Somehow that is the phrase in my head every time I hear this man play. Beautiful rich clear tones that echo off pealing graffiti slathered walls, harmonic melodies that reverberate off the urine stained sidewalk housing a host of hibernating rats.

When he plays, he turns the ugly ducking of the row into a surreally beautiful experience. He is pictured on the corner of 4th and Towne.

Perhaps I am jaded . . . . How is this news? The sky is blue grass is green, and skid row absorbs all the people you would rather have unseen. When I saw this picture my first reaction was to note how clean the sidewalk is there. Out side my office door someone just vomited and 8 people are asleep.

Long Term Skilled Nursing places have to keep you if you have no family and no where to go - even if you have no way to pay.

They cross their fingers and pray you get sick and go to the hospital for more than 3 days so they can give your bed away. Hospitals know that and try to have you out in less than 3 days . . but when you are not, they have to have a discharge plan.

Because of the food and shelter available here on the row, hospitals and SNF's justify leaving people here.

These are more of my favorite outreach services for the
homeless. Some of them are not based in Skid Row.


A Community of Friends ACOF is able to provide housing for homeless, disabled and very low-income persons – creating permanent, affordable housing and an environment that promotes stability.

---

Step Up on Second in Santa Monica. Step Up on Second involves individuals with severe and persistent mental illness in developing opportunities to reintegrate into the community. Step Up is dedicated to long-term support of people in recovery and their families, offering quality housing, educational, social and work experiences. Step Up is committed to increasing public understanding and acceptance of mental illness.

---

Ocean Park Community Center AKA OPCC OPCC, (formerly the Ocean Park Community Center), is a network of shelters and services for low-income and homeless youth, adults and families, battered women and their children, and people living with mental illness.

---

Volunteers of America
Volunteers of America is one of the nation's oldest organized charities. We are committed to bringing lasting solutions to the less fortunate in the greater Los Angeles area.

---

If you know of any service that I have overlooked, please inform me.

Links To Homeless Sites

Beyond Shelter

211 (Los Angeles County Hotline)
Have questions? Need help? Like 911 and 411 before it, "211" is very useful to the average person, It can teach you how to navigate the Public Assistance systems and where to apply for what services.
Interagency Council on Homelessness

Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty
The Weingart center . . . healthcare, education, an social services.

LAMP
Lamp is one of my favorite agencies especially with it's public toilets and showers. Lamp is a one stop mall of homeless services with an emergency shelter, drop in center, laundry mat, showers, drug program, AB34 outrezch, supportive housing and case management.

Larry James Urban Daily

Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness
This politically active agency educates other agencies and works to make the homeless more visable in order to get them on the public adgenda.
Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

Los Angeles Housing Department


National Alliance To End Homelessness

National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness

People Assisting The Homeless

Public Counsel

Shelter Partnership


St. Joseph Center

The Homeless Guy

Westside Shelter and Hunger Coalition

this is Krystal

Personal Hygene

can you tell these are pictures of the same man?
Personal Hygene makes a world of difference in the way we see outselves as well as how we invite the world to see us. Motivation is ofte tied to a clean body, clean clothing and a decent haircut. All the women who clog the spas and salons might be on to something. I have a friend, Krystal, who volunteers on skid row for me and gives free haircuts.

Why Los Angeles Needs a Residential Hotel Preservation Ordinance.

taken from http://www.saje.net/index.php

When you think about some of the things that Los Angeles needs, your thoughts might lean toward our city needing some serious traffic relief, some air quality improvement, a few more independent bookstores, or even how the Lakers need another three-peat. Chances are, your thoughts aren't lingering on how Los Angeles needs a Residential Hotel Ordinance.

But for the thousands of low-income residents living in Downtown Los Angeles, the area's residential hotels are the only housing they can afford. It's the only housing that keeps them from joining the ranks of Downtown's 90,000-strong homeless population and it desperately needs to be preserved.

Why Do We Need An Ordinance?
Residential hotels provide much-needed housing of last resort for the lowest income tenants in Los Angeles , many of whom are elderly, disabled, and families with children. Hundreds of residential hotel units have been lost in the past two years and thousands more are at risk of closure, of conversion into luxury-style apartments, or demolition. It's important for an ordinance to be passed—and soon—to ensure that this type of trend does not continue to push more people into homelessness.

How Does It Work?
A Residential Hotel Preservation Ordinance would preserve Los Angeles' housing of last resort by requiring replacement housing for any lost residential hotel units due to demolition or conversion, and it would require replacement prior to the demolition and conversion of these units to luxury or high income housing.

How Can We Do It?
State law allows Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco to exempt residential hotel units from the Ellis Act, thereby protecting residential hotel units from demolition and conversion.

San Francisco and San Diego have already successfully enacted similar Ordinances protecting residential hotel housing, and Los Angeles must follow.

There are more than 5,000 unprotected residential hotel units in the downtown area alone, and thousands more City-wide. The Ellis Act exemption provides a unique opportunity to preserve affordable housing and help prevent our affordable housing crisis from getting even worse.

What Are The Benefits Of Taking Advantage Of This Preservation Opportunity ?

If LA enacts a residential hotel preservation ordinance, we will:

• Prevent homelessness for thousands of tenants living in hotels at-risk of conversion.
• Contribute to the revitalization of downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Pedro, and other areas and ensure that long term residents can continue to live in their improved neighborhoods.
• Affordable housing developers in Los Angeles will be able to leverage available funds from Propositions 48 and 63 to build on their past successes in renovating residential hotels into safe and affordable housing for extremely low income people.

What Are The Costs Of Ignoring This Opportunity?

If LA does not act now to protect residential hotels, we will:

• Fail to prevent the loss of thousands of affordable housing units in the midst of LA's most severe housing crisis.
• Force elderly and disabled people, as well as hundreds of families with children, into homelessness.
• Displace hundreds of mentally ill tenants who have secured and maintained housing through the State of California 's hugely successful AB2034 Program and other mental health programs.

At this critical juncture, our City officials must make every effort to preserve affordable housing in the midst of our severe housing crisis.

The Ellis Act is a state law that states that landlords have the unconditional right to evict tenants to 'go out of business.'

To evict under the Ellis Act, the landlord must remove all units in the building from the rental market, i.e., the landlord must evict all the tenants. When a landlord invokes the Ellis Act, the apartments can not be re-rented, except at the same rent the evicted tenant was paying, for five years following the evictions.

Ellis Act evictions generally are used to 'change the use' of the building. Most Ellis Act evictions are used to convert rental units to condominiums, using loopholes in the condominium law.

More blogs about homelessla.

this picture says so much about the owner of this ashtray

Easily converted into crack pipes . . go look at our corner store for glass tubes with roses in them

http://www.sptimes.com/News/081001/Floridian/A_crack_pipe_by_any_o.shtml

 

In training last week, I learned the difference between the Red Shirt Security and real police. All this time I thought that the people with Billy Clubs and handcuffs and guns on bikes were the cops. Alas, they are private security hired by the local businesses to keep their specific properties safe. Some how this translated into them harassing and waking up the homeless on Skid Row.