The vulnerability index on Skid Row

I know, I know. It’s already been a few days after Thanksgiving, but I’m still recovering from a food coma that just won’t seem to go away. At least I can still spare myself of the Black Friday experience, an Armageddon over the last parking space too small and wool sweater that won’t fit. That said, after the psychedelic trips resulting from copious amounts of turkey, leftovers, and American consumer capitalism, it’s hard to turn back to Skid Row. After all, gluttony and excess don’t necessarily resonate well with the estimated 74,000 homeless individuals in L.A. County.

But in the spirit of the holiday season (which hopefully for all Americans is a time of giving back to those in need), I’ve turned to the county’s new plan to address homelessness in Los Angeles. According to this recent article published in the Los Angeles Daily News, this past Tuesday L.A. County Supervisors approved Project 50, a plan that aims to identify the 50 most vulnerable individuals on Skid Row and move them into supportive housing.

Modeled after projects already underway in New York City and elsewhere, Project 50 hopes to save the lives of “those most likely to die on the streets,” said this recent LA Times article. These are also the same individuals who have run up the biggest bills in the county, costing tax payers millions of dollars in cycling through emergency medical rooms, shelters and jails.

At the same time, these individuals are considered “anchors” or people of authority among the chronically homeless – classified as one-third of the county’s 74,000 homeless people who have lived on the streets for a year or more and have disabilities such as AIDS or mental illness. As a “block captain” on Skid Row, other men and women look up to these people, learning their street smarts them and gaining street cred.

In turn, officials expect that these 50 individuals will inspire others to seek help.

“In the social hierarchy that exists on the streets, these anchors are at the top of the food chain,” said Board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky. “What's happened in other parts of the country is when the anchors are brought in off the streets, a good percentage of the other people who are marginally homeless access services, too. They kind of follow the lead of the anchors.”

The county has set an estimated budget of $800,000 for services to the fifty people. One homeless individual can cost from $40,000 to $100,000 per year for shelter, incarceration and emergency room care. But in terms of supportive, permanent housing, these costs range from $14,000 to $25,000, said Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor who has studied homelessness. The City’s Skid Row Housing Trust is set to provide apartment housing for these 50 individuals by February.

Experts say that placing the chronically homeless in permanent housing with ready access to social services is much more effective than providing them with temporary shelter. The chronically homeless are “fragile in terms of both physical and psychological health,” said Phillip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on homelessness. “Delivering the treatment and other services that they need is more effectively done when a person is in a stable location.”

Blasi adds that 85 percent of homeless individuals who live in supportive housing stay off the streets.

Critics charge that the program targets too small of a group of people in what is largely acknowledged as the nation’s largest homeless population. And to that, county officials say that they plan to eventually expand the program across Skid Row and elsewhere, pointing to the strategy in New York City, known as Street to Home, initiated by Common Ground. The Times Square project helped house more than 90% of the homeless people living in that part of Manhattan. Common Ground is currently expanding this model in areas of Brooklyn and Queens.

The expectation that the project will eventually include more people is debatable. And if more individuals are included, will the numbers make enough of a difference in the future? Some homelessness advocates agree, saying that a slow, but steady approach is better than nothing at all.

But is Project 50 the right model for Los Angeles (apparently with the worst homelessness problem in the nation)? Skid Row alone is population to an estimated, but varying 8,000 homeless people, according to this recent article in GOOD magazine. And with that, the faces of Skid Row are changing. Yes, there are the Vietnam veterans, drug dealers, coke addicts, and criminals. But within this city within a city, there are also families living out of cars and single mothers moving their children in and out of the infamous Ford Hotel. And we can’t forget the faces of recent immigrants, unsuccessful white-collar workers, divorced ex-husbands, failed fathers, and the list goes on.

These faces are not only changing, but they are moving – moving around in a county that is approximately 4,060 square miles. As multi-million dollar lofts in downtown continue to be renovated within a spitting distance from Skid Row, luxury BMW’s and Mercedes vehicles drive along San Julian St. – a true testament to the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor in this city. Moreover, these groups are having to make home elsewhere…and elsewhere again, with current transient trends moving toward Boyle Heights.

Today, young professionals don’t even have to think twice about when and where to find their next, new luxury apartment. Nearby, the homeless residents of Skid Row and L.A. County have been waiting for an eternity for a roof over their head. And with Project 50 underway, it seems that for the remaining 73,950 homeless, they’ll just have to wait some more.

Additional Sources:

(New York Times) Some Respite, if Little Cheer, for Skid Row Homeless
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/us/31skidrow.html

Gang series: Part I

For leaders of the Mexican Mafia, “stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” According to this recent LA Times article, much of the gang violence in L.A. starts behind bars – even if prisons are hundreds of miles away. The emphasis here is not so much on the fights and altercations between inmates and rival gang members, but on the orders issued by imprisoned gang leaders.

On the street is where these edicts are enacted, where battles for drugs, money, resources and territory meet concrete with blood. The latest of these calls to battle?

Ethnic cleansing.

Under orders from imprisoned leaders of the Mexican Mafia (La Eme), Florencia 13 (F 13s) gang members allegedly attempted to “cleanse” their neighborhood of rival black gangs. But so much for getting the ‘bad’ guys – or other bad guys, I should say. It turns out that the numerous assaults and murders “extended to innocent citizens who ended up being shot simply because of the color of their skin,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien.

But there were some exceptions to this rule – that is, when money is involved. Latino gangs allegedly sold large amounts of drugs and sometimes guns to blacks, including Crips gang members. At any rate, near the end of October, 102 people – mostly members of Florencia 13, based in Huntington Park and the Florence-Firestone neighborhood – were charged with illegal drug and weapons sales, conspiracy and racketeering.

According to this article in CityBeat, news of these charges comes as a sense of vindication for some and a bitter pill to swallow for others. Many black and Latino community activists have struggled for years to get law enforcement and city leaders to admit that many of the racially-charged murders in the area are intrinsically gang-related – particularly comprising pieces of the Mexican Mafia’s larger plot to cleanse their neighborhoods of the black population. And while law enforcement and prosecutors have admitted before that some Latino gangs have attacked innocent victims based on race, this is the first time that the Justice Department has publicly disclosed the Mexican Mafia’s racist agenda – one that is also against prison blacks and includes known collaborations with the Aryan Brotherhood.

For Florencia 13, one of the largest street gangs in the city, racially-charged murders operate as one function in a complexity of organized crime. Members have been ordered to tax prostitutes, ice cream vendors, taxi operators and dealers of fake green cards. At the same time, networks of shooters, gunrunners and drug dealers rule the streets. And as we’ve just witnessed, organized crime is still just as organized behind bars.

In April 2007, Villaraigosa issued his “Gang Reduction Strategy” in response to the recent increase in gang-related crime (14% from 2006), despite the city’s decline in overall crime for the fifth straight year. In the report, the mayor called for a “comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained” approach to combating gangs. While devoting more resources toward arrest and prosecution of gang members, Villaraigosa stressed that prevention, intervention and re-entry are key tools of the trade.

Funny, this model sounds a lot like what Father Gregory Boyle has been doing in Boyle Heights for the past 20 years. It’s no wonder the mayor’s office has based its strategy on the results of the federally-funded Gang Reduction Program (GRP) that reduced gang-related crime by 44% in the area. Father G and Homeboy Industries were a large part of that success.

But this recent article in GOOD magazine highlights Chief Bratton’s announcement in January that gangs will be met by an “unprecedented collaboration” of resources from the FBI, LAPD and other local agencies. The article also hints that the city’s official plan is to “pursue the most notorious gangs and hope for a trickle-down effect to curb the violence.”

However, with all this emphasis on suppression, it comes at no surprise why gang violence is still a viable option for even younger and younger crowds in Los Angeles. “Cops often overstate the problem,” said Boyle in an interview with GOOD magazine. “[The city’s] treatment plan is bad because the diagnosis is bad. If you can fix what they’re fleeing from, then you’ve done a lot.”

What they’re fleeing from is what the mayor identifies as the most problematic of social conditions – poverty, a failing education system, domestic abuse, negative parenting, child abuse and neglect, and the tolerance of the gang culture. (Of course, as if we didn’t already know this from before). And in addition to calling a war on gangs, Villaraigosa also calls on a war on social ills.

But tough talk on crime and social ills is cheap. Father G once said “building prisons to address crime is a little bit like building graveyards to address AIDS…it’s ridiculous.”

At any rate, I’m just wondering if the mayor’s words and plans can count for much now, several months after the issuance of his report. For some reason – as we’ve seen with organized crime – turning words into action seems to work out better for gangs than civil institutions.

America, the land of selective milk and honey

If it’s one thing that Americans are good at, it’s crushing dreams.

According to our clear understanding of immigration, maybe that’s because we’ve recently decided that what this country doesn’t need is the potential for new doctors, teachers, lawyers and soldiers. Instead, we’ve opted for the persistence of a permanent underclass – the underskilled, undereducated maids, dishwashers, and gardeners of America.

Just short of eight votes, the Senate recently rejected the DREAM Act – the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors – a bill that offers a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants if they serve two years in the military or complete two years of higher education.

By voting down the bill, the Senate also turned down the potential pool of 500,000 new soldiers, their chance at college, the possibility of greater contributions to the economy and any real progress toward immigration reform.

Under the DREAM Act, illegal immigrants who have entered the country before the age of 16 and have lived in this country for at least five years can receive conditional residency status. These children would have to complete high school, possess no criminal records and exhibit a “good moral character.” In the extension of state financial aid to undocumented students attending state universities and colleges, conditional residency status can be lifted if these individuals have spent at least two years in college or in the military. Finally after five years, these individuals can qualify for permanent legal residency, obtaining a green card in the step toward citizenship.

Bi-partisan support of the DREAM Act, including co-sponsor and author Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, hoped that the bill would be one of several, less-ambitious measures to pass, comprising a “compassionate and pragmatic” approach that would eventually lead to more comprehensive reform. But with its rejection, the debate on the immigration issue has yet again taken a nasty turn toward a familiar state of indecision born from bigotry and fear.

Colorado senator and Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo urged the Immigration and Customs Enforecement Agency to raid a press conference in which Durbin featured students who would benefit from the act. Accordingly, Tancredo charged: “I don't expect Dick Durbin to be able to tell the difference between legal residents and illegal aliens.”

Funny, I don’t expect Tancredo to be able to tell the difference between his own racism and xenophobia.

In any event, objections of amnesty were grounded on the extension of benefits to illegal immigrants – the same benefits originally reserved for legal residents. And of course the other principle objection was based on the provision of incentives for more people to immigrate to the U.S. illegally.

But since the failure of the Senate’s proposed measure on comprehensive immigration reform in June, this recent failure of the DREAM Act leaves an even more daunting outlook on this already tiresome issue. After all, if we can’t start with the kids now, how are we to come to any resolution for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants that already live here? And what about the 750,000 people who make their way into the country every year? How are we to arrive at any resemblance of comprehensive immigration reform if we aren’t willing to take the baby steps to get there?

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 100,000 children would have been affected by the bill, while the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates over 500,000. At any rate, these children have grown up on American soil for most of their lives. They have been educated in our schools and already speak English in addition to their language of origin. For them, assimilation has brought them even farther away from a home country that they may no longer know. Deportation, in all irrationality, remains for them. And still we say no.

After a high school education, these children are left hung out to dry. No legal citizenship status means few windows of opportunity. And so the number of people limited to a path of dead-end jobs and a life in the shadows remains large and ever-increasing.

The DREAM Act’s rejection, therefore, is simply another lost opportunity at strengthening the country. We have let go of soldiers and more educated taxpayers, of skilled graduates and the benefits they bring to American businesses. Ultimately, we have forgone potential, talent and principle out of the imminent, yet blinding fear of invaders and displacement of resources.

The DREAM Act had opened a future to those who were deprived of one, simply because of the inheritance of their parents’ undocumented status. Instead the act’s failure criminalized them for a residency status that they were not responsible for – for a stigma that they remain chained to.

And still, in a country that champions the rewards of hard work, the bootstrap model is the archetype. Since preschool (if some of us are lucky enough to have experienced it), we are taught to imagine, dream and be who we want to be. It doesn’t matter who your parents are, or what your past entails. Work hard to overcome difficulties and in time you’ll reach your goals.

But even in America, dreams are discriminatory.