Skid Row Supportive Housing

Cole Hunger

Los Angeles has been facing a continuous homelessness crisis for a multitude of years. A combination of housing and income disparity factors play an immense role in the prolonged nature of this problem. The lack of affordable housing options along with the increase levels of income required to have a standard quality of life within this city. One downtown Los Angeles location that suffers the most form these issues is Skid Row. This centralized trapezoidal area has garnered the reputation of being one of, if not the poorest neighborhood within Los Angeles, having an extremely high poverty level measuring just about 50%.

Skid Row has become a location for homelessness to congregate. The neighborhood has turned to functioning as a haven for the homeless as criminalization of general homeless activities combined with antagonizing "Not In My Back Yard" Los Angeles residents have both directly and indirectly pushed them away and out of other areas of the city. The homeless population of Skid Row has inadvertently been stripped of their identity of being residents of the greater Los Angeles, but rather secluded to being inhabitants of just the neighborhood they have been clustered into. Their right to being active participants within Los Angeles, having access to all services and communities that it can provided has been diminished by their classification of being homeless and residing in a discarded area of the city.

The Skid Row housing trust is an organization that has set out to better the quality of life of homeless occupants of the Skid Row neighborhood by creating and developing supportive housing structures and connections, as well as providing services to help this population overcome some their difficulties.

The Skid Row Housing Trust has taken great strides at creating a better situation for those delegated to homelessness in Skid Row. The creating of a large amount of supportive housing has been valuable solution to both reducing the amount of homelessness on top of aiding in the reduction of the housing crisis. However, this should not serve as the end to the support that Skid Row and population needs. Even with the addition of permanent housing, connection between Skid Row and its surrounding Los Angeles counterparts on both a physical and spatial level as well as a communitive one. There is still a distinction between the quality of Skid Row, its infrastructure , and its residents versus any of the surrounding neighborhoods. The creation of housing isn't fulfilling the entirety of the rights to the city that all Los Angeles residents should have. More can be done to advocate for the incorporation of Skid Row as a location into having greater interactions between its adjacent neighborhoods. Alongside this, efforts can be made to help Skid Row residents have better mobility beyond the Skid Row area.

The next steps to improve the quality of life of Skid Row residents and the Skid Row neighborhood is to increase measures of interaction between the people and location of Skid Row with other areas of Los Angeles. To fulfill the Lefebvre's and Mitchell's concept of having a right to the city. the seclusion and segregation that Skid Row faces needs to be reduced. These measures can be tackled by both further programs offered through the Housing Trust, along with governmental policies such as rezoning. The housing trust can work even further with the residents of their supportive housing structures to to find avenues to increase their income levels through finding better job secured and connecting them with resources beyond the scope for Skid Row. Alongside this efforts can be made to garner a better sense of community between Skid Row and its adjacent neighborhoods to reduce the seclusion between locations. The city should also strive to reform the zoning within Skid Row to help improve the location in a way that will not foster an displacement through gentrification. Rather than mimicking the market rate housing zoning that has been taking place in the adjacent neighborhoods, Skid Row residential zones should done in a way that prioritizes supportive housing with instances if mixed income housing. By incorporating mixed income housing this will help reduce the seclusion that Skid Row currently faces, along with encouraging economic growth and stimulation within the neighborhood. Furthering this, zoning should also be changed to include more mixed use locations. As housing is still the main priority this will maintain the development of the needed housing while also providing for economic and job opportunities. Furthermore, the ways that roads and parking is oriented within this neighborhood should be altered to better fit the needs of those who occupy it. Due to the low income levels and the lack of vehicular ownership of the majority Skid Row's population, there is not as much of a need for wide roads and large parking lots and structures. Changes can be made to reduce the amount of required parking spaces that residential and commercial buildings have as the lack of personal vehicle access means that the neighborhood is one of more pedestrian and bike traffic. The reduction of the underutilized vehicle spaces will allow for lots to be developed in more beneficial ways for the community.

References

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• ●Reese, Ellen, Geoffrey Deverteuil, and Leanne Thach. "‘Weak‐center’gentrification and the contradictions of containment: deconcentrating poverty in Downtown Los Angeles." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.2 (2010): 310-327.

• ●Mitchell, Don, and Nik Heynen. "The geography of survival and the right to the city: Speculations on surveillance, legal innovation, and the criminalization of intervention." Urban Geography 30.6 (2009): 611-632.

• ●99pi. “The Containment Plan.” 99% Invisible, 1 Jan. 1970, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-containment-plan/.

• ●Barragan, Bianca. “Should All of Skid Row Be Rezoned for Affordable Housing?” Curbed LA, Curbed LA, 17 July 2019, https://la.curbed.com/2019/7/17/20698280/downtown-la-skid-row-affordable-housing-zoning.

• ●Deal, The Real. “Skid Row's Road Map to Gentrification.” GPAM, 31 July 2019, https://globalpropertyinc.com/2019/07/31/skid-rows-road-map-to-gentrification/.

• ●Dozier, Deshonay. “Contested Development: Homeless Property, Police Reform, and Resistance in Skid Row, LA.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 20 Jan. 2019, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2427.12724.

• ●“Homes. Support. Success.” Skid Row Housing Trust, 15 Nov. 2021, https://skidrow.org/.

• ●Land Use Planning in Skid Row ... - Lapovertydept.org. https://www.lapovertydept.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/skid-row-zoning.pdf.