Where do you fall? The homeless can now sleep on sidewalks from 9pm to 6am, not only on skid row, but all over L. A.! Disney took a big step in saving its resort district in Anaheim, and keeping affordable housing construction out of the immediate area. Doesn't it hurt people to defecate where they sleep? Doesn't it hurt Anaheim to "bite the hand that made it"? Are you in favor of housing the homeless over civic development?

Ahh....this should have come w/ a poll. Until the city can offer services in the form mainly of housing for the homeless where else will they sleep? Oh well, thank Reagan and your parents who voted for him......"pull yourself up by your bootsraps", "rugged individualism", the shrinking of government spending on big social programs was steeped in all kind of race/class doo-doo.:fart:

pro-devlopement, i think, is pro-people. I think, if you're going to build in skid-row (and charge a huge amount of money) then you should pay for some form of extremely low or no income housing for the people being displaced..ie, homeless. it's a win-win situation, i'd like to think...in my own la-la land fairytale.

It's interesting that this topic is brung up, since Yahoo has come out with this article:

Los Angeles remains US homeless capital

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Los Angeles remains the United States homeless capital with more than 40,000 people sleeping rough every night, official figures showed Thursday.

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Figures released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) showed that there were 40,144 people living on the streets of the city out of a population of around four million.

Across the entire region of Los Angeles county, which has a population of around 10 million, there were 73,000 homeless, the LAHSA study found.

The last major survey of homelessness in the city two years ago found 88,000 homeless, although because of changes to the methods used to reach the totals, the two tallies are not comparable, the study said.

Nevertheless, Los Angeles remains the city with the United States' worst homeless problem, said LAHSA executive director Rebecca Isaacs.

"The situation is still extremely serious. Clearly, a great deal of work remains to be done to reduce end homelessness in our county," Isaacs said.

Of the 73,000 homeless, 10,000 were minors, 24,505 suffered from a mental illness, 8,453 were military veterans and nearly 7,200 were victims of domestic abuse.


Now, I remember reading about a project in the Downtown News Quarterly Update about a homeless shelter placed in Skid Row:

Donald T. Sterling Homeless Center

Real estate mogul and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald T. Sterling announced in April that he had purchased land at the corner of Sixth and Wall streets in Skid Row. Sterling said he intended to move forward with a $50 million homeless center. According to the most recent information available, partners and service providers are still being sought and no specific plan has been submitted to the city. Sterling has said he wants the building to include a medical and legal center as well as a homeless court. NA

If that article from Yahoo is correct, it sounds like somebody needs to get on the ball as in yesterday and get that shelter built with the quicknesss.

This a serious problem for the county, it has been and it remains to be. The city with the most # of millionaires also has the worst homeless problem.......only the City Of Angels could pull this one off and I've said it before, LA is an as close reflection of the US that any city can give you. I've always been a supporter of keeping the homeless centralized so they can have easy access to services and transportation. Your shiny new dowtown will not be built without a homeless presence......and so be it!
Over a 1/3 are mentally disturbed and roughly 1/4 are minors!!!! What the fuck is wrong w/ this country? This is a national embarrasment.

What I find amazing is that we have enough homeless in our county to make a small city, which is a down right disgrace to not only our city, but our country as well. It kind of looks shitty on us when we have all of this development going around the city but we refuse to pay attention to our homeless problem.

If that shelter can integrate a educational and job placement program for the homeless as well, that would be the first step in helping out those who dwell in our streets. I'm just glad that someone is actually willing to donate that much money to create a shelter. The only thing to do now is to get the shelter the green light.

Homelessness really is a crisis in America. I think Reagan 's full assault on the mental health sector while he was governor is a big reason for this state's homeless glut. Nearly all states have shunned mental health institutions but that is where a lot of these adult individuals belong.

Pennsylvania used to have a great model for a mental hospital. You would ship all the homeless to certain hospital communities where they could grow their own food, go to school, hold religious services, put on performances, etc etc really just create a self-sustaining community among themselves. PA used to have their hospitals set up like this. It was not very taxing on the budget and lets these individuals live a life of dignity albeit unglamorous. Of course even in the keystone state these hospitals are being dismantled piece by piece. :(

City, ACLU Settle Street Sleeping Case
Some Satisfied, but Few Happy With Compromise on Skid Row

by Evan George

The city of Los Angeles and the ACLU announced last week that they have reached a settlement on a dispute centered around arresting homeless people for sleeping on city streets.


Tents on the streets of Skid Row. Last Wednesday, the City Council and the ACLU announced they had settled a lawsuit over street sleeping. It will allow encampments to rise throughout the city between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., as long as they are at least 10 feet from a doorway or business entrance. Photo by Gary Leonard.
The new agreement essentially allows people to sleep on sidewalks from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. in all parts of the city, except within 10 feet of a building entrance, business or driveway.

The deal also says that police may begin enforcing the longstanding law that prohibits street sleeping once the city builds 1,250 units of supportive housing. That could take more than three years, according to city officials. At least 50% of those units would rise in Downtown.
The City Council voted in closed session on Tuesday, Oct. 9, to accept the terms of the settlement, which Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also backed. A previous compromise brokered by city leaders, which would have allowed street sleeping on Skid Row but not citywide, was rejected by the City Council in September 2006.

The settlement marks the end of proceedings that began with a 2003 lawsuit brought by six homeless people represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. In ruling on that case, "Jones v. City of Los Angeles," in April, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined the city could not arrest people for sleeping on the sidewalk if no shelter beds were available.
Reaction was mixed Wednesday when the settlement was announced with little warning. Some Downtown Los Angeles stakeholders were angered that they were barred from weighing in on the negotiations.


Carol Schatz, president and CEO of business organization the Central City Association, said most CCA members oppose the settlement.

"They wanted the settlement and they simply pushed it through without any input from the community," charged Schatz.

Developer Tom Gilmore was one of those displeased with the 10-foot boundary between homeless encampments and entryways.

"I was looking for something more on the range of about 200 feet from doors and restaurants," said Gilmore.




Despite the opposition, both the city and the ACLU touted the agreement as a success at separate Wednesday afternoon press conferences.

"This settlement really puts us on a path away from the emergency model and toward a real solution to homelessness," said Michael Soller, a spokesman for the ACLU. "This is a commitment to build additional units."

However, disagreements emerged last week over whether housing already being built could count.

Other uncertainties remained as well, including whether the city and homeless advocates could face off again soon over new "anti-camping" ordinances.

City Councilwoman Jan Perry said she is already working on new street and sidewalk regulations that would target homeless encampments and withstand future lawsuits. That could include revising or amending current ordinances, which Perry said was not ruled out by the settlement.

The ACLU has publicly stated it would fight such anti-camping efforts.



Uncertain Impact


In the Jones case, lawyers for the homeless argued that until beds are available, arrests amount to criminalizing homelessness.

The LAPD and others have long contended that shelter beds are open, but that many homeless people on Skid Row are "shelter resistant." A recent study of policing efforts in the area by UCLA law professor Gary Blasi contested that claim. His report found a median of just four shelter beds available on a given night when the LAPD was counting more than 1,000 people sleeping on the street.

City leaders denied that the settlement with the ACLU refutes that claim.

"I think LAPD is correct," said Perry, whose Ninth District encompasses much of Skid Row. "But there is a big difference between shelter beds and permanent supportive housing."

Perry hailed the settlement as a victory for Downtown residents. She said street-sleeping allowances should not be made only for the 50 blocks of Skid Row.

She also said she believes the compromise is a strong win for the city. "I think the ACLU gave up more than they got," Perry said, "because we were going to do these units anyway."

Perry said 1,000 units of supportive housing are currently in the pipeline, though it is not clear how soon they would be ready.

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, praised the requirement to build new housing.

"This is litigation that began as a way of asking the city to provide more shelter beds for homeless people," said Ripston. "What we end up with is 1,250 new units of low-cost housing with services and the ability to sleep throughout the city when there are not enough shelter beds."

However, it remains unclear whether the settlement will actually spur much construction that wasn't already committed to by the city. While the settlement requires more than 625 units of housing to be added Downtown, city officials have said that more than 1,000 rooms of permanent supportive housing are in the works, half of that in Downtown.
"My understanding is that it's new, it's in addition to what is already in the pipeline," said Ripston.

Though it is uncertain how the decision will affect conditions on Skid Row and across the city, it could significantly deter future litigation on the issue.

Previously, the California Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the city. In April, the Ninth Circuit Court sided with the ACLU.

By agreeing to the settlement, the ACLU has given up any claim of using the Ninth Circuit court ruling as precedent for future lawsuits. However, Ripston said that attorneys for the homeless may still cite the decision in future lawsuits.

Contact Evan George at evan@downtownnews.com.

^^^ That's good. The affordable housing is a step in the right direction. The shelter will still need to be built, however...

The original question is a false dilemma. Downtown can be developed and the homeless taken care of. If you want to take care of the homeless, you need a healthy economic base to generate the funds for their care. Developing downtown will probably result in moving the social service that have been built over the years. There is no question we have to re-examine the policies that have closed mental health facilities and allowed people who really cannot take care of themselves out in the streets with no place to go.
Building additional housing units in a city that lacks them will eventually make more places available to house those who cannot afford a place to live.

This is a pretty good article out of the LA Time's opinion section today. I'm not sure if this guy is just blowing steam up our "you know whats", but atleast he sounds sincere.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-lieweke15oct15,0,6176626.story?coll=la-opinion-center

Leiweke and the have-nots

Downtown's biggest player worries about what will happen to his sports/entertainment "campus" if the poor keep getting poorer.
October 15, 2007


Tim Leiweke has his finger in more pies than most Angelenos. Among many other things, his company -- AEG, with the initials standing for Anschutz Entertainment Group -- owns the Los Angeles Kings and is developing the $2.5 billion L.A. Live entertainment/hotel/office-space complex around the Staples Center, which it also owns. The company has benefited from some subsidies and beneficial political connections, which occasionally lands it in at least mildly warm water.

Leiweke came by The Times' editorial board Oct. 15 for a little jaw-jaw about his soon-to-open Nokia Theater, about the controversial Figueroa street corridor, about his secretive boss Phil Anschutz, and about his concerns that a city polarized between haves and have-nots could erupt into a conflagration rather unhospitable to his new "campus" in south downtown. Some highlights from the conversation:

Jim Newton: Can I ask you something -- going back to when Staples was originally being designed and built, there was a big conversation then about the Living Wage, and if I recall correctly all the jobs at Staples are living wage jobs, right?

Leiweke: Everyone's; I mean one of the things I'm most proud about -- and I mean, I have to admit, I'm a little burnt by the article on the Figueroa corridor because they really took aim at us on affordable housing. Well here's the truth about affordable housing: We committed to affordabe housing, we committed to a 20% commitment towards affordable housing on all of our units that we were building before we ever went to City Council. We did it with the community. And then all the other developers got ticked off at us. We were revolutionary. We created this new affordable housing platform. If you go to the advocates on the Figueroa corridor, and in downtown Los Angeles, most of them -- not all of them, there are a few radicals that want more -- most of them will tell you: we were revolutionary in the commitment we made to affordable housing.

We're all union. So when you go onsite and you see every worker on downtown Los Angeles and L.A. Live, we're union. You go behind our stands of all our Levy concession stands at Staples or Nokia Theater, we're all union. And I'm proud of it. Do we pay a premium? Yes. Do we put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage? Yeah. The Arrowhead -- or what do they call it now? The Honda Center -- is not union. So we lose evnts to the Honda Center. And I at times have trouble competing with them. [...] But we're union. We're for affordable housing, I'm for unions. You gotta negotiate, you occasionally have to make sure that you're protecting the best interests in the investment and the money that we've put forth here.

But I've always believed at the end of the day, when it comes to giving people a decent wage, giving them a chance to put bread on the table and in particular giving them health coverage, that it's a role that we're all gonna have to be more focused on, because we as a company are very concerned about the gap between the haves and the have nots. [...]

Further. We quietly are very, very committed at getting involved in other things going on in the community. So we've given a lot of money back, and you know we don't go run ads about it, we don't go boast about it. But we've done our fair share, and it's tens of millions of dollars, not millions--

David Hiller: You ought to run a few ads about it.

(Laughter)

Leiweke: We're runing ads in your paper. You know sometimes, sometimes when I run ads in your paper I catch holy hell for running ads in your paper.

Hiller: Well, not from me.

Matt Welch: What's keeping you up at night right now?

Leiweke: My hockey team. You know I-I I'm bothered by our hockey team because I wish we were better. I hope we do get better. [...]

This is a high-priority city for us now. Whether we like it or not, we're here, we're ingrained, and we have well over $2, $2 and a half billion invested in this community now.

Lisa Dillman: So backpedaling to something you said, how do you get Phil to go against his inherent nature of being secretive and quiet?

Leiweke: Well AEG is not about Phil, and amazingly it never has been. I think in the eyes of some, you know, maybe we shouldn't have put that "A" in AEG. But the reality is this company's not Phil, this company is Tim and Michael and Dan Beckerman [...] and the other 2,000 people who are sitting here working every day. AEG has a life of its own now. Phil's our chairman, and I occasionally have to keep him happy. But you know Phil doesn't sit around, Phil's not headquartered in L.A., Phil doesn't work at AEG, Phil doesn't have an office at AEG, Phil's not going to have a new office in our new corporate headquarters. He happens to be the money that built this company, and now as we've grown we've gone away from Phil money, and gone to traditional forms of money that we go out and borrow, and we have a lot of people that want to give us money to grow, because we keep on having success story after success story, and that builds a good track record for lending. And that means I don't have to be nearly as dependent on Phil.

Now. Phil's my friend, my mentor, my partner, my -- I still have a father, but if I had another father it would be him. And I'm sure he'd say if he had anyone that gave him more trouble than I do he'd have to adopt him as a son. So he is the lifeblood of our company, he is our leader. But AEG is being built by the people here, and we're more and more independent every day from Denver, and we're proud of that. It's a good story.

Matt Welch: Are you involved in the newspapers?

Leiweke: No, thank God. I have no clue what the hell he's doing there. You could quote me on that.

Matt Welch: I was gonna ask you when the Los Angeles is going to start....

Leiweke: You know I'm proud to say that we're independent of that division, because that's not an area of experties, an area of desire, and believe it or not, we'd rather be covered by newspapers, we'd rather buy ads in newspapers, we'd rather not own 'em. We'd rather let Phil figure that one out. [...]

Matt Welch: What are your big sort of frustrations or worries about any kind of public policy thing affecting downtown right now? As you see it sort of develop and boom and get more interesting, what's kind of bumming you out about it?

Leiweke: The gap between the haves and the have-nots. We all better figure this one out; if we don't, there's gonna be a day of reckoning here that's not going to be pretty.

We cannot have the poverty level and housing getting to a point where we lose 50% of our community.

Education. Personally? I think people can go spend all the money they want on L.A. Unified, but I'm frustrated with L.A. Unified because I can't figure out how anyone's ever going to fix it. So we love Green Dot. We've already made a million-dollar commitment to Green Dot for the charter school that they're going to put on our end of town. I hope L.A. Unified gets worked out, but I worry about L.A. Unified. I mean is that beast so big and so far gone that no one's ever going to be able to figure it out? We cannot, you know -- tell me how Green Dot can graduate 97% and L.A. Unified graduates 40%? Is it management? Is it vision? Is it bureaucracy? Is it money? What is it? Something's wrong there, and we've got to figure that one out.

Because we can't keep on dumping kids, we can't go back to kids and tell them, "You have no hope in your life, so join the gang." The reason kids join gangs is because they don't want to work at McDonald's for $8 an hour. And so we've got to figure this one out, or else we're going to lose a large portion of our population base before we ever even get to that population base. So I'm worried about our schools.

I'm worried you know, here were are in a city that is, what, four times the size of New York? And we have a fourth of the police officers. There's something terribly wrong with that. We as a community need to put a higher priority on safety. And it means that we're going to have to give them money. And I'm disappointed that we didn't get the last bond issue passed with both the city and the county. But my God, when you need two-thirds of the people to vote for more taxes, that is a huge obstacle that we have to overcome every time we try to create more of an infrastructure.

But to me, it's the Big Three; uh, Big Four: It's where do you live, where do you have a life, where do you find affordable housing? How do we educate 'em? How will we fix our transportation systems, and how do we ultimately provide people with a safe community? And in L.A. we got to get better at all four; we do not have good answers on any of those four yet. But I think we're headed in the right direction, I think our mayor -- when he's focused -- is good at caring. We've just got to keep him focused. [...]

We've got to solve those four things or we got a campus, and we have 2,000 employees that are going to live in a community that suddenly becomes unlivable. And we can't go back to those days in L.A. We've been there and done that.

We're all union. So when you go onsite and you see every worker on downtown Los Angeles and L.A. Live, we're union. You go behind our stands of all our Levy concession stands at Staples or Nokia Theater, we're all union. Leiweke: The gap between the haves and the have-nots. We all better figure this one out; if we don't, there's gonna be a day of reckoning here that's not going to be pretty.

We cannot have the poverty level and housing getting to a point where we lose 50% of our community.
Education. Personally? I think people can go spend all the money they want on L.A. Unified, but I'm frustrated with L.A. Unified because I can't figure out how anyone's ever going to fix it. So we love Green Dot. We've already made a million-dollar commitment to Green Dot for the charter school that they're going to put on our end of town. I hope L.A. Unified gets worked out, but I worry about L.A. Unified. I mean is that beast so big and so far gone that no one's ever going to be able to figure it out? We cannot, you know -- tell me how Green Dot can graduate 97% and L.A. Unified graduates 40%? Is it management? Is it vision? Is it bureaucracy? Is it money? What is it? Something's wrong there, and we've got to figure that one out.
Because we can't keep on dumping kids, we can't go back to kids and tell them, "You have no hope in your life, so join the gang." The reason kids join gangs is because they don't want to work at McDonald's for $8 an hour. And so we've got to figure this one out, or else we're going to lose a large portion of our population base before we ever even get to that population base. So I'm worried about our schools.

But my God, when you need two-thirds of the people to vote for more taxes, that is a huge obstacle that we have to overcome every time we try to create more of an infrastructure.
But to me, it's the Big Three; uh, Big Four: It's where do you live, where do you have a life, where do you find affordable housing? How do we educate 'em? How will we fix our transportation systems, and how do we ultimately provide people with a safe community? And in L.A. we got to get better at all four; we do not have good answers on any of those four yet. But I think we're headed in the right direction, I think our mayor -- when he's focused -- is good at caring. We've just got to keep him focused. [...]
We've got to solve those four things or we got a campus, and we have 2,000 employees that are going to live in a community that suddenly becomes unlivable. And we can't go back to those days in L.A. We've been there and done that.

This guy knows what he is talking about. You rarely hear this kind of straight talk from the suits.

After Villar is gone who's next? Let's all pray for Eric Garcetti as our next mayor! This guy gets it! Taken from the Planning Report:

http://www.planningreport.com/tpr/?module=displaystory&story_id=1281&format=html

I like Garcetti as well. Recognizes the needs for developing housing in the city, especially along transit corriders. Seems favorable to mixed use development as well.

Oh! I was hoping for Janice Hanh or something.