Skid Row

Everyone who comes to LA seems to be struck by Skid Row, a 5 block by 5 block area of 5,000 or so homeless people, living in Single Room Occupancy hotels, one of the numerous shelters, or on the street. In the 1970s, the city government pursued a policy based on the "containment theory" that if homeless people were consistently dropped off in this area by the police, and social services, mental health services and charities were centralized here, then the homeless population could be out of the way and controlled. Today, Skid Row is a residential community, a transitional place, and home to a whole bundle of complex issues: race, dependency, gentrification, addiction, apathy, injustice.

Since there is so much good literature out there, I'll let others do my work for me.

Skid Row Video

Tonight I was walking through Skid Row with some other young adults in my group. Later, inside a church that has Wednesday night karaoke ministry, I started talking to a man who had seen me earlier on the street. We were joking about how white people usually mean free sandwiches in those parts. At first, I was saddened by the stereotypes put on me because of my light skin. Then, I realized, outside of a church group, a white girl maybe wouldn't come into Skid Row with a smile on her face, and meet everyone's eye and say hello. In fact, if I were walking by myself at dusk to catch a bus, I wouldn't make any eye contact. So maybe they had me pinned pretty good.

Yet, the reconciliation that happens through the conversations and a handed-over sandwich can be very real, even if the circumstances that get both sides of the exchange where they are, to either give or receive, seem so wrong. It was a good reminder that sometimes stereotypes come from the same place as truth and that almost always, cynicism is the wrong response to something that is confusing. Laughing and swallowing one's pride in a large adam's-apple-popping gulp is usually the right response.

This was the demographic of skid row when the midnight mission (one of the sites where I'll be volunteering this summer) started sobering up and feeding up people almost 100 years ago.



I won't get into the theories about the demographic shifts or the policies that brought an end to one era and the beginning of another tonight, but let's just say it gets my head a-churning.