Skid Row

The plates were foam, the gravy in plastic pitchers and the disposable tablecloths brightly colored. The scorching sun beat down, and live gospel music blared from the makeshift stage. Sikhs passed out bags of fresh produce alongside Lutherans giving out hand-knit wool caps and wooden crosses. So went Thanksgiving on skid row, where more than 2,000 people -- homeless, jobless or just down on their luck -- lined up at the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown Los Angeles for a free feast of turkey legs, sweet potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce and pie. Across Southern California, from a Hollywood comedy club to a hockey arena in Orange County, thousands turned up for free Thanksgiving meals.

The Fred Jordan Mission is treating children living on Skid Row and their families to haircuts, pizza-and-burger lunches and new shoes and clothes this week. Labor, food and apparel items are being donated by local businesses. Volunteer hair stylists are still needed.

Re "LAPD's Skid Row Divide," March 10 The "broken windows" theory that Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton is using for skid row is a harmful, conservative philosophy masquerading as pragmatic and progressive public policy. When you simply focus on surface systems of disorder, you forget about the root causes of crime, such as poverty, discrimination and a lack of economic opportunities. Fighting social disorder as a means to fight crime does little good if these common factors are ignored.

Los Angeles prosecutors on Wednesday announced that they would seek a criminal injunction targeting potentially hundreds of so-called commuter drug dealers who travel to skid row from other parts of the city to sell their goods -- an aggressive new tactic in the city's crackdown on the West Coast's largest drug bazaar. The proposed injunction, if approved by a judge, would ban the 80 named dealers from skid row and would allow authorities to expand the list by as many as 300 additional names over time.

The hard-core Occupy L.A. crowd is still at it, even though its encampment is gone. Protesters marched through downtown this weekend and rallied Monday at City Hall. But the hard-luck Occupy L.A. contingent is back to life as it was before — sleeping on cardboard pallets on filthy streets and crowding skid row shelters for meals. It's impossible to know how many Occupy L.A. protesters came from the ranks of skid row homeless. The skid row folks were considered a management issue in the tent-city enclave, running off more genteel protesters with rough language and raucous behavior.

Re "Good signs downtown, but vision still lacking," column, Aug. 12 As usual, I agreed with most of what Steve Lopez had to say, but not all. One of my strongest objections was to his comment "that downtown will scare most people away until there's a commitment to build, and scatter across the region, enough supportive housing to clean up skid row once and for all." As creator of the Skid Row Development Corp.

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich lost another round in his misguided legal battle to lift a court order barring the city from seizing and destroying the unattended property of homeless people who live in downtown's skid row. On Friday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to rehear an earlier decision by a three-judge panel that put the ban in place. The judges ruled that the city's policy violated  homeless people's 4th Amendment right to be free of unreasonable seizure of their property.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has moved forcefully and appropriately to rescue the city's program to preserve low-cost Skid Row housing. His forceful leadership is obviously needed as business interests, understandably enough, increase pressure to drive out the poor people in this, the last section of the central city that is not fully redeveloped for commercial purposes. His move is consistent with the city's commitment in 1976 to preserve at its center this low-cost housing.