The Moral Crisis of Skid Row
Los Angeles’s addiction epidemic is creating a permanent underclass, cut off from the rest of the city.Winter 2020
California
The Social Order
They call Los Angeles the City of Angels, but it seems that even here, within the five-by-ten-block area of Skid Row, the city contains an entire cosmology—angels and demons, sinners and saints, plagues and treatments.
Walking down San Pedro Street to the heart of Skid Row, I see men smoking methamphetamine in the open air and women selling bootleg cigarettes on top of cardboard boxes. Around the corner, a man makes a drug transaction from the window of a silver sedan, a woman in an American-flag bandana flashes her vagina to onlookers, and a shirtless man in a bleached-blond woman’s wig defecates behind a parked police car. Slumped across the entryway of an old garment business, a shoeless, middle-aged junkie injects heroin into his cracked, bare feet.
Skid Row is the epicenter of L.A.’s addiction crisis. More than 12,000 homeless meth and heroin addicts pass through here each year, with thousands living in the vast network of tent encampments that line the sidewalks. For decades, L.A. has centralized public services in this tiny city-within-a-city. The result: it’s become an iron cage of the social state, with the highest concentration of homelessness, addiction, and overdose deaths in Los Angeles County. Fire Station 9, which covers Skid Row, is now the busiest firehouse in America, responding to 35,518 calls for service last year, including a record-high number of overdoses and mental-health crises.
The scale of the crisis is astonishing: 40,000 homeless men and women in Los Angeles County suffer from addiction, mental illness, or both. More than 1,000 will die on the streets this year. As I survey the human wreckage along Skid Row, my fear is that the city government is creating a new class of “untouchables,” permanently disconnected from the institutions of society. For the past decade, political leaders have relied on two major policies to address the crisis—“harm reduction” and “housing first”—but despite $619 million in spending in 2018, more people are on the streets than ever. The reality is that Los Angeles has adopted a policy of containment: construct enough “supportive housing” to placate the appetites of the social-services bureaucracy, distribute enough needles to prevent an outbreak of plague, and herd enough men and women into places like Skid Row, where they will not disrupt the political fiction that everything is okay.
The LAPD’s Central Police Station is a windowless fortress, surrounded by a narrow strip of dirt and a sagging chain-link fence. Last year, after rats established a system of tunnels underneath the station, the department made plans to pave over the remaining landscape with concrete, but the project is on hold. I’m here to see Sergeant Pete Kouvelis, an LAPD veteran with a detailed, street-level understanding of life on Skid Row. I wait in line behind a polite and neatly dressed man filing a battery complaint against another resident in his SRO apartment complex, and then give my name to the tired-looking officer behind the glass.
After a moment, Sergeant Kouvelis, a broad-shouldered man with a military haircut, opens the security door and shakes my hand. As we pass through the back hallways and climb into his white patrol vehicle, Kouvelis, who earned a degree in architecture from USC and served as an officer in the Marine Corps, launches into a short discourse on the political economy of Skid Row. He says that the territory here is divided into sections by street gangs from South Los Angeles, who control the markets for meth, heroin, prostitution, cigarettes, and stolen goods. “This is pretty much the epicenter in L.A. for maintaining your addictions,” Kouvelis says. “You’ve got the gang element that markets their drugs, and it’s predatory. The more people addicted, the better.”
Indeed, addiction is a booming business here. Based on data from the Center for Harm Reduction and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, I estimate that the sales of meth, heroin, and cocaine on Skid Row add up to a $200 million annual enterprise, fueling a massive black market in everything from stolen bicycle parts to human organs. The LAPD, including its gang and narcotics task forces, has tried to disrupt the drug trade for decades, without much success. “We’ve tried different things, different data,” says Kouvelis. “But the population is very good at learning our tactics and then adapting their behaviors to counter our tactics. . . . It’s almost like a shell game, where we’re trying to do one thing today and then, three months from now, we’ll [need to] try a different tactic.”
Outside San Julian Park, which the Grape Street Crips use as a central distribution point for meth and heroin, Kouvelis stops the car in the middle of the street. He explains that we don’t want to be too close to the subsidized apartment buildings because residents on the upper floors will sometimes throw trash, urine, and feces at the cops below. While we wait for another officer to arrive, Kouvelis tells war stories from his time in the Central Division. He points to a tree around the corner that used to have 50 or so hypodermic needles stabbed into it; addicts would take one out, use it to shoot up, and then stick it back into the cracked bark. He tells me a particularly nightmarish story about a young bipolar woman, kidnapped and held in a subsidized apartment, and then plied with meth, tortured, and raped for more than two months; officers found her unconscious, with her hair ripped out and a half-dozen broken bones. A few years ago, Kouvelis says, officers even learned of a baby living in one of the tents—they cordoned off the entire street and went tent-to-tent until they rescued the child.
When the other officer, a thin, bald-headed man, arrives, we get out of the vehicle and walk through the park to the Green Apple Market on Fifth and Wall. Suddenly, we hear screaming and fighting around the corner. The officers run over and find a heavyset woman with a pit bull accusing a man in a bloody gray shirt of harassing her while she sleeps in her tent. Kouvelis, the bald-headed cop, and other officers from another patrol car break up the fight and scatter the crowd. As he crosses the street, the man in the gray shirt protests that I’m taking pictures, and another man in a black beanie points at me and threatens: “If [the police] wasn’t here, you woulda probably got jumped or knocked out.” The police recognize the man in the gray shirt from a few days earlier, when he was stabbed in the neck and nearly died in the hospital. “He’s not long for this world,” says one of the officers. “He’s going to get himself killed.”
“I estimate that the sales of meth, heroin, and cocaine on Skid Row add up to a $200 million annual enterprise.”
Roughly a decade ago, Skid Row’s future looked more hopeful. In 2006, Police Chief William Bratton and Central Division Commander Andrew Smith implemented a strategy of Broken Windows policing for Skid Row, called the Safer Cities Initiative, which led to a 42 percent reduction in major felonies, 50 percent reduction in overdose and natural deaths, and 75 percent reduction in homicides. “We’ve broken the back of the problem,” said Chief Bratton then, reporting that the overall homeless population had been reduced from 1,876 people to 700 people—an astonishing success. (See “The Reclamation of Skid Row,” Autumn 2007.)
The progress proved short-lived. Arguing that Broken Windows policing “criminalizes homelessness,” activists slowly dismantled the Safer Cities Initiative through civil rights lawsuits and public pressure campaigns. Today, Skid Row’s homeless population is estimated to be at least 2,500 people, and crime has been rising for years.
At the Central Division, a consensus is emerging that it’s only a matter of time before the neighborhood explodes. “I was a Marine officer [and] served overseas,” says Sergeant Kouvelis. “Skid Row rivals anything that I have seen to date . . . in terms of the conditions that people live in.”
Over the past 30 years, activists and political leaders have successfully shifted public policy regarding addiction and disorder away from a so-called punitive model that relies on prohibition, incarceration, and abstinence toward a “harm-reduction” approach that takes widespread drug use as a given and attempts to reduce rates of infection and other negative effects. Mark Casanova, executive director of Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles, has been working with addicts on Skid Row since 1985. His Center for Harm Reduction distributes 2.4 million clean needles to more than 12,000 addicts each year. As I walk through the door to the waiting room, I see a gaunt young man waiting to collect needles, swabs, and fentanyl testing strips. A woman with floral tattoos covering her scabbed-over arms slides a tray of used needles into the metal sharps container. On the wall is a large map of the city, with hundreds of blue pushpins marking each spot where an overdose was reversed with a naloxone inhaler provided by the center.
“Since I’ve been here, so many decades, the percentages of the type of drug users has shifted,” says Casanova. “Right now, about 70 percent of [the homeless drug users on Skid Row] are crystal meth users, or a combo of crystal meth and heroin, crystal meth and cocaine. . . . The remaining percentage is probably about 25 percent heroin, and a fair number of cocaine users.” While having such a high percentage of meth users means fewer fatal overdoses per capita in Los Angeles than in cities with higher rates of heroin addiction, like San Francisco, it also means that service providers here must contend with the unique properties of methamphetamines, which flood the body with dopamine and noradrenaline and can induce psychosis and lead to violent behavior.
The Center for Harm Reduction unquestionably saves lives: its needle exchange reduces the rates of infectious-disease transmission, and its naloxone kits reverse hundreds of overdoses per year. Still, it’s a brutal calculus, measuring overall “harm reduction” against a baseline of worst-case scenarios. And outside this limited framework, no evidence exists that harm reduction reduces overall rates of addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. In fact, despite a steady expansion of harm-reduction services, last year was the deadliest on record for Los Angeles County, with meth-related overdose deaths up more than 1,000 percent from 2008, claiming Skid Row as its epicenter. In the Central Division, crime has increased 59 percent since 2010, with officers responding to 13,122 incidents last year, including 2,698 assaults, 2,453 thefts, and 1,350 car break-ins, a trend doubtless intensified by the addiction crisis.
Harm reduction’s major limitation is that its practitioners lack a viable method for moving addicts into treatment and beyond their addictions. Though the center provided clean needles and supplies to more than 12,000 addicts last year, less than 1 percent voluntarily enrolled themselves in its free outpatient drug-treatment program. “There’s a mysterious element to that moment [when people decide to enter recovery that] all of us that work in treatment would love to be able to understand,” says Lori Kizzia, the center’s addiction specialist. “It’s mysterious in that it’s a part of the human spirit that surfaces. . . . But we really feel like even if it was only one person that we were able to be present for and help them make the changes . . . that would be well worth it.”
The problem, however, is that “changing one life” is not an adequate standard for a public-policy agenda. As I watch Casanova and Kizzia walk through the clinic, I’m touched by the kindnesses that they perform for the desperate and disordered people who walk through their doors. But I can’t escape the conclusion that harm reduction will never be enough. The people working here—the administrators, the addiction counselors, the medical teams—are making heroic efforts to keep people alive, but no one has figured out how to reduce addiction and fundamentally alter the trajectory of life on Skid Row.
Three blocks from Skid Row, I follow a small flock of public workers across North Main Street from the art deco–style City Hall—where addicts sleep on the front lawn—to the modernist-style City Hall East. Signs posted on the side of the building announce an upcoming cleanup. Earlier this year, investigators from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined the facility’s administrators for exposing workers to trash, bodily fluids, and a rat infestation that left one deputy city attorney with a typhus infection.
None of this seems to deter Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who projects relentless optimism and insists that homelessness is primarily a housing problem. The centerpiece of the mayor’s plan—endorsed by activists, unions, and the Democratic establishment—is the construction of new subsidized and permanent supportive-housing units. In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Proposition HHH, authorizing $1.2 billion in new spending, with the goal of constructing 10,000 units of “affordable housing” over the following decade.
Nearly three years later, the city has finished only 72 units, costing $690,692 apiece, a cost inflation that the city comptroller has called “utterly unacceptable.” In total, Los Angeles spent a total of $619 million on homelessness last year—more than double the previous year’s budget—but the number of people on the streets rose by 16 percent. Regardless, in his most recent State of the City address, Garcetti boasted that Los Angeles has “nearly $5 billion to spend on our work” and that, “based on the evidence, the money that’s been invested, the new hires that have just been made, the time we’ve dedicated, I know that things will turn around.” He blamed the lack of progress on delays in “getting the machinery going” but promised that “in this coming year, we will start seeing a difference on our sidewalks and in our communities.”
Progressives have rallied around the slogan “Housing First” but don’t confront the deeper question: And then what? It’s important to understand that, even on Skid Row, approximately 70 percent of the poor, addicted, disabled, and mentally ill residents are already housed in the neighborhood’s dense network of permanent supportive-housing units, nonprofit developments, emergency shelters, Section 8 apartments, and SRO hotels. When I toured the area with Richard Copley, a former homeless addict who now works security at the Midnight Mission, he explained that when he was in the depths of his methamphetamine addiction, he had a hotel room but chose to spend the night in his tent on the streets to be “closer to the action.” Copley now lives in an SRO unit at the Ward Hotel—which he calls the “mental ward”—where he says there are frequent fights and drugs available at all hours of the day. Even worse, as a condition of receiving federal money, many of the permanent supportive-housing projects must allow residents to use alcohol and drugs on the premises. In recent years, overdose deaths in subsidized homeless housing have been an all-too-frequent occurrence.
The truth is that homelessness is not primarily a housing problem but a human one. Mayors, developers, and service providers want to cut ribbons in front of new residential towers, but the real challenge is not just to build new apartment units but to rebuild the human beings who live inside them. Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of work that can be “scaled” like a product. Still, the builders have prevailed. Every few weeks, Mayor Garcetti and a rotating group of public officials announce new projects, shovel dirt, and cut ribbons. On Skid Row, a nonprofit developer is building two permanent supportive-housing projects, the Flor 401 Lofts and Six Four Nine Lofts, that will provide studio apartments to 153 homeless men and women, at a cost of $65 million. Though Skid Row is undoubtedly one of the most difficult places in America to achieve sobriety and reclaim a normal life, the city’s political class continues to centralize the problem.
This is the iron grip of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness in Los Angeles: you can’t arrest your way out, you can’t harm-reduce your way out, and you can’t build your way out. Beneath the optimistic rhetoric of the politicians lies growing anxiety that the crisis has moved beyond its control. “This is a FEMA-like, Red Cross–like disaster,” says Andy Bales, a critic of the Housing First model who has spent the last year calling for the National Guard to intervene and help prevent the outbreak of an epidemic. “We have actually left homelessness to grow exponentially to the point that it has put all of us in danger.”
Tonight, from the beaches of Venice to the desert towns of Palmdale, more than 59,000 human beings will sleep in tents, cars, and emergency shelters throughout L.A. County. Here, at the corner of Sixth and Wall on Skid Row, a truckful of sanitation workers in yellow vests passes through the streets with water hoses and spray-buckets of bleach, dousing the sidewalks in the hopes of forestalling the next outbreak of typhus, plague, tuberculosis, or leprosy. Fear grows that the next pile of trash or blood-covered rag will set off an epidemic.
It’s dusk, and the Midnight Mission’s Copley, my guide through the encampments, is getting nervous. He says that we should start heading back because “statistically, we’re likely to get in trouble on this block after dark.” As the streets begin to stir, I find myself looking through the gaps between the downtown skyscrapers, catching a glimpse of the bone-dry hills that surround the city. It strikes me that underneath the steel and stone, this place is a wide-open desert that couldn’t support much life for the first million years of its existence.
At the corner of San Pedro and Sixth, I watch the sun vanish behind the buildings, casting a heavenly glow over the streets and the tents and the worried faces. In the falling darkness, a middle-aged black man with light-colored eyes reaches for my hand. He introduces himself as the Reverend and, bowing to reveal a long surgical scar down the back of his head, tells me that he has broken his neck twice but still walks the streets of Skid Row.
“You’re lucky,” I tell him.
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” the Reverend fires back. “From Genesis to Revelation, you won’t see the word ‘luck’ once. It’s God working miracles. He’s going to work a miracle here, too,” he says, spreading his arms the length of San Pedro Street, as if to gather up all its despair into his hands.
The Reverend is mad, it seems, but perhaps no madder than the policymakers who have spent billions in vain, refusing to admit that their proposed solutions have worsened the problem instead of ameliorated it. At least the Reverend seems to understand what the policymakers won’t: that the people on Skid Row are the casualties, not of capitalism or an unfair social system, but of a profound spiritual crisis. Political leaders will continue to make plans, cut ribbons, and wish for luck, but until that reality is recognized and addressed, miracles may be the only thing that works.
Top Photo: Skid Row is the epicenter of L.A.’s addiction crisis: more than 12,000 homeless addicts pass through here each year. (PATRICK T. FALLON/REUTERS/NEWSCOM)
Horror, fatigue and constant calls: 24 hours with skid row’s firefighters
Aman in tan cargo shorts is lying on the pavement, turning gray with his shirt pulled up to his chest.
An ambulance from Los Angeles Fire Department Station No. 9 shoots down an alley and comes to a stop. Firefighters Brian George and Nicolas Calkins pop out and grab an assortment of medical gear.
“It’s probably heroin, dude,” George says to Calkins, even before kneeling.
They get to work.
“He’s breathing,” Calkins says.
“Narcan?”
“Yeah. I think heroin.”
George checks the man’s pulse while Calkins looks for a vein. The man is not breathing well. They inject naloxone, often referred to by the brand name Narcan, into his neck to counteract the overdose. It doesn’t work.
George and Calkins respond to thousands of calls like this every month while working at one of the busiest fire stations in the nation, in the heart of one of the most troubled places in Los Angeles: skid row. They are the unlikely rank and file on the front lines of California’s escalating homelessness crisis.
The roughly 60 firefighters at Station No. 9 regularly respond to everything from epileptic fits and overdoses to stalled elevators and full-fledged fires, crisscrossing a district defined by extreme poverty and powerlessness alongside extreme wealth and power in downtown L.A. With residents who are often victims of crime, crippled by addiction and psychiatric disorders from years of living on the street, the firefighters do the best they can with the little they have to offer. Yet the needs are overwhelming.
In 2019 alone, Station No. 9 logged nearly 22,800 emergency calls across just 1.28 square miles — about 7,500 more than the city’s next-busiest station.
Taking care of L.A.’s most vulnerable residents has given these firefighters a unique perspective on the homelessness crisis. Most are empathetic. Some feel isolated or frustrated about the city’s inability to fix what’s happening outside their front door. But rather than dwell on those larger forces or their feelings about it all, they train constantly and joke around with a camaraderie shaped by their shared commitment to one of the city’s most intense jobs.
“We see things that people never see in their lifetimes — we’ll see multiple times in one day,” said Ian Soriano, a firefighter and apparatus operator at Station No. 9.
This is 24 hours in the life of a skid row firefighter.
5:30 a.m.: Fire Station No. 9
Just before sunrise that day, Dan Martinez pulled his Audi A4 onto the sidewalk outside Station No. 9 at 7th and San Julian streets.
The area around the station is abuzz for so much of the day. But at 5:30 a.m., when the C shift arrives, it’s quiet. Martinez, who planned to work 48 hours straight, was the first to show up.
A few minutes later, Jacob Gibson, an attendant on one of the station’s ambulances, came in and started prepping a meal for the 19 firefighters on duty. Tall with curly red hair and a round face, the second-generation firefighter joked about what he thought was the hardest part of his job.
“Cooking for this many people is a pain in the ass,” he said.
Gibson began to cut peppers and whisk eggs as the shift change kicked into high gear. Members of the B shift ambled down from their quarters as members of the C shift lined up their cars in the parking lot next door and waited to cram them behind the station.
5:39 a.m.: Outside the station
An elderly homeless man walks by wearing a faded gray sweatshirt. He stops and turns toward a firefighter.
“My flesh is on fire,” he says. “Put me out.”
“You’re not on fire,” Capt. Branden Silverman responds.
The man keeps walking.
Most of C shift is in the station by 6:30 a.m., but if firefighters don’t arrive even earlier, by 5:45 a.m., others will give them hell. Each member has a job to do. In the morning, they check the gear they’ll be using that day, and situate their pants and boots near the firetruck they’ll be riding in, so they can move quickly when a call comes in.
7:35 a.m.: 632 St. Vincent Court
The man in tan cargo shorts is lying on the pavement, his skin gray.
Calkins, trying to reverse the effects of a heroin overdose, finally finds another vein in the man’s arm and asks for another dose of naloxone.
“If you do it, just go half,” George says.
George rubs the man’s chest and pulls him by his pants onto a gurney. Soon afterward, the man is alert in the ambulance and on his way to an emergency room.
Station No. 9 responds to more medical calls like this than any other fire station in the city, according to the LAFD.
Over nearly two years beginning in 2018, almost 14% of the people that the LAFD took to emergency rooms citywide were homeless. That works out to roughly 81 homeless people a day. For Station No. 9, that ratio was 59%, or about 12 homeless people being brought to the ER every day.
Sometimes firefighters administer naloxone by intraosseous infusion, in which a hole is drilled just below the knee and the drug is injected directly into the patient’s bone marrow. This is the quickest way to bring someone back from an overdose.
There’s a futility in this ritual, though.
On skid row, these firefighters have watched homelessness grow, with the citywide population topping 36,000 as of last year. They’ve seen drug addiction rob many of those same people of their health, making it harder to achieve a stable future away from the street. Yet all George or Calkins or anyone else at Station No. 9 can really do is take them to the emergency room.
Firefighters say they’ve noticed that overdoses often occur when a person with a history of drug addiction gets out of prison or jail and thinks he or she has the same tolerance for heroin as in the past.
“You think your body is used to it,” George said. “You OD a lot quicker.”
In an effort to reduce the workload, the LAFD recently launched its Sober Unit to transport intoxicated people to a center on skid row. Also, a modified wildland firefighting truck known as a “fast-response vehicle,” or FRV, now prowls downtown responding to calls.
The department has heavily publicized these pilot programs. The problem is neither operates on weekends.
“They really push the FRV units,” Capt. Raymond Robles said, “but we’re here every day.”
8:15 a.m.: Back at home base
By 8:15 a.m., the C shift had received 10 calls for help. In the previous 30 minutes, there had been five, nearly all of them on skid row.
Returning to the station, Gibson trudged back to the stove.
“I hope they didn’t burn anything,” he said, knowing that he’d hear it if his fellow firefighters weren’t pleased with their burritos. “All right,” he said a few minutes later, “breakfast is ready. Come and get it.”
The station’s 19-member C shift — all of them men — assembled in the kitchen. Capt. Larry Salas ran through the schedule for the week.
It’s a challenge to keep Station No. 9 fully staffed. Some firefighters blame the stigma of homelessness in their district. The volume of calls and the intensity of the work mean firefighters looking for easy overtime aren’t flocking there.
As a result, on the day The Times visited, one firefighter was working for his fifth straight day.
After roll call, Robles, the station’s longtime leader, took over the meeting. An affable and stocky man, he is part father and part camp counselor to his cohort of younger firefighters, who are intensely loyal to him.
“We’re going to go to the Hotel Baltimore and throw the stick,” he told the team, referring to practice climbing the ladder. “Everyone is going to climb the stick and work our way down.”
Next to speak is Tony Navarro, who, as the most senior member of Station No. 9, is the bull firefighter. He has been at the station for 11 years; before working there, he’d never seen skid row.
On his first day, Navarro responded to a medical call to find a man without feet in a wheelchair. His legs were wrapped in plastic, and maggots were eating away the flesh underneath. When he and other firefighters pulled the man out of his chair, they found that his whole backside was raw and maggots were crawling over his body, top to bottom.
“It smelled like a dead body,” Navarro said. “That was my first day, and it was all downhill from there.”
‘It smelled like a dead body. That was my first day, and it was all downhill from there.’
TONY NAVARRO, FIREFIGHTER
Burnout is the biggest enemy of trying to be an effective firefighter at Station No. 9, he said. The constant calls, constant horror and constant fatigue add up to high turnover. He recalled dozing off at the wheel several times on his commute home. More than once, he said, California Highway Patrol officers pulled him over.
These days, Navarro said, he finds time to kick his feet up and clear his head by sleeping for a few minutes or watching a movie. Finding those quiet moments is important, he said. Otherwise you won’t make it through the day — physically or emotionally.
For many members of the station, responding to calls in ambulances is the hardest part. “You’re inundated with patients,” Navarro said. “It gets to you.”
Of Station No. 9’s roughly 22,800 emergency calls last year, about 18,850 were medical, according to the LAFD.
“Half of us wouldn’t want to be here if it was just that,” Navarro said.
9:46 a.m.: 501 S. Los Angeles St., Baltimore Hotel
Two engines and one ladder pull out of Station No. 9 and enter the heat and traffic of a Saturday morning in downtown Los Angeles. The long truck comes to a stop on 5th Street and blocks a lane of traffic.
The truck’s ladder rises and settles next to the building’s roof. The men line up to climb and discuss how to carry gear up the ladder.
“The most dangerous part is the transition,” Navarro says.
Two years ago, during a training exercise at a building a lot like the Baltimore Hotel, a member of Station No. 9 — Kelly Wong — lost his footing and fell from the ladder onto a firetruck below. He died two days later.
Firefighters are quick to say they do this work for guys like Wong, whose photo is everywhere in the station. They’re less willing to talk about what happened on that day.
Soriano, the apparatus operator, worked the same shift as Wong but was off the day his colleague fell. He had been driving to a wine festival with his girlfriend but turned around and headed to the hospital when he heard what had happened.
“A lot of the guys were really good friends with Kelly. Seeing them broken was terrible. If we don’t get an opportunity to practice this scenario,” he said, referring to climbing the ladder, “we’ll be in trouble when there’s a more stressful scenario when someone is hanging out a window and a fire is blazing. We have to do it, man. We do it in memory of him.”
Soriano has been with the LAFD for 13 years and with Station No. 9 for four years. After responding to dozens of calls for several days in a row, the grim nature of the work sometimes blurs together.
“It wears on your patience, because a lot of the homeless people, we know them by name, and they’re doing the same thing over and over,” he said. “We take a guy to the hospital and he’ll be right back out at 2 p.m. There’s a shock when you first get there and you have to learn how to deal with that over and over again.”
Embracing stoicism, Soriano said, helps him deal with the perpetual stress.
1:38 p.m.: 300 Santa Fe Ave.
Firetrucks and an ambulance scream through skid row on their way to an apartment building. A man has fallen six floors after taking a wrong step while fixing an HVAC system on the roof.
The firefighters find him moaning, face down in a pool of blood. His arms and legs point in unnatural directions.
Gibson runs over and kneels down, attempting to get a pulse and sense of the severity of the man’s injuries. The man’s moans grow louder as the firefighters contemplate how to get him onto a gurney.
“It’s going to be uncomfortable no matter what,” Gibson says, cutting off the man’s shirt.
Another firefighter grabs him by his pants and helps flip him over.
“He broke a lot of things,” Gibson says.
6 p.m.: A quiet moment
As 6 p.m. approached, Gibson prepared dinner. While waiting, firefighters cleaned the station, tinkered with faltering exhaust pipes and examined a new ram bar, a firefighting tool for breaking through locks, doors and walls.
In this quiet moment, Michael Villata, an 11-year LAFD veteran, said he’s often thinking about the disorder that surrounds Station No. 9.
He said he and his colleagues know rising rents have contributed to the growing number of people living on the street. But he also blames the nexus of mental illness and drug abuse, and what he sees as a hesitancy among Los Angeles police officers to deal with homeless people and their encampments.
In some cases, Villata speculated, the breakdown of families has left people without the support they need to be successful in life.
Skid row can be dangerous. Firefighters said they have been threatened while responding to calls. Homeless people have brandished knives, and others have picked up shovels to swing at them.
“We’ve been punched, spit at, choked,” Robles said.
Specific procedures for dealing with such incidents exist, but they still happen often enough that firefighters say they worry about ending up in a violent confrontation when responding to calls. It doesn’t stop them from caring for people on skid row, though.
Villata said he tries to support homeless people — one man in particular, who goes by the name Mango and lives in a tent across the street from Station No. 9.
Mango moved to Los Angeles from Florida and has become the firefighters’ greatest champion — often wearing a T-shirt or a hat with Station No. 9’s logo. Sometimes he helps clean up after a fire is extinguished, and when gear gets stolen from trucks, Mango is usually the one who will venture out to find it.
More often, he stops by just to hang out and talk with the firefighters.
Over the summer, Villata rebuilt Mango’s motorbike, but it was stolen days after he delivered it.
“When I gave him the bike, he cried. He was really happy…. I saw him a few days later and he was devastated that it got stolen,” Villata said. “I just felt horrible for Mango because of how grateful and happy he was. To have something taken from him — just watching it sucks.”
6:48 p.m.: Station No. 9 TV room
Navarro’s feet are up and his eyelids are drooping. A movie is playing on the big screen as a homeless man walks into the station.
“If I could just get some sleeping pills,” he says.
The man’s thumb is nearly ripped off, pointing in an odd direction.
The man explains how he recently had surgery and how he had taken the cast off prematurely because his hand hurt. He also tells firefighters that he missed a follow-up appointment with a doctor.
“We don’t have any,” firefighter Eric Shinn tells him. “Go to the drugstore and get some NyQuil maybe. You can’t be missing appointments.”
Shinn wraps the man’s hand and finds a piece of cardboard to fashion a makeshift splint.
The man leaves.
Such grim scenes drive firefighters to find ways to escape and relax. They pull lots of pranks on one another — like a seemingly serious “training session” ordered by Robles. It turned out to be a younger firefighter swinging nunchaku as his colleagues broke down in laughter.
There’s lots of amusement in these moments — a brief respite from what’s happening outside.
Station No. 9’s members are a tightknit crew. They vacation together. Their families grill together. Soriano recently led a crew of his fellow firefighters on a snowboarding trip to Austria. They also went to Chile and Japan.
“There’s a brotherhood that you can’t really speak about unless you have been there,” Soriano said. “We’re involved in each other’s lives. We hang out with our girlfriends and wives. We go on trips, and we have a lot of fun at the station.”
Another way firefighters let off steam is to play handball. It’s the LAFD’s official sport, and tournaments often attract old-timers who worked at the station decades ago. Sometimes they play in their socks to decide who will do dishes after dinner.
While a game was underway, Soriano and Robles sat in the kitchen and discussed how firefighters were adjusting to life at Station No. 9. Some were struggling with how much time they had to spend responding to medical calls.
It’s common during the first year working on skid row for some firefighters to be sick all the time until their bodies adjust to the stress. Firefighters often spend their first year battling colds and feeling generally unwell.
“It’s something like your freshman 15,” Soriano said, comparing it to the belief that many college students gain weight in their first year.
He blamed it on the lack of sleep and unceasing exposure to the generally unhealthy environment of skid row.
“The hotels, the tents — it’s not necessarily the most clean place to operate,” Soriano said. “I got sick. It’s not like you’re throwing up. You’re just sick constantly.”
11:38 p.m.: 118 E. 6th St., Cole’s French Dip
Engine 209 pulls out of the station, and Mango steps into the street to block traffic. This happens a lot.
Firefighters arrive at Cole’s French Dip and find a man flat on the ground. Patrons are standing around, wondering what’s happening.
Villata digs into the man’s pocket and finds a needle. His pupils are uneven.
They give him a dose of naloxone and his vitals return to normal.
“Let’s go,” Capt. Jim Duffy yells.
“Captain is tired,” Gibson says to no one in particular.
4:47 a.m.: 1301 N. Main St.
Chatter over the radio alerts Station No. 9 to a fire in a neighboring district. Firefighters arrive to find an abandoned building, flames erupting from its mezzanine.
Robles grabs a saw to cut holes in the wall and ceiling. Soriano grabs a fan. They move room to room, putting out remnants of the conflagration.
Navarro pulls off his breathing mask.
There were 82 incidents in 24 hours.
Navarro had just worked 72 hours. Robles was scheduled to do another shift.
When the firefighters return to Station No. 9, the A shift has already arrived and is getting situated. Mango is outside grilling food that he intends to sell. Another day at the busiest fire station in Los Angeles has begun.
"When we hear stories about the homelessness in California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens contribute to the problem? They take jobs and affordable housing, yet instead of discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians encourage them to come by lavishing free stuff on them with confiscated dollars from this and future generations." JACK HELLNER
EYE ON THE NEWS
Empty Words on Homelessness
Governor Newsom talked a lot but said little. February 21, 2020
California
The Social Order
California governor Gavin Newsom devoted almost his entire State of the State address to homelessness, though observers who follow the issue recognized no new analysis or important proposals. Some critics charge that Newsom lacks strategic vision. Ten to 15 years ago, homelessness policymakers had vision to spare: they were ramping up their “campaign to end homelessness,” and Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, participated energetically in that nationwide push. It wasn’t successful, but the “end homelessness” rhetoric has endured. In his speech this week, Newsom asserted—as if we’re still in 2004—“I don’t think homelessness can be solved; I know homelessness can be solved.” Bold applause lines and “make no small plans” promises long ago ceased to be inspiring—or even credible—for most people.
The speech’s best ideas had to do with mental health. Newsom called for more use of conservatorships and outpatient civil commitment, both of which have the potential to stabilize thousands of seriously mentally ill Californians. Californians have heard hopeful proposals about mental health many times before, however; time will tell. Newsom praised a recent initiative in San Francisco that modestly expands conservatorship for the mentally ill, though local progressives opposed it.
Newsom said nothing about inpatient psychiatric care. Amid the flood of homelessness-policy reports coming out from public task forces and commissions, inpatient psychiatric care receives virtually no attention. It’s an area where the Trump administration, with its recent push to eliminate the so-called IMD Exclusion—which bans Medicaid funding for mentally ill adults in specialized psychiatric institutions—is doing more for the homeless than California’s leadership.
California particularly needs state leadership on homelessness due to the uniquely regional character of the crisis. Local policies on homelessness in California don’t stay confined within local borders. Regardless of what role personal choices did or didn’t play in their circumstances, the homeless clearly do exercise some preference about which communities are best to be homeless in. Progressive localities offering generous municipal services for the homeless often resent how they wind up providing those services for people from other communities, whose governments don’t invest as much in supportive housing, shelter, or outreach.
Newsom declined to offer state leadership on the issue of greatest regional importance: law enforcement. With the Ninth Circuit’s 2018 ruling in Martin v. Boise, which effectively prevents municipalities from outright bans on street camping, cities possess fewer options on disorder-related questions, such as how to deal with mass homeless encampments. Say you’re the mayor of a modest-size city in the Central Valley, and you want to do something about a downtown tent encampment. As soon as you start raising the issue, you get a letter from a Los Angeles-based lawyer threatening to sue if you don’t adhere to the ACLU’s dictates on encampment policy. Most local officials in that scenario will back down from trying their case in court. Thus, the practical effect of Martin is policymaking by legal advocates. This satisfies no one, but to what extent can cities push back? Can a mayor of, say, Sacramento expect broad-based support if he decides to make public disorder his Number One priority?
Oftentimes, the simplest explanation is the best. California politicians don’t want to commit themselves on public disorder because fence-sitting is the safer alternative. Polls in California show strong support for the goal of reducing public disorder but more ambiguous support as to the means. How much firmness the public would tolerate isn’t clear. One recent survey of 1,000 likely voters found that about three-fourths supported coupling encampment restrictions with a “right to shelter” policy. That’s not too far from the official position of the Ninth Circuit and legal advocates. Limiting street camping on the condition that cities be equipped to offer indoor shelter to every individual who may request it is unduly burdensome, even for well-off communities. But localities can expect little help or guidance from Governor Newsom on this thorny issue.
Given the current level of concern about homelessness in California, it would be strange had Newsom not devoted his State of the State to the topic. San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s crises in the streets are internationally notorious, much like the South Bronx in the late 1970s, though at that point New York’s murder rate had yet to peak. Sometimes, policy challenges have to get worse before they get better. Californians’ confidence in a solution to homelessness is very low. Could the worst be yet to come?
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