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“When I get down to my last dime, I’ll just walk over to skid row.” —Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Down and Out by Downtown

This summer marked the completion of the tallest tower on the Pacific Coast, the Wilshire Grand: a gleaming symbol of prosperity rising above the Los Angeles basin. Yet this metaphor of metropolitan success also looms over Skid Row, an area described as the homeless capital of America. While adjacent downtown districts undergo urban renewal, Skid Row remains impoverished, a perennial neighbourhood of last resort. In recent decades, however, developers and designers have emphasised Skid Row as an Angeleno community rather than a repository for the city’s forsaken people. The Skid Row Housing Trust leads the emergence of this restorative and innovative built environment. The nonprofit developer-landlord promotes social, mental and physical wellbeing through good design in the belief that LA should be liveable for everyone.

The stark juxtaposition of wealth and poverty in downtown reveals the city’s economic disparity. Neither wages nor housing stock currently increases at rates proportionate to the region’s population growth, reducing Angelenos’ purchasing power in a supply shortage. LA is one of the least affordable cities in the country and the high cost of living exacerbates homelessness here. By their most recent count (June 2017), the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority estimates that 57,794 people per night experience homelessness in LA County. Skid Row is the epicentre of the region’s dispossessed population.

An encampment of urban refugees occupies Skid Row, its streetscape defined by a multitude of makeshift shelters. Desperation demands ingenuity, so the homeless invent a diversity of impermanent dwellings out of available materials. 

 

Skid Row’s improvised vernacular architecture includes blue tarpaulins pitched as tents, cardboard boxes reconfigured into lean-tos and suitcases and shopping carts rigged to make miniature mobile homes. Camping tents are ubiquitous, repurposed to brave an urban wilderness.

The Trust and similar organisations work to housing is the best starting point to rebuild one’s life and is also the foundation of a thriving community. Across the city, gentrification pushes the poor out of their historic neighbourhoods into a dwindling number of inexpensive areas like Skid Row. The Trust aspires to transform it into a more equitable district without dislodging the locals, who call Skid Row home and, in truth, have nowhere else to go.

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The backside of Rainbow Apartments
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Left: Homeless man being ousted from camper shell, 1987
Right: A typical Skid Row streetscape
Map of Skid Row
SOURCE: AUTHOR

Policy + Policing

A cyclical pattern of municipal policies and national attitudes towards homelessness conditioned Skid Row’s character in addition to the Trust’s formation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the prevalence of vagrancy and vice motivated private welfare groups to ‘cure’ homelessness through a moralising form of operant conditioning. So-called scientific charity disciplined ‘tramps’ for living on the street while rewarding them for seeking help in shelters, with police ultimately enforcing their behaviour. This movement treated the symptoms of homelessness without preventing its causes.

Despite the city’s support, scientific charity was too decentralised to address the widespread poverty wrought by the Great Depression. The federal government intervened to nationally implement a broad socialist platform, which framed mendicants as victims, not miscreants. A new generation of charities adopted this perspective. According to sociologist Forrest Stuart they originated the term ‘homeless’ in order to, ‘highlight a lack of housing as the only thing that separated the most severely impoverished population from more sympathetic groups.’ Relief programmes of this period sought to alleviate, rather than punish, homelessness through transitional housing and employment.

In the 1970s, changing public opinion brought about the decline of the public welfare state. Neoliberal policies, which persist today, apply market logic to society, in effect penalizing homeless people for not participating in the flow of goods and services. 

 

Urban planning theorist Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris observes how loitering in public induces a ‘discomfort [that] makes homelessness incompatible with activities such as shopping and strolling along the sidewalks.’ Their presence in shared space elicits hostile reactions: disdain, disgust and indignation. This visceral phenomenon, in Oscar Wilde’s words, is “the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.” Perhaps society loathes confronting its own homeliness, so police are enlisted to regularly evict the homeless from the public realm.

LA enacted an official ‘containment strategy’ in 1977. The name negatively connotes quarantine, belying more nuanced ambitions. The city hoped to manage homelessness through what could be called the Field of Dreams philosophy: ‘If you build it, they will come.’ The concentration of social services and low-income housing in one place would attract homeless people from other areas, like downtown’s business district. Non-profit organisations such as the Skid Row Housing Trust predominantly run these facilities.

As of this year, voters approved two ballot initiatives that increase the financial support for these groups. As a result of Measure HHH, the city will issue US$ 1.2 billion worth of bonds to build more subsidised units and shelters. Measure H, passed several months later, commits the city to funding an expansion of homelessness prevention programmes. Evidently, LA’s political climate shifted again as its citizens expressed a renewed sense of social responsibility through democratic action.

Breaking Ground

The Trust seeks to invigorate Skid Row through design equity. Its CEO, Mike Alvidrez, believes that ‘everybody deserves good design and everybody should have good design.’ In practice, this ethos produces dignified, therapeutic architecture. ‘Trauma informed design’ responds to people’s specific needs to provide safe space, unlike Skid Row’s chaotic streets. 

Typically, these buildings are inwardly focused and fortified from the outside. Entire social ecosystems must thrive within their regulated interior environments, so they are often courtyard typologies with expressive atriums.

 

Michael Maltzan Architecture’s Rainbow Apartments (2006) embodies this radical interiority. The building, which provides 89 units of special needs housing, has a subdued presence on the block. Its exterior facades are white stucco with a pattern of repeating window arrangements. Red denotes its entrance and accents sunshades around the windows, but the colour enlivens the building’s courtyard more prominently. The original proposal envisioned white, porous screens superimposed over open hallways. Michael Maltzan describes the single-loaded corridor as a spatial apparatus to connect formerly homeless residents with the building’s interior semi-public life. “Many of these individuals have built up shells around themselves that make it difficult for them to relate in a more social way,” so the architecture resists their inclinations to isolation by temporarily bringing them into contact with community space.

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The ‘dancing man’ staircase inside New Genesis Apartments

New Genesis Apartments (2012) by Killefer Flammang Architects explores a similar design agenda. It also favours a monochromatic palette punctuated with a bold colour. A sculptural staircase emulating the pose of a dancer animates the interior courtyard. Yellow railings emphasise the ascending steps, which sweep up from the bottom floor and switchback every two floors to create a circulatory écarté. As with the Rainbow Apartments, single-loaded corridors guide people through a self-contained public realm. The design emulates neighbourly urbanism by enabling residents to see each other more frequently and keep watchful eyes over their community. In-house health and social services offices are likewise open to the courtyard, the reasoning being that public transparency destigmatizes treatment. Unlike most other projects, New Genesis’s location on the border of Skid Row and Gallery Row allows it to sustain commercial space on the street level, in addition to the 106 units of affordable housing above.

Old Is New Again

 

Although it’s now popular throughout downtown, adaptive reuse constitutes the majority of development in Skid Row since the founding of the Trust in 1989. Recycling and reprogramming existing structures was a pragmatic way to reduce construction costs. 

 

Modern building codes make this process more expensive, but adaptive reuse retains other tangible benefits. It promotes sustainability by improving life-cycle performance; even a facadectomy lengthens the lifespan of exterior materials. Buildings communicate and reinforce society’s values and history, lending adaptive reuse didactic value. This kind of development is a demonstration of sustainability at an architectural scale, as well as a potent metaphor for the rejuvenation of a neighbourhood. The restoration and reuse of dilapidated buildings symbolises the potential of homeless people to recuperate and rebound.

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New Pershing Apartments seen from Main St.

New Pershing Apartments (2015), another KFA design down the street from New Genesis, preserves an ornate Victorian envelope that wraps around a contemporary courtyard complex of 69 units. The 19th century office building was previously converted into an SRO hotel, which the Trust modernised in the 21st century to keep pace with population growth and current ideas about supportive housing. KFA’s founding principal Wade Killefer explains that these projects aren’t thought of as ‘way stations’ or ‘warehouses’ anymore, they’re homes. Accordingly, the New Pershing features studio apartments and a courtyard, communal rooms and rooftop gardens to bring residents together.

Star Apartments (2013) represents the other side of the adaptive reuse spectrum. Despite a unique appearance, it actually inherited the ground floor from the previous building. Maltzan remodeled the existing commercial site because new mixed-use real estate was ineligible for federal funding. The former storefronts now house the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Monolithic concrete piers raise prefabricated residential units above the adaptive reuse component of Star Apartments, opening a multi-use platform in the space between. This flat datum replaces the archetypal courtyard as the setting for public life. It includes gardens, patios, recreational space, common areas and supportive services. This deck is both a refuge from the street below and a mesa on which its 100 formerly homeless residents can survey their city.

Community Building

The Trust inspires a sense of belonging in an ostracised population by listening to them and incorporating their insights into designs. The overhaul of Las Americas Hotel’s courtyard (2011) represents this process on a small scale. SALT Landscape Architects engaged the building’s tenants through a series of charrettes before remaking the rundown space behind the building into a beautiful backyard. 

Homelessness may trigger lasting agoraphobic or claustrophobic anxieties, so SALT endowed the courtyard with varying levels of openness beneath the pergola, tree canopy and sky. 

 

Allen Compton and his team orchestrated the complicated, sometimes contradictory functions that the courtyard had to accommodate a retreat and a meeting place, a garden and a kitchen, a study and a gym. The residents can take pride in a space they helped plan and they continue to maintain and contribute to their reclaimed backyard. 

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The Maple St. facade of Star Apartments

This empowering effect can be translated from a courtyard to the entire district. Guided by the design direction of Theresa Hwang, the Trust collaborated with local partners to formulate Our Skid Row (2015), a vision plan that imagines a safe and vibrant future for the neighbourhood. The Trust invited community input throughout the urban proposal’s development by organising charrettes and seminars. They even took the process into the streets by carting around a ‘Participation Station’ that facilitated mobile workshops.

Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects turned the resultant data and ideas into a design sourcebook, which was further refined by artist Rosten Woo. The document proposes very little conventional architecture, outlining instead a modular system of objects and amenities inserted into the existing urban fabric. Most of the interventions are simple yet multivalent, such as a fence that simultaneously provides secure storage, seating and shade. This kit-of-parts concept is portable to any other neighbourhood in far-flung LA with homeless residents. In truth, its components could appeal to anyone, sheltered or not, because the people of Skid Row and Angelenos in general desire a liveable city.

Skid Row is both unique and ordinary. It’s infamous for pervasive levels of crime, disease, mental illness and homelessness. Nevertheless, the Angelenos living here want recognition and representation like any other neighbourhood. Allen Compton affirms the need for design to ‘humanise the city’— only built environments that reflect and respect Los Angeles’s diverse communities can bring about this transformation. The Skid Row Housing Trust emphasises stable housing as the necessary condition for the formerly homeless to regain control over their lives. Therefore, increasing Skid Row’s affordable housing stock is fundamental to empowering its residents.

Top: ‘Las Americas Courtyard Charrette Board’
Bottom: 6th St. reimagined as a mixed-use corridor, part of the ‘Our Skid Row’ vision plan

Yet the Trust’s portfolio proves that good design goes beyond that. The organisatio incrementally improves Skid Row by promoting healing and sustaining communities within new and reused architecture. The ‘Our Skid Row’ proposal speaks to the holistic vision uniting these efforts.

The buildings themselves have become civic forums for realising the neighbourhood’s liveable potential. On the streets it’s every man for himself, whereas housing operated by the Trust fosters togetherness and cooperation. In fact, city officials and the formerly homeless launched the successful campaign for Measure HHH in the courtyard of New Genesis. Enlightened design has and will continue to empower the people of Skid Row. When everyone in society is able to participate in the urbanisation of Los Angeles, it will truly be a city for all.

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