Central LA, long given over to industry and skid row, now struggles to address the problem of rebuilding the center city to attract residents who don’t want to stumble over homeless campers or be accosted by aggressive panhandlers in the process.
The homeless need a home, and services to become able to maintain it.
This is the Housing First approach in a nutshell, and is the option we proposed in our report last year on the same problem occurring in the Lower Reach area of the Parkway. (on our website)
This has been since adopted by Sacramento, but unfortunately not in the scattered-site housing method we prefer, instead looking at large-scale congregated housing, which doesn’t solve the problem for other residents or the homeless in the optimal method.
Scattered-site housing, (renting subsidized units from existing landlords throughout the area) reduces the congregating of the homeless that is now the problem in downtowns in LA and here.
An excerpt.
L.A. renaissance
Downtown revival trips over homeless
By Laura Mecoy - Bee Los Angeles BureauPublished 12:00 am PDT Saturday, October 21, 2006
In just four years, movie crews have replaced the drug dealers and junkies on the sidewalk outside the historic downtown building where Bill Cooper lives.
Restaurants and art galleries are opening in nearby storefronts, and loft dwellings are filling up the old office buildings.
"Definitely, the renaissance of downtown is well under way," Cooper said. "From the moment I came downtown to the old bank district, I just felt this was going to be a new frontier."
Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis that writer Dorothy Parker once described as "72 suburbs in search of a city," turned its downtown over to business decades ago.
Now it's bringing restaurants, retail and residents back to the city's core. Downtown denizens claim their neighborhoods soon could be pulsing with life 24/7 because of two new developments and last week's announcement of the first high-rise office tower in the central city in 14 years.
But the 1,800 homeless people living on downtown's Skid Row continue to plague efforts to reinvigorate the heart of the city.
