The Containment Plan (rebroadcast)
26:01 Share

this is 99 percent invisible im Roman Mars last week， the supreme court of United States upheld a ban on sleeping in public spaces， while the majority in favor of the ruling argued that it was not intended to target the unhouse it effectively allows cities and states to criminalize homelessness even when there are no shelters available， we thought now might be a good time to reair our episode from 2017， which covers the skid road district in los angles its about the strategic design decisions undertaken by city planning officials to develop a distinct neighborhood for the homeless。

its hard to overstate the vastness of the skid row neighborhood in la it spans roughly 50 blocks， which is about one fifth the entire downtown area of Los Angeles in some ways。

the streets of skid row are a bit like other parts belling thats reporter carligreen there are corner stores and street vendor selling everything from jewelry to lose cigarads their old breaktownhouses filled with lowincom housing there parks were grown， ups gather to talk and children gather to play but its also very clear when you entered skit row for one thing theres the smile the states of skid row often stink of urine and other excrement baking under the hot los angless sun the gutters are lined with trash and the sidewalks are mostly and on some blocks entirely occupied by peoples makeshift homes a dizzying array of tarps and tense stretch out for blocks in blocks one structure jutting up against the next and the next and there are lots of people on the street many them pushing special red shopping carts the carts are handed out by a local avocasey group because the police used to arrest people for having what they believed were stolen shopping carts so all the person got to do just be almost in come here you know stand me and a register give you a shopping card right and a people uh userd user to push their property around and stuff like that in and the cups hit em thats what almost thats general dogan walking around skid row with me hesacommunity。

organizer and lifelong residen of the neighborhood whos lived in both flow and come housing and on the streets here so this yeah so im going to raise no skill row my parents met the end of they both got a job at bullets department storm seven browway uh they went went the lunch fell in love i was born nine months later in general hospital and i been down town on every sense！

walking through skid row its not hard to see when you reach the edge the line， the divide skid row from the rest of downtown and if you stand right there， youll notice that youre the intersection of two radically different neighborhoods so may street is a divide align main street is the via line between the house in the house that because you got always people that sleep on one side street in the lovebuilders on the other side of street and some of the almost people lay down in a tip and they can look up a city tv in the lovebuilding so thats a divider line for your and in Los Angeles that dividing line between halves and have not between skid row and the rest of downtown it wasnt drawn by accident its the result of a very specific plan to keep homeless people on one side development on the other its a plan that somewhat surprisingly was written and fought for by advocates of skid bros resident population back in the early 20 sentry。

the railroad went through downtown Los Angeles right around whereskid row is now and like many other cities around the country a neighborhood formed around the traintracks so first of what what do we have in front of us here okay well。

the first thing Ryan ack is a los Angela city planner its a oh this is beautiful yeah its a map for 1909 and the reason i i bought this out is this pictorial here of 1909 actually predates zoom back when the area now known as get row started to develop x there werenany zoninglaws in la to say what types of developments were allowed in different areas？

um and so what developed the time you can add the confluence of of the rail and the los angles produce in agricultural markets at the same point， um， which brought a a large transition population terms， the railroad workers。

anaragorculturalworkers have gone through the archives of the la times as mentions of skid row back a hundred years ago， around the turn of the century。

Gary blaze is a usela， a merit is professor who was a housing in homeless advocate in an around scit roll back in the seties and eighties。

so it group around the railyears around downtown and the people were referred to in a la times as for example。

booms all the way up into the 70 most people in skid role lived in cheap apartments are single room， occupancy？

hotels or sros there were homeless people but fewer than there are now what i what i saw what i was a kid was homelessness was just too whynos again general dogan whois living in schedule on the seven days so you had up yeah the occasion of white nose and majoryon was white males and how mute i see drink white port and all that kind of stuff skid row was not yet the sprawling tentcity that it would go on to become but it was still considered a rough neighborhood were people went to seekoutdrugs or drink all day and sleep on benches and the homeless population was growing。

as good role grew， the greater downtown area of la was also growing and developing， and the developers didnt like what was happening in skid row so for example。

the union restream it was on main street and there are a lot of people there it was full all the time there were people lined up outside lot of activity there there was essentially an open air drug market around a corner。

a fifth in main street and so a plan emerged in nineteen 72 a plan drafted by group of business people and endorsed by many city officials to move skid rose population out and developed the area for new er more moneedresidence it was known as the silver book plan， and it was essentially to raise skid row kick everyonoutboldosbuildings start fresh of course。

resiance of skid row and their advocates didnt like this new plan and they began thinking about how to fight it one of those people was Charles elcessor。

a young lawyer at the time who remembers coming across some research that showed that when you build those enablehood like skitherrow， it just means more skid row like neighborhoods pop up elsewhere what i did we we werenquite sure whether was true or not heresalcessor admitting that true or not the theory was useful？

but it was it was a it was a very convery useful theory for purposes of saying this is mistake that that whole idea was a mistake the theory that skilled row would just pop up somewhere else of residents were forced to move scared people who didnt want skid roseresidents to end up in their neighborhood some of these scared people join the scared row activised cause and the activists were happy to have them they really did you know come up with this idea that had some scarely support um！

but also really really helps the iadric acy and so armed with there one study elsesareanotheractivised came up with an idea to replace the silver book plan which again would boldos get row with another one heres Jeff de trick who helped right the new plan we develop was called the bluebook plan Jeff de trick in his wife Catherine mores have been longtime advocates for the homeless they run a while knownsoup kitchen and skid row called the hippykitchen the bluebookplan was this to contain the spread of skid row its basically whatsacall the a containment plan this new plan will call it the containment plan from heronoutpropose some pretty radical ideas including getting all the missions and the charities and other homeless services to physically move their offices。

so theyd be within the newly strongborder sofskid row again Gary blaze the deal was all the services the tend to attract to homeless people will be concentrated to the east of spring street and in exchange for that the redevelopment agency will not only not boldos all of the sros。

but it will also fund a separate nine profit called the sro housing the sroehousinterest would be charged with protecting and maintaining a whole slew of low income housing inskid row the active spend several months writing and developing the containment plan and they worked every angle trying to get the city to take it seriously。

so someone knew someone in the city council thats cathermorous explaining that they got someone to distribute a draft of the plan to everyone on city council and so they agreed that while there was a lunch break that they would bring these in and put them at every place so the people came back in the council people came back in sat down picked up the first thing on the start paging through this where did this come from i dont know where came from the containment plan was enough of a compromise that somehow amazingly it went out it wasnt legally binding agreement。

but it went on to define the cities approach to get road for decades and it was a totally unique approach， Charles said no one else was doing what they were doing and nobody really seems to have done it sense elcessor says hes worked on lots of campaigns to save skid road like neighborhoods or housing projects since the sevens but skid road was the only time hesuse containment as a strategy the containment plan made very suggestions on how to keep skid road types within the new borders of the neighborhood。

theresaction of the plan calls inducements that reads with public restroomsbenches and pleasant open spaces within the contained area of skid row the residents might be inclined to confine their activities to the immediate area that section would servicem magnet to hold undesirable population elementsinskid row not against their will but of their own accord and the plan talks about a buffer song， which would create a border between skid row and the rest of downtown strong edges will act as buffers between skid row and the rest of central city when the skid row residen enters the buffer， the psychological comfort of the familiar， skid row environment will be lost he will feel for him and will not be inclined to travel far from the area of containment。

after the containment policy was officially adopted in 176， the city started to implemented including many of the meticulous and uncomfortable suggestions of how exactly to contain skid rows population like the buffer zone i dont remember how i know this！

but i do remember uh learning at this that some graduate students from usc were hired basically the shadow people， living and good row and to keep track on a map of where they went and so the question was how broader buffers are did you need how far do people wander from schedule and i think the determination was made that you need a buffer of about two blocks the city also began using unpleasant design like annoying bright light sunskid。

rosebordering streets to keep homeless people from warning to expand their territory a main street always had the the regular fancy lights the regular the old meadow once they built down and i was it again general dogan and so when they start building the loss on main street， they came specifically and they put these big ads presalize i know they but i know presanize when i see what all right yeah by this big and a brown you can go over there and look at it yeah that was targeting people who like me who come on site the sro and smoked cigarese hang out front of the building or this talk and then there were the more aggressive measures if you stayed within the borders of skid row Gary blaze says the cops might not bother you， but yeah you crust over that border then um if you look like you might belong on skid row the cups were gonna stop you they containment zone made some practical sense both for the city and the residents of skid row but its also an uncomfortable dehumizing idea its a warehouse uh warehouse is what is where you storeship right and so you are the idea was to push all of the city of law sandalist unfavorable！

citizens right and one general area elcessor the lawyer who helped write the plan says if the way its written sounds on empathetic or even offensive that because they werent trying to run a pr campaign they werent trying to change politicians minds about skid rows residents they were desperately frantically trying to save skid row from being paveed over and containment was better than doing nothing heres jeft trickagain who call off at the plan you know its spoken of a rather derisively um maybe we could have thought of a better name uh but its better than the video right here literation plan yeah right？

yeah exactly in case you didnt catch that he was saying itbe better than an obliteration plan forbetter or worse over the course of just a few years la s get row became the place to go if you were homeless in los angless。

some hospitals would even discharge patience there if they didnt have a fixed address few out out in south central you know or round about you know， theres very few service providers they give twenty four hour access there is no place you know out of south central or community where home people can go to and every day get three years be able to go take a shower be able to go is bad from stuff like that so all the services is constrating one area so out in south central if you homelis it。

the it draws you to skilled row la was funmely all of its homeless people to skid row and in the 1980， the homeless population of Los Angeles began to explode crack was decimal in black communities across the city and many of these newly addicted people were going to skid row today。

theres a new epidemic smokable cocaine otherwise known as crack theysuperaddictive and deadly。

cocaine concentrate the crack problem has become a crack crisis at its spreading nationwide it is an explosively destructive an often lethal substance。

which is crushing its users in the mits。

the crack epidemic and the escalating war on drugs ragnan aggressively cut back the welfare system。

which drastically shrank the space between poverty and homellessness skid row wasnt mostly whitemail alcoholics anymore for one thing it became overwhelmingly black you started sing families in the states！

people who might have otherwise taken a room in single occupancy hotels just couldnafford them anymore you try you can you can live two three days in a motile and la we three we two hundred dollars you know so people like we help us keep my two hundred dollars and get a tent you know that mean just crash out and save my money to eat on Garry blazi was a young advocate at the legal aid foundation at the time and he remembers that skid row was so crowded it felt unsafe i want from you would see you know a few people on a block to you would see a hundred people uh on a block meaning that basically uh people were shoulder to shoulder and so the density was just gramming it was a it was a completely insane place blaze remembers that for Christmas of nineteen eighty four an ineffort to get folks。

some shelter， he and some other advocate setup two big tense with a bunch of cots on an empty patch of land just opposite citihall and pretty soon there were 80 people sleeping on cats and those tons！

in the last couple of decades conditions on skid row have changed a bit there are fewer homeless people they are no longer sleeping in shoulder to shoulder on the street but skid row has endured as a place for homeless people to live and find services even as otherskidro style neighborhoods around the country were eaten up by justification and their residents were scattered around their respective cities and over the years the sense of community schedule is only gotten stronger the neighbor has become not just a hub for social services but for activism around poverty on homellessness we always seen it as community right uh uh i get more hey！

how are you doing？

brother whatsup hey， how are you doing？

jira dogas when i walk on this again skip road then i do when i walk on the the yapified side they walk path you like they only see some of my lot of my note and they still dont wait we have no animals you know this is a community down year uh we work to make this a community？

apart from the containment plan theres another major reason why skid row has not been taken over by new apartment buildings and thats zoning aside from the single room， occubenc hotels and a bit of other low income housing that was grandfather in most of skid row is owned industrial rather than commercial or residential again city planner Bryan ack in the eastern half of skid railway is zouned industrial that has precluded the expansion or the ability to create new housing there but all of that could soon change Los Angeles is currently undertaking a total rehall of its zoningcode starting with downtown and a lot of skid row that was formally zowned industral will probably be rezoned as mixed use there are a lot of vacant buildings？

oncegidrew and the city would like to make some of that real estate available for housing many residence of schedule would love to have new housing theywenasking for it for years having more housing has been been something that they have expressed as something thats critical for the neighborhood having grocery stores with you know healthy and accessible on cheat food the city is basically saying in order to give you housing we have to resume。

but skitreal residents want new housing in their neighborhood to be affordable， and that isnt something that can be detwiththrough zoning zoning can say whether an area is industrial or residential or mixed， but it cant say of housing will be affordable that would have to be done legislatably someskitro residence believepolitical leaders could find a way to build affordable housing in the neighborhood。

but instead theyll use the resulting process as an excuse to open up the real estate market and get them out like Craig or he dont wanna give me his last name but hes a longtime resident of skid row and he says zoning is just a tool the tool they want to used to get real the holess people and create this new agent rocation program is zonly theyre planning on making beings of dollars by pushing us out。

squeezing us out or kicking us out meaning us support people the disadvantage people that the homeless and and plus of the residents of the of the neighbor even without zoning changeskid row is getting smaller containment was never a legally binding agreement and the city seems to be increasingly less guided by it theres a whole neighborhood actually that juts up against get row that used to essentially be a part of it its a new hip neighborhood filled with art galleries in sheet caffees its called the arts district and is the areas around skid road have continued to jentify taking bytes out of the edges of the neighborhood skid row itself has changed。

including general dogan says the police presents in two thousand six the city live with they call a safeness they would brought a hunting ten extra policy skill role so that containment zone is been broken up， busted up by the police the police come in swing a Billy close peoples friend out and so thats why you got the tense all by the freeway all all over here because people say you know them are ready be open here on forty thirds three to my tent you know them be able to chill out you know them even being on Sang Julian st against the wall being Jack up three four times a day！

back in 1976 whencessorandmorris anotheractivised came up with the containment plan they included a map that laid out exactly what the borders of skid row would be they were trying to make a deal a kind of compromise will stay over here just dont try to push us out with new development and will stay contained everybodys signed up for houses right not here！

just a couple weeks ago， skid row residents and activis were out on the street fighting for those same borders the ones from the nineteen 76 containment plan， but with a different attitude， theynot trying to contain skid row theyre trying to contain development or at least the luxury housing development thats currently being considered right at the edge of skid row， its A33STORYHIGHRISE apartment building just needs approval from the local council men to move forward theyre about two dozen people at the protest， including general dogan thisisars dont build here， theyre saying or else？

laskid roll was not the first skid row abretrovement has a story of what is rumored to be the first use of the phrase after this。

so im in the studio with average government and constantly you were doing a story in Seattle where you ended up on another skid row and not just any skid row it was maybe where the name skid row comes from um so if you go to Seattle and you go downtown you own counterplace called pioneear square， which is actually a triangle and it is the tourist area and um seeado used to be a really big logging town and the mill used to be right downtown so loggers will go up into the hills and chop down these massive huge trees and they lubricate them with fish oil and hook the logs up to teams of oxen and mules and then would run the logs down this road over the milk now that would be called dragging or skidding the logs skittingalogs makes this road the skid road it was called skid road with a d according to my guide dina gerian and that st is now called yeslerway because Henry yesler was the owner of the mill at the end of the st where the logs were being skighted downto and this mill was also very close to the support and so here in this part of town yougot these sailors who are taking their short live and then these loggers are like lot of guys around and theyve got these hard jobs with long periods of downtime they are looking for action and fun luckily scattle in this area in the skidro was here to provide before there was Vegas sincity was right here a lot of bars lot of Brothos so this is the original skid row maybe maybe there are other towns i have to connect there are other towns that had skid roads as a functional term of the logging industryanotherpart to the world i dont know if those other skid roads also developed like bars and red light districts and you know me rough attitudes， but thats definitely what happened in scale thanks your stuffing in yeah！

thank you！

since this episode air the debate on rezoningscit row has continued on advocates are finding for afforblehousing to be part of any proposal， but the homeless population is still facing the same lack of legal protections and now with the recent scotus ruling theres a risk that cities in a similar position will turn simply to finding arresting and jailing the onhouse populations， 99 percent visible was produced this week by Carlogreen Mixby street fusifmusicbiswan Riow additional production and voice acting by average troublemen special thanks this week to John Malpeed and Henry at browers from the Los Angeles property department thanks as well to line a sheen to and everyone at the los and less community action network if this episode resname with you， i recommend you go back and listen to our series called according to need by kating mingle， it covers the challenges of truly addressing homos ness instead of just trying to sweep people away to somewhere else its one of the best things we ever done i hope check now！

Cathy two is our executive producer curt colestead is the digital director。

delinehall is our senior editor nikidia update is our intern resident， includes CRISPR Ruby， Jason Dalian， Emitfitzgerald martingang sales， Chris for Johnson， Vivian Lee Washmenton， Joe Rosenberg， Gabrielle Gladney， Kelly prime， Jacomaltonadomadina， Nina Potec and me Roman Mars the Nanina percent of visible logo was created by Steffen Lawrence， we are part of the Stitcher and serious exam Podcast family now headcorded six blocks north in the Pandora， building in beautiful Uptown， Ogland California， home of the openrootsock club of which im a proud community owner other teams may come and go， but the roots are Oakland first always you can find us on all the usual social media sites was around discord server you can find a link to that as well as every passed episode of 99 pi AT99PI dollar。