In June 2022, LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis submitted a motion to create the Skid Row Action Plan, a sweeping initiative to turn Skid Row into a healthy, thriving community after decades of institutional racism.
Meant to eschew the top-down approach of the past, the Action Plan proposes something simple yet radical: What would it look like to center residents? To that end, the county appointed a 10-person Resident Advisory Committee of former or current residents of Skid Row to provide guidance during the design phase.
“That’s what is different, right? It’s not the state saying, ‘We know what’s good for you, you need a drug treatment program in Skid Row.’ It’s, ‘Talk to us about what you need and how we do it,’” said Sieglinde von Deffner, Skid Row coordinator for Housing for Health, a program of the LA County Department of Health Services.
But as the plan moves forward, tensions continue to emerge between LA County and Skid Row community members who are concerned that certain priorities included in the plan will fall by the wayside, especially plans for economic and community development. The original Resident Advisory Committee officially ended in December. A new plan for resident advisory councils is still in process with no clear timeline, leaving the county with no official resident oversight.
So far, the county is reporting impressive progress: 350 new interim housing beds and 750 new permanent housing units, a new 24/7 safe landing space in the Cecil Hotel lobby, and a new campus on Crocker Street to house a harm reduction health hub and safe services space.
While a presentation to the Board of Supervisors last month focused on what the county has accomplished so far, the plan as envisioned through the community design process is much more than a strategy to reduce homelessness in Skid Row. It’s a radical revisioning of Skid Row as a place, building on decades of work by activists and residents to win recognition of Skid Row as a neighborhood in the face of governmental oppression, institutional racism, and organized abandonment.
What is the Skid Row Action Plan?
From August to November 2022, community stakeholders met to establish priorities for the plan. Then from June to December 2023, consulting firm Change Well led a community design process with residents, county and city staff, and service providers, leading to a final report released in April.
The Skid Row Action Plan contains six major components: permanent housing, interim housing, a safe services space, a 24/7 low barrier health care center, a harm reduction health hub, and economic and community development.
At base, the Action Plan is a push to improve permanent and interim housing in Skid Row, as well as to address the effects of systemic inequality, including extreme poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to trauma-informed healthcare, substance use treatment, and employment.
Change Well’s report advises the county to shift from a service-delivery model to a place-based model. Easier said than done, said Tom Grode, a member of the Resident Advisory Committee. He explained that LA County is dominated by three powerful health agencies, the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Public Health, and the Department of Health Services, which is leading the Skid Row Action Plan.
“They haven’t seen Skid Row as a neighborhood. They see them as thousands of individual clients,” he said.
As the months tick by with no resident oversight, he’s feeling frustrated.
“What’s the mechanism… to hold the county accountable? And the answer is, there is none,” he said. “Okay, that was the purpose of the Residence Advisory Committee. So now it’s just the county on its own implementing the plan however the county wants to.”
The county recently selected a third-party non-profit, United Coalition East (UCEPP), to lead the next phase of resident involvement. UCEPP will hire three to four staff members from the community to facilitate community meetings to determine how the resident advisory councils will work.
Members of the resident advisory councils will be paid a substantial stipend — a huge departure from the past. For participating in work groups, members of the original Resident Advisory Committee received one $50 Visa gift card per session. Though more than residents received in the past for their input — a sandwich, according to Grode — the total still worked out to less than minimum wage.
“I’m able to go get me something to eat or something,” said Lorraine Morland, a Skid Row artist, advocate and member of the Resident Advisory Committee. “I gave them many hours and I think it’s no more than right to help.”
During the community design process, residents pushed the importance of paying people for their lived experience — whether with homelessness, substance use or sex work — as a priority, while also being conscious of the “benefits cliff.” People who have public benefits risk losing them when they cross a certain income threshold.
The councils will allow residents to speak directly to the agencies that are funding housing and other programs in the Skid Row. For example, the interim housing council will be able to meet directly with the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Health Services, and LAHSA, the joint powers authority of the city and county of Los Angeles that manages LA County’s system for placement in housing and shelters.
“So it’s not going to be that Bob didn’t get ice in his soda,”explains von Deffner. “But having curfews in interim housing is really counterproductive to getting vulnerable folks inside, for example.”
Per the Action Plan, there would be a total of six resident advisory councils for each component of the plan.
The county currently has state funding for a five-person permanent housing council and is seeking philanthropic funding for five additional councils, according to the Department of Health Services.
The need for collaboration
Any transformation of Skid Row into a thriving community must involve the buy-in of multiple groups, not just the county. Grode said he has doubts about whether the Department of Health Services will be able to collaborate with other departments and stakeholders to achieve the goals of the plan.
He pointed to the December 2023 final presentation for the Skid Row Action Plan where Supervisor Solis said that she hoped it could be a model for other cities in California seeking to address homelessness.
“And I’m like, ‘You go for it, Hilda!’ Now my theory is Hilda has no clue what’s going on. But, go for it, Hilda!” he said.
There are only five supervisors in a county of 9.6 million people.
“Through both the Every Women Housed Plan and the Skid Row Action Plan, we have moved 1102 residents into interim housing and over 600 have been moved into permanent housing,” Supervisor Solis said in an emailed statement that listed $147 million in funding so far. “But we can’t do it alone. We need the support of our community to bring all the components of the Skid Row Action Plan to fruition.”
There are questions about how the Action Plan fits with other ongoing efforts in Skid Row, including the LA Alliance lawsuit, which is a lawsuit brought by downtown stakeholders and business interests against the city and County of LA and LA Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe, which is an initiative to remove encampments by moving unhoused people into motel rooms.
The county would not comment on whether there is an overlap between beds required by the LA Alliance lawsuit and beds provided under the Action Plan.
In June 2023, LA County was awarded a $60 million Encampment Resolution Fund Grant. Von Deffner clarified that the city and county jointly applied for the grant to provide 394 shelter beds and wraparound services, but the grant wasn’t part of Inside Safe.
Past initiatives to transform Skid Row have often focused on removing unhoused people from public spaces through the criminalization of poverty. This is not the approach that the Action Plan is taking, according to LA County.
“Inside Safe in Skid Row looks nothing like it looks anywhere else,” von Deffner said. “For Skid Row, this isn’t an encampment that — it’s small and on one block that we can resolve in a couple of weeks… So there was no enforcement component, nor any targeting of any one part of Skid Row for getting vulnerable folks into those beds.”
Additional community recommendations
To explain the gap between how the county views the Skid Row Action Plan versus how the community views the Skid Row Action Plan, members of the Resident Advisory Committee point to the sixth and final working group convened during the community design process, the Economic and Community Development working group.
The original motion from Supervisor Solis to create the Action Plan included two items, “Increased Sanitation Services” and “Increased Sources of Income” that were consolidated into a list of “Additional Community Recommendations” in the original Skid Row Action Plan report submitted to the county in December 2022.
In her statement to LA Public Press, Supervisor Solis did not include economic and community development in her list of the components of the plan.
These recommendations, in turn, became a working group during the Change Well community design process. At the urging of group members, this became simply “Community Recommendations.”
“I was really upset,” said Linda Leigh, a member of the Resident Advisory Committee. “I was like, ‘That’s the community? You’re saying the community is less than interim housing, permanent housing, mental health? That is the community.’”
Later, the group changed the name to “Economic and Community Development.” Recommendations include creating a low-barrier application process and establishing a $25 million entrepreneurship fund.
Jobs, not services
If Skid Row is a neighborhood and not just a place where people go to receive services, then what does that mean?
It means creating jobs for Skid Row residents through the Action Plan, said Coach Ron, a member of the Resident Advisory Committee.
“It’s a lot of residents that — they don’t need services, right?” he said. “Like, ‘I need employment. Like, ain’t no jobs available? Ain’t no contracting opportunities available? We can’t be county vendors or something?’”
Each component of the Action Plan will include a resident advisory council if funding allows.
But trauma-informed employment for Skid Row residents is woven into other parts of the plan as well, especially jobs for people with lived experience with homelessness, substance use, and sex work. For example, the safe services space will employ community ambassadors to promote safety and trust.
The role of trusted community members or “community natives” is crucial, according to New Money, a community member who is developing his own program, Boots on the Ground, in coordination with the community ambassador program.
“We’re dealing with a lot of people that have faced adversity, so therefore it’s a lot of mental health that’s needed out here,” he told LA Public Press. “A lot of people’s courage [is] destroyed. That’s why you see people that have been down here for over 30 years. I’m trying to break that trend.”
If you don’t involve the community, people won’t use your services
Without community buy-in, people will not take the medication or go to therapy or accept services, according to members of the Resident Advisory Committee. A lot of that has to do with trust — if people don’t trust you, then they will not use your services — many people in Skid Row have a history of trauma with service providers.
“The community knows the community. The therapist — they come in, they don’t know nobody. All they doing is working within them four walls, that’s it,” Coach Ron said.
Coach Ron explained it like this: There is an office for the Department of Mental Health in Skid Row, but people don’t see it as a place for them.
“They don’t go in there to use the restroom, they don’t go in there and sit down, they don’t even go in there to get out of the sun — they walk right past it,” he said. But if the office were a communal space with community members facilitating activities and providing coffee and pastries, and a place for people to charge their phones, that would build trust, he said.
There’s also a cultural gap between the people in Skid Row providing services and the people in Skid Row receiving services. For one, Skid Row is a majority Black community, with 58% of the population in Skid Row compared to 8% county-wide. There’s an educational gap as well. The majority of Skid Row residents don’t have the educational qualifications or licenses to work in the types of positions that the county is hiring for as part of the Action Plan.
“Without [the community], you are nothing,” said Leigh. She describes the community as the “mothership,” with everything else as a satellite.
She pointed out that an informal economy already exists in Skid Row. “I’d like to see a barbershop with a school in the back to train people because you have people who cut the hair already on the street,” she said. “Why not do the things that are already happening there with people who are already doing it?”
Housing for Health, the department within the Department of Health Services that is heading up the plan, is in conversations with the LA County Department of Economic Opportunity about the job creation and economic development portion of the plan. The goal is for 40% of positions created by the Action Plan to be filled by Skid Row residents.
“I wanted 60 to 80%,” said Leigh. “You have a lot of people that live in Skid Row and not in tents… So why not train them? I mean, we could train them, get people trained to run a grocery store.”
Listening to the community
Skid Row already has models for community-centered design, including the ReFresh Spot hygiene center and the Skid Row Arts Alliance, as the report from Change Well and Skid Row advocates point out.
Skid Row also has its own safe consumption site run by Pastor Blue, an ordained minister and co-founder of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, providing a nonjudgmental, communal space with Narcan, clean pipes, and clean needles.
Katherine McNenny, a Skid Row resident who attended the community design working groups last year, believes that the county could be doing more to battle the ongoing overdose crisis in Skid Row by providing a 24-hour space with Narcan.
“I don’t see why that couldn’t have happened a year ago or a couple months after the motion was filed. I mean, for God’s sake, the Urban Alchemy canopies that are up 24/7… They pass out Narcan when they get it, and they’re a private nonprofit.”
The harm reduction health hub slated for the Crocker campus is set to open in the first quarter of 2025, according to the county. Another big part of the plan is a 24/7 low barrier health center — similar to an urgent care clinic — where medical care and mental health services are available around the clock. But this piece of the plan is ultimately dependent on funding.
“That piece of the Action Plan is the most complex to fund,” said von Deffner. “So, it’s definitely on the road. But there’s a large commitment on our part to figure out how to make it work.”
Stigmatized by the media as the largest outdoor mental asylum in the world or as a hub of addiction and violence, residents say that Skid Row is also a creative, joyful community, the “biggest recovery community anywhere.”
Some members of the Resident Advisory Committee say they still want to be part of the plan to make the neighborhood a better place.
Morland wants to do more events like the community festival hosted by the committee for the broader Skid Row community to give feedback on the Action Plan with live music, food, and resources.
“I thought it was a good idea to just let people sit down in their community and serve them. They didn’t have to get up or do anything,” she said.
Coach Ron wants the county to continue funding the original Resident Advisory Committee.
“If we don’t stay together, stay present, I see there’s a tendency to not follow through.”