L.A.'S SKID ROW DEFIES SOCIAL ENGINEERING

LOS ANGELES - It's been called "the skiddiest of all Skid Rows": 50
square blocks of run-down hotels, abandoned factories, burned-out
storefronts, dingy bars and seedy liquor stores, interspersed among
hundreds of makeshift homes, most of them built with discarded
cardboard boxes and stolen shopping carts.

Located an easy walk from City Hall, police headquarters and other
downtown seats of power, this last stop for the destitute has been a
fixture of the nation's second-largest city for nearly a century.

Folk singer Woody Guthrie called it "the skiddiest of all Skid Rows"
in his 1943 autobiography "Bound For Glory." Poet Charles Bukowksi
said it was populated by "people who are mutilated and almost dead
.. creeping, crawling, uncared for creatures."

These days the area has been getting a less poetic though equally hard look.

With a burgeoning real estate market bringing luxury apartments and
condos to the edge of Skid Row, city leaders are torn between letting
gentrification roll over the area or trying to make it a more
hospitable environment to get help with homelessness, drug addiction,
mental illness and other troubles.

Among other measures:

Police have conducted drug stings, making more than 5,000 arrests
during the first three months of the year, including one in which
actor Brad Renfro was caught trying to buy heroin.

Authorities tried to keep thousands of people from sleeping on the
streets, but a federal appeals court stopped the effort until the
city provides adequate beds to house all of its homeless.

The City Council placed a yearlong moratorium on demolition of about
240 Skid Row flophouses while officials try to balance affordable
housing needs against the conversion of older buildings to apartments
that can rent for more than $1,000 a month.

If all of the projects now under development are completed, the
number of housing units in downtown could more than double to nearly
40,000 in five years.

Some of the estimated 14,000 homeless people on Skid Row fear they
could be shuffled off to the suburbs to make room for those projects.
An ambitious plan by a group called Bring L.A. Home proposes the use
of temporary shelters throughout Los Angeles County.

"They don't want to get rid of homeless people, they just want to
move them around to where people won't see them," said Franklin
Smith, a homeless man who can often be found perched on a shopping
cart outside a small toy store along Skid Row.

Steve Van Zile, an executive with SRO Housing Corp., which
refurbishes old buildings and rents apartments for Advertisementas
little as $66 a month, said the housing boom is a concern for his
nonprofit organization.

"Finding properties is always the issue for us," he said. "It is
getting harder and harder," as the price of real estate rises.

Estela Lopez, who lives in the area, says the boom shouldn't be
blamed for Skid Row's dilemma, although it may have focused more
attention on a place she says has been in need of fixing for years.

"In my lifetime, the area has gone from being the Skid Row for people
who were down and out, down on their luck and needing help, to an
area that is violent, an area that is taking people's lives through
illness and disease and drug addiction or through stabbings and
fights," she said.

As executive director of the Central City East Business Association,
a pro-business and property owners group, Lopez helps lead nighttime
walks through Skid Row as part of her group's efforts to take back the streets.

"You'd be surprised how few people take us up on that offer," she
said, noting only four did on a recent walk.

One of those who didn't was Smith, a former dispatcher for a trucking company.

Like more than half of those on Skid Row, drugs and mental problems
appear to be his enemies. Although Smith said he's never been in
trouble with the law, he holds a lighter in one hand and a marijuana
cigarette in the other as he speaks, quickly flicking away the latter
when officers in a passing police cruiser give him the onceover.

He is one of about 3,000 people who sleep on Skid Row streets each
night, according to Don Spivack, deputy director of the County
Community Redevelopment Agency.

About 8,000 live in hotels that range from dirty flophouses with
little more than a cot and a hot plate, to clean, recently renovated
buildings like those run by SRO Housing Corp. Another 3,000 live
night-to-night in area shelters.

The unfunded plan released last month by Bring L.A. Home proposes
spending $12.4 billion to create 50,000 units of low-cost housing and
a handful of shelters throughout the county.

"The idea is to make it a stable neighborhood, as much as you can for
the population that you're dealing with," Spivack said.