On skid row, where physical and mental distress are on parade, 'we are forecasting a tsunami of seniors and families with children,' says the Rev. Andy Bales.
Research suggests that the type of shelters that could end up being the centerpiece of multiple candidates' homeless plans doesn't suit many homeless people.
The Social Order
In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.
The
New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’s prison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the
Print
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s order to Los Angeles officials to sweep homeless people off skid row into shelters or housing is grounded in his conviction that a wrongheaded focus on creating permanent housing has perpetuated racism, spread encampments and caused the avoidable deaths of Black people.
But the complexities of the lives of homeless people on skid row suggest that shelters may be, at best, an incomplete and unwelcome solution to the homelessness that has persisted in the 50-block district downtown for more than 50 years.
“They’re putting the smallest Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound,” said skid row activist and poet Suzette Shaw. “They don’t think we are real people.”