How Do You Breathe Life into a Neighborhood That’s Been Forgotten?

General Jeff Page walked under the crooked backboard and onto the dusty concrete floor. The basketball court, one of two in downtown Los Angeles’s Gladys Park, seemed like it had once been painted green, now dulled to gray, marred by dirt and grime. General Jeff couldn’t find any basketballs, only deflated rubber kickballs that plopped onto the ground when he tried to dribble. Nearby, cardboard boxes and tents surrounded 40 single-room occupancy hotels and a couple of nonprofit missions. None of the squalor came as any surprise to General Jeff, who, in August 2006, was a brand-new arrival to Skid Row, an area that consists of 50 blocks and is home to a sizable chunk of the county’s 44,000 homeless residents, many of whom are black males struggling with substance abuse, mental illness and trauma. Compacted into one district that borders a resurgent downtown, Skid Row contains the largest concentration of unsheltered people in America.

Skid Row, in downtown Los Angeles, has the city’s largest concentration of homeless people who regularly live on the sidewalks in tents and cardboard boxes.

As General Jeff, an experienced basketball player, nailed jump shots (and retrieved bounceless rebounds under the basket), homeless guys sprawled under the shady queen palms and California sycamores, dodging the heat. When he took a break, a squat, elderly man waved him over. General Jeff thought he knew the guy — an old-timer, Manuel Benito Compito, known as “O.G. Man” on the streets. From beneath O.G.’s graying mustache came a gravelly voice: “Hey, man, I want you to help me start this basketball league.” General Jeff swiveled, looking for eager players. But the vagrant men on the sidelines were mostly gabbing or shuffling through their stuff. “I’ve only been on Skid Row a few months,” he explained. “I’m not sure I want to be involved,” he said and left.
After more pestering, General Jeff (whose name, he says, refers to his willingness to tackle any problem, like high-ranking military commanders do) gave into O.G.’s request. Over the course of a decade, he’d take on many more projects in the community: fixing streetlights, cleaning up trash, painting murals, setting up chess clubs and art collectives and fighting for a seat on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. People started calling him the unofficial mayor of Skid Row.
Jeff on the basketball court at Gladys Park.

From that shoddy basketball court, he and O.G. launched the Positive Movement, a paradigm shift asking Skid Row residents to reclaim their section of the city as a functioning neighborhood, rather than a containment zone. By offering more activities, the Positive Movement provides alternatives to drugs and other undesirable activities. In the process, as residents help themselves, the movement undoes the negative images of substance abuse that have tainted the area. As part of the initiative, next spring, Skid Row residents will ask their fellow downtown citizens to recognize the neighborhood as its own space. With this change in status, citizens would be able to make planning and land use decisions (such as preserving low-income housing from developers, advising city leaders on public transportation and policing and distributing a small coffer of funds for community projects). If downtown residents approve the change, the vote would mark the first time the city has recognized Skid Row as a unique neighborhood, rather than its unofficial status as a dumping ground for lost souls that don’t belong elsewhere in the City of Angels.
“As human beings, we adapt to our environment. And if the environment is completely negative, we’re going to adapt to that…When we talk about Skid Row, when we hear about it on paper, we think of it as a place of rehabilitation, just like a hospital where a human body can heal. But when you think of Skid Row and a hospital, you get two different visuals,” Gen. Jeff says. “As soon as you go into a hospital, the human subconscious, the mind will allow itself to heal. There’s a different smell, a sense of energy, sanitized rooms and walls. You go to Skid Row, and you say, ‘Oh no.’ This is dirty, this isn’t healthy, this isn’t good. It’s hard to heal and truly, naturally rehabilitate on Skid Row.”
Which is why General Jeff set out to change that feeling from the inside out.
This memorial tree was planted in memory of Barbara Brown, a homeless woman who died at the site.

General Jeff came to Skid Row from another notorious L.A. neighborhood: South Central, a place known for its race riots and gang violence. A rap producer who once worked with Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, “writing, producing, mixing, rapping, deejaying, pop, lock and dancing,” General Jeff says. “You name it, I’ve done it.” After traveling the world, he returned to South Central to organize community members to end gun violence, but ran into difficulties getting them to the table and gave up hope. When the bills started to mount, he gave up his place, stuffed a wad of cash in his sock and started sleeping on the street, finding shelter in warehouses and cooking food with heat lamps. When he moved to Skid Row, he carried two suitcases: one full of clothes, the other containing a drum set — his last tie to his former life. “I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t know why I am here. There’s no blueprint or degree or beacon of light,” he recalls. “The drum machine, that was reality.” He spent a few nights in the park, then at a mission (where men sleep in gigantic dorms with no privacy), before ending up in a single occupancy room (a type of housing for low-income individuals, where, to save on rent, they live alone in a tiny residence, often with a shared kitchen or bathroom) in one of the district’s many hotels, and meeting O.G. in Gladys Park.
General Jeff believes that the negativity of Skid Row can make it hard for residents to rehabilitate themselves, which is why he created the Positive Movement.

After the Vietnam War, servicemen flooded downtown, taking up residence in Skid Row’s dilapidated hotels and using cheap liquor and drugs to obliterate the memories of battle. From that point on, through the crack epidemic in the 1990s, chronic homelessness on Skid Row has been associated with substance abuse and recovery. A 1970 book, “Stations of the Lost: The Treatment of Skid Row Alcoholics,” found that most of the neighborhood’s homeless only spent one-third of the year without a roof over their heads; the rest of the time, they shuffled through jails, mental hospitals, rehab and the missions, before landing back on the streets. Forty-five years later, not much has changed, says O.G. “You go to Union Rescue Mission and spend some nights there. You relapse, then you go to the L.A. Mission. You relapse, then the Midnight Mission. You keep going next door,” he explains. That cycle reveals itself in L.A.’s extremely high percentage of chronically homeless individuals. About 15 percent of all the city’s unsheltered have been on the streets for more than a year or several times over three years. While there’s no data available on why this population remains homeless, it can be assumed that drugs and alcohol continue to play a role.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” one homeless woman from Las Vegas tells the L.A. Times in 2005, when three people died of an overdose on the same day. “People getting high on the streets like it was legal.”
In Skid Row especially, temptation is always around the corner. Most of the shelters let men out of the large dorms at 5 a.m., and some prevent them from reentering until the evening intake. With few constructive activities in the area, grabbing a beer might suddenly sound like an attractive way to pass the time during non-work hours. Add to that the armies of drug dealers and liquor store owners who profit at users’ expense. (One infamous profiteer, Recondal “Ricky” Wesco, is said to set up his beer cart outside rehab centers and hawk tall boys for just $2, undeterred by more than 50 arrests.) General Jeff feels that the infrastructure of Skid Row itself is designed for people to fail — making the Positive Movement’s “outlets” like basketball, chess, visual and dramatic arts so crucial to the neighborhood; they provide a better way for residents to occupy their time.
General Jeff helped get the mural in the background installed on Skid Row’s San Julian Street.

But as soon as these groups got off the ground, the basketball players asked for whistles, scoreboards and uniforms, and the photography club wondered if they could afford an extra camera. General Jeff realized he would need sustained funding to keep them around. Across Los Angeles, 96 elected neighborhood councils, which can range from seven to 30 members per board, are each allocated $42,000 by EmpowerLA, a city-funded umbrella organization, for discretionary use. General Jeff heard that the education committee of the council that oversees Skid Row — the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC, pronounced “dee-link”) — would be willing to help fund the Positive Movement’s operations, so he simply added an educational component to the basketball league. (The team would discuss various concepts, like teamwork, family, and punctuality before tip-off.) Pretty soon, the team sported jerseys emblazoned with “Skid Row Streetball League,” and the camera club had 10 new digital cameras and an exhibition timed with the Downtown Art Walk.
When General Jeff returned to DLANC a few weeks later to thank the council for the funds, a board member asked why the name “Skid Row” was printed on the jerseys. The elected official was ashamed of the name, painting it as a blight on downtown, General Jeff recalls of the tense meeting. Stating that players were proud to wear their community’s name on their chests, General Jeff argued that if Skid Row didn’t own up to its reputation, it would be easy for the rest of the city to forget about the homeless. After all, he’d seen it happen before. In 2003, “South Central” was renamed “South Los Angeles.” The rebranding effort scrubbed away the images of gang violence associated with the name — a boon to developers hoping for growth but a blow to activists wanting to launch a public relations campaign highlighting old issues that persisted onto the new map. After the meeting ended, General Jeff found out the angry board member was, in fact, his representative for “Central City East,” the preferred name for Skid Row among developers and bureaucrats. General Jeff had never considered a career in politics before, but wanting the person off DLANC, General Jeff ran against him and won in a landslide in 2008, capturing more than half the votes in a four-way race.
From his new position, General Jeff highlighted his neighbors’ concerns. Unlike elsewhere, city maintenance rarely happened in Skid Row. Streetlights burnt out (or were shattered by drug dealers seeking a cover of darkness) and weren’t replaced. Garbage and feces littered the gutters because trash cans and public restrooms in the area were limited out of concern they would become sites for drug use or trafficking. Along with O.G., General Jeff started a cleaning force to pick up trash and made a map of broken streetlights. His most significant battle on DLANC erupted in 2014, when a nonprofit developer wanted to bring in a restaurant with a liquor license on the ground floor of a permanent supportive housing unit that hosts recovery programs and addict support groups. DLANC board members, worried about the impact of pouring drinks around residents with histories of substance abuse and the steady encroachment of gentrification into the area’s borders, fought back. The Skid Row community largely won the fight, but General Jeff lost any goodwill with downtown business owners in the process.
All of General Jeff’s work of the past 10 years started to unravel last spring. He lost his post on DLANC to a newcomer, and he seemed disillusioned with the system. After homeless counts of Skid Row residents hovering roughly around 39,000 for several years, the numbers suddenly spiked to 44,359 people. Charities and public services strained to meet the need, but with no new housing lined up, a long-term solution wasn’t readily available.
Meanwhile, police relations, historically turbulent, frayed even further as law enforcement continued to crack down on residents. Since the launch of the Safer Cities Initiative in September 2006 (the program piloted in 2005), cops had begun to break up sidewalk encampments and issue tickets for minor infractions. Based on former police chief Bill Bratton’s theory of “broken windows,” (combating minor quality-of-life crimes like vandalism or public drinking as a way to keep order in urban areas and deter more serious crimes) law enforcement wrote 1,000 citations for jaywalking and loitering every month during the program’s first year, according to an independent UCLA study. (General Jeff has been arrested for loitering in 2013, but successfully fought the case at trial and avoided a conviction. A related charge of resisting arrest, however, resulted in a sentence of 20 days of community service.) Tensions came to a head in March 2015 when police approached Charly Leundeu Keunang, a 43-year-old Cameroonian national living on Skid Row, known to his friends as “Africa,” and tried to take him into custody for a suspected robbery. Keunang, mentally ill and high on meth at the time, reached for the gun in an officer’s holster. After a brief scuffle, six shots were fired, hitting Keunang in the chest, torso and left arm. Bystanders captured his death on camera, and it was viewed millions of times on Facebook. Skid Row might have looked safer to outsiders, but it didn’t feel that way to its residents.
A memorial in the spot where Charly Leundeu Keunang was shot and killed.

Skid Row citizens have a different set of priorities for day-to-day life, where staying sober or getting to work is an accomplishment, says John Malpede, an artist who started “the other LAPD,” the Los Angeles Poverty Department, an arts group for those who live or work in Skid Row, 30 years ago. “We’re the biggest recovery community anywhere. Skid Row is a resource for not only all of Los Angeles, but also for all of Southern California. It’s a place where there are services and an understanding and a long-term community that suits the needs of people who are suffering from all kinds of disabilities and traumas, whether it be domestic abuse or wars or addiction,” says Malpede, who came to Skid Row to work at a free legal clinic and began offering art workshops when the lawyers weren’t around. “We’re tarred and feathered on a daily basis. They always say there’s drugs and alcohol on Skid Row. Well, there is everywhere, and it’s also true that there are 80 recovery meetings run by community members every week. It’s a very sophisticated recovery culture.”
General Jeff decided to solidify that ethos by creating Skid Row’s own neighborhood council. Through it, Skid Row residents could fight developers to preserve the $365 median rents in the area and other low-income housing, prevent businesses from acquiring liquor licenses and fund community programs. In formation meetings chaired by General Jeff, residents have been discussing the board’s ideal structure. They’ll submit a formal application to break away from DLANC in October, and then start campaigning for the special election that could happen as early as spring 2017. There’s one main issue standing in the neighborhood’s way: a previous requirement that each council must oversee a minimum of 20,000 residents; the Skid Row zip code, according to city data, was just 8,096. Stephen Box, a spokesperson for EmpowerLA, confirmed that the average neighborhood council serves 40,000 residents. But he also pointed out that councils represent communities that greatly differ in size, from the massive 103,364 people served by Wilshire Center-Koreatown’s group to the tiny 7,323 residents in Elysian Valley Riverside.
“We’re getting up and doing something positive for ourselves. We’re not waiting for a handout or even a hand up,” says General Jeff.

“Historically, going back to stereotypes, they’re all drunks bums and addicts. They’re all panhandlers. They don’t contribute anything productive to society. ‘Why don’t you get up and do a job? Why don’t you do something?’” General Jeff squeaks in a high-pitched voice, imitating his critics talk about Skid Row community members. “Let me tell you, that’s what we’re doing,” he says. “We’re getting up and doing something positive for ourselves. We’re not waiting for a handout or even a hand up. We feel that we have something to contribute. We want to add our voice to the conversation that dictates our future.”
Come election season, General Jeff and his neighbors will see whether the rest of downtown is willing to let them assume decision-making power — or whether the poor of Los Angeles will continue to be voiceless.

L.A.’s New Homeless Shelter Offers More Than Just Four Walls and a Roof to Those in Need

When most of us think of helping the homeless, images of homeless shelters and food kitchens probably come to mind, not community gardens and running tracks. But Los Angeles thought the latter would be beneficial, so that’s what they developed.
The City of Angels and the Skid Row downtown area, in particular, has a chronic homeless problem. And since other policies and endeavors haven’t worked, the city decided to try something different. So they built the Star Apartment complex.
Not only does the 15,000-square-foot apartment complex offer 102 units, but it also boasts a community garden, library, running track, art room and exercise facility.  The purpose of the apartments is to instill a sense of normalcy for the residents — all of whom were previously homeless.
“The community that lives here should have a similar environment to anybody that could afford something more expensive,” Star Apartments designer Michael Maltzan tells the L.A. Times.
Sharing the building is L.A. County’s Department of Health Services Housing for Health Division. Using a variety of services, the Department works to improve the lives and health of the county’s homeless. Over the next 10 years, the Department’s goal is to provide housing for 10,000 people, according to the Huffington Post.
All of this is possible due to the efforts of the Skid Row Housing Trust, which helps find affordable homes for those with disabilities, poor health, mental illness and addiction and the low-income. In order to finance Star Apartments, the Trust received low-income housing tax credit equity from Bank of America and the National Equity Fund.
Any occupant of the Star Apartment complex who earns a salary must allocate 30 percent of it to their rent.
While it may seem that providing housing and amenities for the homeless would be costly to taxpayers and the city, it’s actually saving money. According to the 2014 study by the Central Florida Commission of Homeless, right now it costs about $31,000 a year to provide for one homeless person (due to the high cost of paying for medical and psychiatric hospitalization, jail time and emergency rooms), whereas operating the Star Apartments will only cost about $10,000 per resident for a year.
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A Parade of Hope: L.A.’s Skid Row Celebrates Its Community

The 52-square-block area in Los Angeles known as Skid Row is home to the densest population of homeless in the United States. In addition to those living on the streets, there are an additional 7,000 people residing in subsidized apartments or welfare hotels in the area. Many of these residents suffer from mental illness or substance abuse. But last Saturday, this distressed community was recognized for something other than its plights.
Skid Row residents congregated at Gladys Park, where they began the celebration of the second annual Walk The Talk parade, put on by Los Angeles Poverty Department, a local theater company. Neighborhood leaders and community members danced as the Mudbug Brass Band played to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
The event, billed as a project that combines performance, visual art, and community conversations, celebrates the downtrodden area’s sense of community among the more than 3,400 people living in homeless shelters and on the sidewalks of Skid Row.

“It’s a demonstration of Skid Row culture,” said Manuel “OG” Compito, a local who spearheads a three-on-three streetball league at Gladys Park. “And it does have a culture.”

Stanford University students on an urban art walking tour and Christian students from Sunnyvale, California, handing out hygiene kits, joined in the fun while onlookers enjoyed a mobile gallery featuring a Skid Row history display.
MORE: Meet the Couple Who Dedicated Their Entire Life Fighting for the Homeless

Skid Row preacher Pastor Cue Jn’marie adds the parade also aims to give those suffering from mental illness, depression, or addiction a celebration of hope.

“You never know who’s struggling,” Jn’marie said. “And this is the trigger they need to improve their lives.”

The parade wound along Gladys Park northwest to 5th and Main streets, stopping along the way for the Poverty Department’s sketches, which honored local activists and leaders like General Jeff Page.

Page, a member of the downtown neighborhood council, is a “proud resident of Skid Row.” The local activist and one-time hip-hop entrepreneur has spoken up for the community to bring clean drinking water, chess tables, shaded refuge, and a basketball court to Gladys Park.

Former Skid Row resident Stephanie Bell, 51, attended the parade and was even featured in some of the skits.

“I have seen a vision of all the people here dressed in suits and dresses, high heels, just like in uptown, going to their jobs,” Bell said. “It can happen.”

For many of Skid Row’s residents, including Compito, the parade acknowledges that the area is indeed a community, and that it’s only getting larger and prouder.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Compito said.

Meet the Couple Who Dedicated Their Entire Life Fighting for the Homeless

For decades, the 54-block stretch of downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row has been home to the largest concentration of homeless people in the country. While much of the city’s population marches towards revitalizing the area, a seasoned couple has dedicated their lives to standing up for those left behind.
Jeff Dietrich, 68, and nearly 80-year-old Catherine Morris have spent their lives sticking up for L.A.’s most underserved community: The homeless. The two are often found at the Hippie Kitchen, a soup kitchen located on 6th Street, where the couple joins a team handing out 5,000 hot plates of food each week, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Despite their efforts to serve the poor, Dietrich and Morris have not always been popular. They’ve been arrested more than 40 times and have even faced criticism from within their own religious organization. Notorious for their range of protests —  from rallying against nuclear arms and Army recruitment to the first Gulf War to the groundbreaking of a $200 million cathedral — Dietrich and Morris have also been perceived as preventing growth in one of the poorest areas in the city.
Indeed, Los Angeles is home one of the largest homeless populations in the country. According to a 2013 report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), L.A. had the highest percentage — about 80 percent — of homeless people without shelter as well as the largest amount of chronically homeless, Politico reports. About 14,840 homeless people, many whom suffer from mental disorders to drug addiction, live in L.A. — 5,000 of which call Skid Row home.
“We’re known as the homeless enablers,” Dietrich told the Times. “Yes, we believe in enabling people living on the streets, people who’ve been discarded by society, so they can live with as much dignity as possible. I guess that’s right, homeless enablers is what we are.”
The two also championed an initiative to provide homeless people with shopping carts to serve as mobile storage. Despite public outcry from business owners downtown, a judge ruled that the carts could not be seized, which some considered detrimental to revitalization efforts.
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The pair first met while volunteering at the Hippie Kitchen as a part of the Catholic Worker, an organization that sprang from the Great Depression and created a movement of people living in poverty while helping society’s most vulnerable members.
Morris was on a year-long hiatus from her job as a principal at a posh Pasadena school while Dietrich was returning from a trip to Europe after he refused the Vietnam War draft. The two fell in love and Morris left the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus to marry him in 1974.
Catholic Worker volunteers operated out of an old Victorian home, which can house up to 30 people at a time. It is kept scant to convey the sense of being poor, and Morris and Dietrich still reside there with just 12 workers — half of which are older than 50.
But the two are resolute to carry on their work despite a lack of successor. They don’t preach or ask for any federal aid and instead focus on what’s important: Helping the poor.
That attitude is inspirational to some like Father Tom Rausch, a Jesuit priest and professor at Loyola Marymount, who points out that their work aligns with Pope Francis’s vision for the future of their church.
“I think finally we have a pope in line with the Catholic Workers,” Rausch said. “If he were a simple priest living in Los Angeles, he’d be with them. Times have changed. There’s a sense that the work they are doing is validated by Francis, that he is saying the kinds of things they have been saying for years, and that has to feel very good to them.”

Meet the Incredible Boy Who Proves You’re Never Too Young to Volunteer

After a visit to Los Angeles’ historically disadvantaged Skid Row at the age of 4, little Jonas Corona knew he had to help. As the TODAY show reports, the preschooler couldn’t get the image of homeless children out of his mind. Wanting to do more to help, his mom quickly signed her young son up to volunteer at shelters and charity programs so he could help out every day. However, because Jonas was so young, he was only allowed to volunteer once a month.
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Undeterred, when Jonas was 6, he started his own non-profit called, Love in the Mirror that works to help homeless and disadvantaged youth in need. Jonas, now 10, and his other young volunteers collect food, clothing, books and other supplies to donate it to programs like Casa Youth Shelter that provides a temporary roof and counseling services to youth in crisis.
“It’s not right for kids and adults to be on the streets having nothing. Everybody should have a home, everybody should have a place to eat or live,” Jonas told TODAY. “Everyone should have something.”