ARTICLES
April 2004 ARTICLES
Contents © 2004
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Row on Skid Row
Are Social Service Agencies "Pimping" Children?
BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER
It was a derelict building by all accounts. The San Julian Hotel on San Julian Street (between 5th and 6th Streets), downtown Los Angeles, was a two-story, wood and stucco structure that had been partially burnt by fire in April 2003. Some charged that this 25-room hotel in the heart of Skid Row had been a center for drug dealing, though its former owners deny this. Still, according to the November 29 Los Angeles Times, the San Julian was known on the streets as "buck wild" and "New Jack City" after a 1991 film in which a drug lord converts an apartment building into a drug laboratory.
It might seem odd that the city's demolition of the San Julian last November should be any way controversial. Yet, in a letter to the December 4 Times, Jeff Dietrich, a member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, did criticize it. Dietrich objected not only to destroying housing in an area where there are so many homeless, but to the replacement of the San Julian -- not by another shelter -- but by a children's playground.
Dietrich said that Skid Row is no place for children or playgrounds. "The only time that children and families have appeared in this neighborhood of almost exclusively single adult males is when they have been imported for profit or for fund-raising purposes," read Dietrich's letter. In the past, Dietrich claimed, hotel owners packed families into the single room occupancy hotels on the Row for profit; now, "some nonprofit organizations" are doing the same "because, let's face it, children and playgrounds are much more appealing on your fund-raising brochures than the indigenous population of single, adult African American males."
Dietrich's letter got a blistering response from Dr. Ralph Plumb, president of the Union Rescue Mission. In a letter published in the December 20 Times, Plumb called Dietrich's statements "the most misguided cynicism" he had "encountered in a long time." Though Dietrich mentioned no particular nonprofit in his letter, Plumb knew at whom it was directed; for, wrote Plumb, "the Union Rescue Mission purchased and razed the property in question and now plans, for the interim, to have a play area for the many children who have migrated to skid row."
In his letter, Plumb says that, indeed, children do live on Skid Row. He cites 2000 census documents that give the number of children in the area bounded roughly by South Los Angeles Street, East 5th Street, South Alameda Street, and East 7th Street to be 619. I contacted Dr. Plumb in February, and he further clarified the census number. A researcher hired by Union Rescue Mission found, said Plumb, "a discrepancy with the census report." Plumb continued that for the above area, "U.S. Census repots 412 children under the age of 19 living in the area, while community surveys do account for 600-700 children in the Skid Row area. These community surveys were primarily conducted in the hotels in and around Skid Row. We cannot ignore the children who do in fact stay in our shelter. For example, the average number of children sleeping in our shelter in January 2004 was 110 each night."
But even after Plumb's December 20 letter, Jeff Dietrich was unrepentant. If there are children on Skid Row, he said, it's because they are brought in by social service agencies and housed there. "They didn't just stumble down to this place," said Dietrich. "There's low cost housing here. But it's not appropriate low cost housing for them."
Dietrich said that in general the inhabitants of Skid Row are single males. In the '70s, when Dietrich first came to Skid Row, the majority were single, white males; today, the majority are single, black males. Dietrich explained that people don't want to come to Skid Row "because when you get to this place, to Skid Row, to Central City, downtown Los Angeles, they know you've gone to the very bottom of the barrel, and they don't want to go there. It's very dangerous on the streets, and this is the last place they want to come."
But families, said Dietrich, have been brought to Skid Row. "This is a long, historical.... I'm old! I've been here too long! I've been here longer than all of these people, and...." He paused, collected himself, and continued. "They started in 1980 when the families were being brought in to Skid Row basically by coyotes, and there were a couple of hotels on Skid Row and some very entrepreneurial Latino guys, who said, 'we can just pack people into these hotels.' They just filled the hotels, put our people [single, homeless men] on the streets, and filled the hotels with ten people to a room. The city was going, 'we're not going to throw these people on the street.'" Dietrich said he asked Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a center for garment and sweatshop workers and their children, located on the edge of Skid Row (bordering the Flower District), to relocate the families. Callaghan, said Dietrich, "systematically removed every single family on Skid Row and put them into more appropriate housing."
According to Alice Callaghan, the movement of the families began in 1982 and ended in 1986. She said she and others "got churches and temples to adopt families and help them find first and last and move in. The [Los Angeles] redevelopment agency jumped in shortly after we started the program and began picking up a considerable piece of it. We spent four years systematically relocating 400 families out of 122 Skid Row hotels." Currently, some families, Callaghan said, live on the edge of Skid Row in hotels where "at any one time there might be as many as 50 families." These families "tend to be transient American families; usually you could guarantee that the parents are involved in drug dealing and they're dragging their children here and there with them." But, said Callaghan, "it's rare to find a family inside the Row, because about 45 of the 65 hotels on Skid Row are owned by non-profits, none of whom rent to families because they are complying with the occupancy and other codes of the city, which preclude allowing more than one person in these rooms. So the reality is, that there are a couple of hotels on the edge of the Row [that house families]. But it would be better, if you were going to serve those families on the edge of the Row, to pull them off the Row than to pull them deeper in."
But that's precisely what Union Rescue Mission began doing not many years after the evacuation of the families from the Row, according to Callaghan -- it began pulling them into the Row by serving them in the very heart of the Row. And, even worse, Union Rescue began housing women and families.
Callaghan said that when Union Rescue was undergoing the environmental impact phase during the construction of their mission on San Pedro, "every group on the row, whether it was the police, the city, other missions, agencies -- everybody was unanimous that Union Mission must not help women and children there. And Union Rescue Mission agreed to that. The mission gets built, and lo and behold! They begin bringing families in for all kinds of events. There was one Saturday I remember, not last year, but the year before, when there were three events for families on the Row. And all the missions were out filming families for their little shows or brochures; and yet if you stood on any border of Skid Row, after any of these events, you would see these 'Skid Row families' leaving the Row afterwards."
Union Rescue "would be happy to receive a copy of any 'agreements" that Callaghan may have in her possession regarding her claim," said Plumb. "The central issue is that the landscape in downtown L.A. has changed. The national statistics for homeless families (women with children and intact families) comprise 40 percent of the urban homeless population nationwide and 41 percent in Los Angeles." Plumb said that recently his organization commissioned USC to conduct a study on the care for the homeless on Skid Row. The study stated: "the service system on Skid Row was set up primarily to serve single men. However with the influx of women and children into the area, the social service system has been unprepared to deliver needed services. In Skid Row, the Union Rescue Mission is the only place for homeless women and children to go when they are in need of their resources."
According to Callaghan, Union Rescue is not alone in bringing families and children to, and housing them on, Skid Row. Such events, such as Christmas gift-giving events and back-to-school events, are sponsored by other missions on the Row, including Fred Jordan Mission and the L.A. Mission. "When these events are held," said Callaghan, the missions "pass out their leaflets all over, at the local schools, they advertise in the paper. In years past, when Union Rescue Mission did its Christmas stuff, families would line up at 5, 5:30 in the morning in order to get themselves on the list -- not on the day of the event, but you had to get on the list, to schedule your times." Fred Jordan Mission, she said, has back-to-school events. "Families come from all over and they camp out all night on the streets of Skid Row in order to get these free shoes and backpacks," said Callaghan.
Callaghan strongly objects to bringing women and children onto the Row. "Anyone reading your paper just has to imagine walking through Skid Row -- either by themselves, if they're women, or if they're men, imagine their wives, their mothers, their sisters, walking with little children through Skid Row by themselves. I can't imagine they would fathom doing that. Why would the missions have them do that? And we're talking the middle of the Row, not the edge of the Row! Union Rescue Mission has a welfare hotel across the street, where people on welfare vouchers come from all over the county. They have one of two Skid Row parks on the corner. L.A. Mission is at one corner; the other welfare hotel is at the corner, and half a block in the other direction is the Weingard Center, which runs lots of programs that include programs for people who have just gotten out of prison. In conscience how can they bring women and children and have them stand there, and even spend the night?"
Ralph Plumb of Union Rescue Mission admitted that his organization does hold activities at its facility on Skid Row, not only for families that live there but for families from across the city as well. "Union Rescue Mission sponsors special activities for children who are homeless and poor," Plumb wrote in his February 11 e-mail response. "Some of these activities are at our 545 S. San Pedro location. Some of them are off-site, which are only offered to children who are receiving our services. We engage the children we serve in activities that expose them to activities outside of Skid Row whenever possible." Union Rescue does sponsor a "'Christmas Store,' where homeless and poor families may come and 'shop' free of charge for their children, Plumb said. "Because of the amount of donations we receive, we extend the invitation to 'shop' to the greater community. However, many people attending are receiving services at our shelter, either men who have children who are not with them, or women who may have children staying with them at the shelter. This year, 154 of our regular guests chose toys for their 495 children who may or may not live at our shelter." Plumb, however, said that registration for his mission's Christmas event begins months before it is held, and participants may register by phone, mail, or through other service providers. "We do not have families lining up at 5 a.m. as Callaghan states," he said.
Plumb agreed that "women and children do not belong on Skid Row;" but, he said, "they are here, and they are here in growing numbers. Women and children are the fastest growing population of homeless people in the United States, and with Skid Row's historical acceptance of the homeless population, we are located where people come to find services."
But Callaghan counters that Union Rescue Mission has enough money not only to offer services to homeless families away from Skid Row, but to house them as well. "People think of missions as Mother Teresa serving the poor," said Callaghan; "they need to think of them as multi-million dollar corporations. Nobody has access to their books, but with all the fundraising they do and all their nice new buildings, it would be pretty hard to think they're certainly not multi-millionaires. Both we and the Catholic Worker have been on the Row 22 years, and we've never housed a family on the Row. We take them to East L.A.; we've put them up in hotels, if we've had to. The reason families are brought there is that Union Rescue Mission accepts them. If they had an emergency, they should have opened a warehouse two blocks away. If you were just one block away from Skid Row, it would make a huge difference."
Ralph Plumb said that as a 501(c)3 organization, Union Rescue is required by law to disclose its financial reports. "In the fiscal year 2002/2003, 85 percent of total expenses incurred by Union Rescue Mission went to program services." Callaghan's claim that Union Rescue has the money to provide in-site and off-site services "is not accurate." Much of the mission's funds, said Plumb, "(72 percent in fiscal year 2002/2003) are donated products such as office furniture, diapers, food, and clothing" which "cannot be turned into cash." Plumb, however, said that Union Rescue has a facility for families off the Row, called Family Together; "but that space is extremely limited and always has a waiting list for entrance." Union Rescue, said Plumb, is "in the beginning stages of a capital campaign to build a Family Life Center that will be located off Skid Row, able to house more women, children, and families." He called this project the mission's "number one expansion priority."
If Union Rescue and other missions are bringing families onto Skid Row instead of reacting to a genuine problem in the area, why are they doing so? "I call it just blatant pimping of children," said Callaghan. "It is much easier to raise money if you're showing what appears to be, and what could be made to appear to be, a Skid Row family." Jeff Dietrich agreed. "Here's the thing," he said. "Everybody wants to appeal positively to the larger community, whether it's for economic investment or for donations. So, if you're the director of a large center, you're going to put your best foot forward. How do you do that? Do you show who the dominant majority of poor are that you are actually having to deal with in that area, who are black males and who often are drug users? No! You're not going to do that! What are you going to put on your brochures? You're going to put women and children. So you do things for women and children so you can appeal more positively to your fundraising base. I actually went to a fundraising class from a Franciscan. He said, 'it really doesn't matter what you're doing, but here's what I'm going to tell you; even if you're serving all males, get a child. Even if it's just one child, and put that child on your brochure.' This was 1970. This guy had a major soup kitchen in San Francisco, and he was telling us, 'this is how I raise money. I don't tell people what I really do' -- which is to serve the destitute poor who are a product of the social system and who are really a symptom of racism.
"But nobody," continued Dietrich, "wants to take that prophetic stand, to say look, help the poor here, because of a racially-biased system that has abused black people from the beginning of our nation's history -- you're not going to raise money that way!"
Ralph Plumb thought the characterization of "pimping" "ludicrous" and "untrue." "To accuse an organization with more than 113 years of quality service to the disadvantaged of Los Angeles is outrageous. We open our doors to people in need without discrimination, and this includes women and children."
But both Dietrich and Callaghan say that the removal of the San Julian Hotel for a playground reveals that missions like Union Rescue are discriminating in favor of women and children and pushing out the homeless men. The missions, said Callaghan, "came here to serve the guys [homeless, single men]. Children are important and precious, but so is that 40-year-old man." Callaghan said that instead of demolishing it, the city and Union Rescue should have given the San Julian over to one of two non-profit agencies (with one of which, the Skid Row Housing Trust, Callaghan is involved), which could run it as "clean, safe housing."
But Plumb said that Union Rescue is not ignoring the single homeless males of Skid Row. "We are working," he said, "on a long-term plan for site redevelopment of the properties we own in Skid Row. In the interim period, and until we have an adequate facility built outside of the downtown area for children, we wanted to afford them some semblance of normalcy and a safe environment -- just to be kids!. This play area will give them a place to be rather than on the streets."
But is a playground or a hotel the best use of property on Skid Row? One is left wondering how far a single playground can even contribute to giving children there "a semblance of normalcy and a safe environment"? "There are 11,000 people on Skid Row," said Callaghan, "thousands sleeping on the sidewalks. This is a very untypical neighborhood. What are the children thinking when they walk past everything?"