Under Philip Mangano, President George W. Bush's homelessness czar, the "housing first" approach had reached 300 cities by 2007, and Mangano credited it with a 30% nationwide drop in chronic homelessness between 2005 and 2007.
From the hundreds adrift on Los Angeles' skid row, outreach workers identified the 50 most vulnerable using a 30-item questionnaire. Those who made the list reported some combination of multiple emergency room visits, HIV, diseases of the heart, liver or kidneys, addiction and mental disorder.
Skid row was now the latest, highest-profile laboratory probing the possibility that a room of one's own, free from the chaos of the street, can serve as a springboard for getting well rather than as a reward for it.
--
The problem with Bobby Livingston, who seemed unafraid of death or jail or the streets, was the lack of leverage.
Soon after moving into the Senator, he was screaming contemptuously at his neighbors -- they were lazy, always after his money or liquor or drugs -- and at the management, which found his behavior menacing enough to threaten eviction.
It was June 2008, half a year into the project, and Bach was looking for Livingston.
Eviction would mean his ouster from Project 50 and banishment from subsidized housing for three years, an outcome Bach thought she might stave off if she could get him into drug treatment.
"He's so live-in-the-moment. He cannot defer gratification," she said. "Until he's on his meds, I don't think we have any hope."
For all its cruelty, skid row carried the comfort of familiarity. If Livingston was hostage to chemical need and random mayhem, he was also lord of a self-contained concrete kingdom whose laws he'd mastered. He knew where to find drugs, sex and cheap food, and his fierce reputation kept enemies at bay.
Still, Bach thought that she glimpsed a sweet, almost childlike vulnerability.
Maybe it was the way he wore his baseball cap sideways or how, in amiable moods, he greeted her as "my favorite girl!"
She found him at one of his haunts, a diner called Martha's Kitchen on East 4th Street. He sat in the back, violently stabbing a Styrofoam plate of scrambled eggs and toast. He bristled at her approach. "I need to be alone. What's wrong with that?"
Bach needed a pretext to sneak past his defenses. She pulled up a chair and pretended to be hungry. He was hunched over his plate, flecks of spittle flying, when Bach reached out and plucked a slice of toast. She put on a smile. "Will you share? Can I have a piece?"
Livingston looked startled. "Yeah," he muttered.
She took a bite, just big enough to be credible, and returned the bread.
They were just inches apart now, and she had his attention: He needed to go with her or he'd be out on the streets again. He followed her outside and climbed into the county car. Seconds later, he threw the door open and headed back toward Martha's Kitchen, his expression malign.
"There we go," Bach said. "We're losing him."
"There's just some people you can't help," said a man watching from the sidewalk. "Too much rock. He ain't worth it. He ain't worth it."
Shortly afterward, Livingston was caught buying crack.
--
"I can't stay out of trouble," he said. "I been touched by the devil or something."
For once, Livingston's eyes were alert, his voice clear. He was sitting behind the plexiglass at Men's Central Jail. With his long history of drug crimes and probation violations, state time loomed.
He grew up in Cheraw, S.C., he said, one of 16 kids, scrawny, premature, with asthma that his mother treated with marijuana. He said his stepfather, who was half white, hated the darkness of his skin and covered it with welts. He fled west, and in 1980, at the corner of 5th and San Pedro streets, he inhaled his first hit of crack cocaine: "I said, 'Damn, that's what I need.' "
Over four decades downtown, he saw the white retirees vanish and the once-magnificent hotels become shooting galleries and thousands of faces come and go.
"Everybody dead but me. And I was the baddest one of them. I did more than all them did," he said.
Thinking of the streets, horrible memories assailed him: alleys running with blood, bodies in trash bins, death all over. Survival in his world, he said, precluded friendship. Everybody wanted something. "I don't eat with nobody. I don't smoke with nobody. I be by myself all the time. I got no friends. I don't want no friends. I don't need no friends."
He didn't know Project 50's origins or philosophical underpinnings, but he knew that "them people sent from God," and that a woman named Miss Carrie had tried, with surprising intensity, to help him. Then a word came to mind he had already taken pains to disavow. "She my friend."
In the summer of 2008, after half a year in a borrowed warehouse, Project 50 moved into a headquarters at 5th and Main streets, a quick walk from the clients' apartments. There was an office, a health clinic, and a drop-in center with secondhand armchairs and board games.
