The Skid Row Op-Ed That Nobody Wanted

I have gotten over the fact that nobody wanted to buy the book I was selling about the neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row. I still think the research I did there was interesting though so I will post some excerpts in this and future hubs. Here is the Skid Row Op-Ed that nobody wanted...

Lately I have been scouring the Web for stories on LA’s Skid Row. Using a variety of search terms, thousands of hits are returned spanning several decades. It should come as no surprise that an article on Skid Row from 1984 looks strikingly similar to one from 2004 or 2008. A bulk of the writing on Skid Row laments the neighborhood as a growing problem while chronicling the latest LAPD efforts to “clean up” the neighborhood. Lately, “broken windows” policing, the brainchild of Dr. George Kelling (who has earned a mysterious sum as a “consultant” to the LAPD), is defined and debated. Sizable chunks of the reporting on Skid Row are best described as “feel good pieces,” detailing turkey dinners on Thanksgiving or recreational activities occurring in the community. This occasional rewording of the same stories suggests that just about everything tried in Skid Row since the City of Los Angeles created the neighborhood is not working.

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Now with intense gentrification occurring in and around Skid Row, a sense of urgency underlies stories about “Safer Cities” and swanky lofts and condos. The LAPD reports success in breathing down the necks of Skid Rowians, while constructive critics, such as UCLA Professor of Law Gary Blasi, astutely rebut their claims. It is the same old song and dance. And for once, I would love to see someone stand up and acknowledge how unproductive it has all been.

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As a doctoral student in 2007 and early 2008, I spent a significant amount of time hanging out in Skid Row as part of my research on the neighborhood. I did not just walk through Skid Row with the LAPD or take a guided tour with Downtown business boosters. I actually spent time, on the ground, in the neighborhood. I played dominoes in San Julian Park consistently. There I realized Skid Row is made up of a diversity of people, not just addicts and the mentally ill as many would have us believe. I also discovered that LAPD officers are wrong when they claim that drugs are sold in the park. Furthermore, San Julian Park regulars, not the LAPD, are responsible for keeping it “sober,” as a guy named “Big Frank” told me.

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I also spent time talking to people outside of the park, including Cenith Youngblood, who was featured in an August 14, 2008 LA Times story on a wonderful urban garden she is a part of in the Row. I interacted with countless others who make up the thriving community that Skid Row is and can continue to be. “People here,” as one formerly homeless man who returns to Skid Row to work as a street vendor told me, “actually talk to one another,” as opposed to his present neighborhood where “people stay in their house, behind their bars and they don’t talk to nobody.” I witnessed the not-so-good side of Skid Row as well. In one example, I got to know an alcoholic, who gave me his mother’s phone number so I could give her periodic updates on whether her son was dead or alive.

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I offer two takeaway points from my time in Skid Row. First, a stroll through the neighborhood offers little in the way of reality. Targeted tours of a neighborhood do not present a true sense of what it is like. Rather, they help further false perceptions that everyone in Skid Row is there because they drink, dope, are mentally ill, or lazy, when in reality, the reverse is often true. They ignore the fact so many people in Skid Row have zero, or minimal issues, with alcohol, drugs, and other assorted problems despite sweeping generalizations of the Skid Row population.

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My second point comes in light of an objective truth – the story of Skid Row, over the years, has remained the same, tired, politically-charged and misinformed account. We must change things up in Skid Row. We need to stop the self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity. Ticketing people for jaywalking, arresting people for selling a nickel bag of marijuana, or telling someone not to sit on a curb does nothing to help solve the real problems that exist in Skid Row. We ought to try “broken windows policing” in reverse. Decriminalize the little offenses and instead of “attacking problems,” let’s go into Skid Row, find the positive – as I did – and allow it to turn itself into bigger and better things from the ground up.