"Hey, I'm down here at the Union Rescue Mission. I'm going to sleep on the streets. They say the rats are as big as cats." (philosophy major, venture capitalist, and former Mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan)
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/nov/09/local/la-me-banks-20101109
A night on L.A.'s skid row
Do-gooders find that charity is complicated on the streets
November 09, 2010|Sandy Banks
Last weekend I paid visits to struggling San Fernando Valley families in need of Christmas charity. They were crammed into crowded houses and consigned to shabby garages. They skimped on meals and slept on beds with no sheets.
This weekend, I took a step further down the economic ladder and spent Saturday night on a skid row sidewalk outside the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles. Inside, hundreds of people, most of them homeless, were finishing dinner and settling on folding cots.
I was there at the invitation of Peter Samuelson, a philanthropist trying to promote his invention: a rolling shelter with a mattress and tarp that folds up to resemble a shopping cart. He imagines them lining skid row mobile homes for folks sleeping on sidewalks.
He calls it an EDAR, for Everyone Deserves A Roof. About 200 have been distributed through shelters and community groups. They're not cheap $500 apiece to produce. Samuelson hopes publicity will spur donations to the foundation he created to build and donate them.
I assume he also hopes to shake a few bucks from his other guest that night, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who has given tens of millions of dollars to worthy causes. Riordan had taken him up on a dare, Samuelson said, to spend a night sleeping on skid row "and see how the homeless live."
The evening had the feel of a sightseeing trek, with Riordan on his cellphone to a friend: "Hey, I'm down here at the Union Rescue Mission. I'm going to sleep on the streets. They say the rats are as big as cats."
But the amusement faded as the sun went down, and we rolled our EDARs around to the back of the building, on a soulless stretch of San Julian Street. Tough-looking men hooted at us as we pushed past the news cameras, for making them the backdrop of our sideshow.
As we decamped on the filthy sidewalk, Samuelson's entourage huddled to the side, wondering, no doubt, why Sugar Bear, the large security guard we were promised, wasn't there. Union Rescue Mission director Andy Bales was facing off a trio of young toughs who accused him of snitching on a drug dealer. Riordan was wandering through the crowd, pleased that more folks recognized him there than on his visits to our newspaper office.
I was trying not to see giant rats running along the gutter or breathe air that reeked of urine, malt liquor and marijuana.
Seyoum Habtemarian, a reed-thin man who described himself as "full-time homeless," wandered up, dinner plate in hand, as we uncoupled our mobile shelters. "Can I get one?" Habtemarian asked. His eyes lit up when Samuelson unzipped a tarp, unfolded the sides and began explaining how it functioned. "You can take it. Just don't let it out of your sight," Samuelson said, promising a chain and a padlock for it.
It must have felt like a winning lottery ticket to a man used to sleeping on hard, cold streets. But I felt a chill as I watched Habtemarian push off with his gift into the dark, past the fellows bedding down on grimy cardboard.
How far do you think he'll get before someone steals it? I asked. Samuelson sighed. "I tell them if someone tries to take it, let them have it." Even thieves need a place to sleep, he said. "It's enough to know that one less person will be bedding down on a cold sidewalk."
It would be nice if skid row charity was that simple.
The question "Can I get one?" was repeated all night. But so too were cautions and concerns that the contraptions could be used to victimize women and hide abuse or would be stolen and traded for drugs. Their relative luxury and scarcity, it seems, might only fortify the cruel Darwinian logic of skid row streets.
"You make a man comfortable on the streets, he loses his incentive to improve," warned a man with soft eyes and scarred hands that shook as he lighted a cigarette. "I had to get tired enough of life in the streets to get it together on my own" and earn a spot in a single-room-occupancy hotel, he told me.
A woman named Gloria six years on the street worried that the mobile shelters would mark their owners as targets. "It's a good idea, but only if you have enough for everyone," she said, peering underneath the tarp to appraise the sleeping space.
"Because if some people have them and some people don't, people will be trying to beat up each other to get one. They fight about way less than that. Somebody will get killed over one of them EDARs here."
But the next morning, a dozen EDARs went out to an elderly woman sleeping blanket-less in flip-flops, to a lady in a wheelchair whose friend goes without sleep to watch out for her, to a gnome-like women who passed the night maniacally sweeping the sidewalk clean. And to Elzie and Ron, men perpetually down on their luck; and to Reggie, who was dozing in a chair until a woman enraged because he didn't have a light for her cigarette smashed it in the street and took off.
Mission director Bales knows it's not enough. What people who are homeless need more than a rolling mattress "is a connection to a community," someone willing to listen to their stories and able to help them manage their problems, he said.
Late Saturday night he dispatched a security guard to pick up a batch of food from McDonald's for us. A few hours later, he was handing out the extra hamburgers to the gang members who had threatened him.
It's not enough, food and shelter. But that night, it would have to do.