Skid row makeover

With chic lofts on the rise, Los Angeles' impoverished residents are being driven out of the last place they can call home.

By Evelyn Nieves

Read more: Politics, News, Gentrification

Aug. 8, 2006 | LOS ANGELES -- To see the old skid row of the down and out and the new skid row of the well-to-do, look no farther than the Frontier Hotel.

Smack in the heart of the nation's biggest poor neighborhood, the hotel rents to both the poor and the wealthy, albeit through separate entrances.

The Frontier's poor people's entrance, on Fifth Street, has iron gates, burly guards who ask you your business and a long, dark foyer with a clerk behind thick glass. The Main Street entrance, for urban pioneers renting new lofts on the hotel's upper floors, has a gleaming white lobby, potted palms and marble floors.

The Fifth Street renters, who pay about $100 a week, have no access to the Main Street side. And loft dwellers, who pay from about $1,100 a month to $3,900 a month, have no reason to venture to the Fifth Street side, where the hotel is still known as a rundown flophouse, one step up from the streets.

Skid row's new Frontier makes poor people and their advocates shudder. It's not just the hotel, which the owner intends to fully convert to market-rate lofts, that puts them on edge. It's everything, they say, that suggests that the grand plans for the nation's largest skid row -- 50 square blocks of prime real estate in the largest city in the country after New York -- are leaving out the poor, mostly black people who live there now:

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.

Next page: "The Bottoms" is a stunning slice of third-world poverty