But Mary Dillon and her husband had lasted three summers — “Into the Wild” brought them — and they never felt at home.

They were in Niland, buying ice and supplies to take on the road. Dillon, who is 52, said she and her husband were going back to Washington state. They had just sold their trailer, were checking their mail, and were taking off.

Dillon’s husband, a 66-year-old retiree, didn’t want to talk or give his name. He said it was just better that way, given the topic was Slab City.

“We don’t want no trouble,” Dillon said, though she managed to give a sheriff’s deputy an earful about some goings-on at the slabs. “We just want a normal life again.” They had 1,300 miles to drive, and were looking forward to it.

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The plants would not be limited in size — one potential applicant for a license wants to open a plant that would produce over 21,000 pounds of pot a year — but they would be heavily taxed and regulated.

Those vying for one of the four licenses would have to pay $211,000 in annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes.

Proponents of the measure also touted the possibility of Oakland becoming the nation’s cannabis capital, especially if California voters approve the legalization of recreational marijuana in November.

“Do you want to be the “Silicon Valley of Cannabis?” said Jeff Wilcox, a local businessman who wants to build “AgraMed,” a 7.4-acre plant with a bakery, a lab and 100,000 square feet of cultivation space.

But Stephen DeAngelo, executive director of Harborside Health Center, the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the world, said small growers were coming to him terrified that the ordinance would mean the end of their livelihoods.

One of the co-sponsors of the ordinance, Rebecca Kaplan, said the ordinance would not take effect until January, giving the council time to come up with a plan for medium-sized growers.

Councilwoman Nancy Nadel said she worried about quality of the product, wanted environmental protections and questioned why the council was voting on the measure now if it wasn’t going to take effect until January.

The measure will go before the council one more time for a final vote, but the outcome isn’t expected to change.

“Then we came across the idea of adding small animals as well,” Gerrie recalled, “since all these animals are being euthanized” by animal shelters.

The proposed ban on puppy and kitten mills became a proposed ban on the sale of just about every animal that might end up in a shelter: gerbils, guinea pigs, birds, hamsters, turtles, snakes, rats. Sales of rabbits and chicks are already banned in the city.

The idea came back to bite the commission. It led to the panel’s biggest, longest monthly meeting in recent memory, not to mention blogger fodder around the world.

Animal control and welfare commissioners say all they planned to do at their regularly scheduled meeting Thursday evening was discuss the idea, hear out those on all sides of the issue — pet store owners, rescue groups, pet owners and maybe, just maybe, take a vote on a ban.

After a vote, the proposal would have to find a sponsor, preferably two, on the Board of Supervisors, pass muster as legislation with the city attorney, and then pass the Board.

But once Gerrie’s idea made the front page of The San Francisco Chronicle Thursday — “Sell a guinea pig, go to jail,” the story began — it was famous.

Or infamous. The Chronicle story prompted 793 comments and counting, many playing on only-in-San Francisco stereotypes. “Bay area people truly are nuts!” read a common refrain. It prompted CNN’s Jack Cafferty, who called the idea “not half bad,” to ask readers their thoughts, prompting 15 printed out pages of debate from around the globe.

And the commission’s regularly scheduled meeting, usually attended by a handful of spectators, became a standing room only spectacle of close to 100 people, with some spilling into the hallways, and speakers lined up for hours.

The guinea pig rescue people showed up. The rabbit rescue folks came. The bird rescue people showed up in force, including Mira Tweti, who decried the plight of captive parrots and how often they are dumped by owners who find them too demanding.

“I thought it was the longest meeting we’ve ever had,” Gerrie said, adding that he thought the several hours were productive, brought a lot of attention to the issue nationwide and “got people talking.”

And yet, he said, “I would love to get this behind me.”

That will have to wait a little while. The commission, overwhelmed with varying opinions, voted not to vote, tabling the debate until at least another month.

The animals began leaving in droves the day after Thanksgiving, almost as if someone had issued an order. But Boehm said the fact that so many sea lions stayed for so long is even stranger than their disappearance.

“They do move off,” Boehm said, adding that in the fall, older sea lions head to breeding colonies in the Channel Islands, off the coast of Southern California along the Santa Barbara Channel. Younger sea lions, he said, “don’t mind those rules and tend to travel far and wide.”

On Tuesday, 10 sea lions lounged and swam and dove from the docks, spreading themselves out where the animals were stacked three and four deep just a month ago. The bulk of the herd probably followed their favorite foods, sardines and anchovies, Boehm said.

The younger ones still sticking around Pier 39 were enough to satisfy hordes of visitors huddled against the wind to watch them. The sea lions huddled together, dove off the docks, and honked and barked.

“We’re happy with what we see,” said Carmen Fernandez of Miami Beach, Fla., who was watching the sea lions with her husband Carlos.

Despite the sea lions’ abrupt disappearance, Boehm said the Marine Mammal Center is not concerned that they have departed for good. While more than the usual number have left — usually about 40 remain — it is very unlikely, Boehm said, that they won’t come back. By spring, the herd will probably be back, as usual, he said.