City Studies Conditions at Shelter Site for Homeless

It is called Justiceville, a ragtag compilation of plywood, cardboard, tattered blankets, old tires, discarded drapes and about 60 homeless people.

Ted Hayes, who organized the place and gave it its name, said the makeshift dwellings at 6th Street and Gladys Avenue in downtown Los Angeles allow homeless people to take care of themselves, and he has challenged government officials to work with him to come up with a better plan.

But living conditions at the former children’s playground site have become so abysmal that even some advocates for the homeless question whether officials should allow it to exist.

Subject of Hearing

The city attorney’s office will hold a hearing today to determine what to do about the scores of people who make Justiceville their home, in apparent violation of health, building and safety, zoning, and fire codes.

“I look out and see people living in shacks and I feel like I’m on the set of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” said Catherine Morris of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker agency next door that provides meals to the homeless of Skid Row. “It is neither safe, nor decent, nor sanitary.”

At the heart of the controversy is not only what to do about the city’s large homeless population but what to do with those who cannot or will not fit into the traditional help programs offered them. Justiceville, by all accounts, has attracted a mix of homeless, from the truly desperate to predators who use the shanty town as a base for drug activity.

How to deal with it is a political hot potato because “nobody wants to be the one type cast as the villain who kicked homeless people into the street,” said Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, which helps families on Skid Row. “But it isn’t that simple.”

Followed Tent City

The impetus for Justiceville was Tent City, the temporary tents set up at Christmas across the street from Los Angeles City Hall by the homeless. Tent City brought unprecedented attention to the problems of the homeless population. It also attracted the attention of Hayes, a former minister who had been active in the civil rights and student protests of the 1960s.

Hayes said he left his family in Riverside to become “homeless by choice.” He is convinced that “homelessness will be the issue of the ‘80s, as big if not bigger than the civil rights movement.”

Hayes has turned into a persuasive and media-smart leader of the homeless. He managed to wrangle donations of portable toilets for the residents who had been using the sand as toilets and had a telephone installed in the middle of his makeshift office, plywood walls covered with quilts and blankets. The steps are old tires. He has an old typewriter inside and a cat, which was curled up on a mat that serves as Hayes’ bed.

“I don’t deny that we have a bad situation,” said Hayes, as another resident cooked meat nearby over a trash can turned stove with a refrigerator grill turned griddle. “It is unsanitary, but we didn’t create the problem. We ask the county, ‘What can we do?’ and their big answer is ‘Just get off the property.’ ”

Owner of Property

The property is owned by Orient Investment Co. Ernest Doizaki, company president, said the county told him to clear the property after squatters started living there a few months ago.

“I’m basically in a no-win situation,” Doizaki said. “It’s as if someone came and sat on your front lawn and refused to leave. As a business person, yes, I wish they would leave, but as a person, there ought to be something that can be done. With all this USA for Africa movement, there ought to be a USA for the USA, with all the people starving here.”

Doizaki said the problem fell in his lap after the Catholic Worker, which had leased the property for years as a playground, opted out of its lease in February.

Morris of the Catholic Worker said the agency decided not to continue leasing the grounds because “last winter, during the rains, a lot of people moved onto the grounds because it has roofing. After Tent City, a whole new group moved in, just living there all the time. As a group dealing with homelessness, we didn’t know how to deal with this. It wasn’t politically possible for us deal with it when we’d get press calls asking, ‘Why are you evicting people from your playground?’ Where was the county to work with them? In the meantime, it hasn’t been a healthy situation.”

‘Not Legal Dwellings’

On that, everyone agrees. “There is no running water, these are not legal dwellings,” said Al Hearne of the county Health Department. “We’ve met with city officials, and I had understood that city public works might have a role. . . . We have recommended a complaint be filed, but that’s up the city attorney.”

Justiceville would never have happened if the county and city offered more options for the homeless, said Nancy Mintie of the Inner City Law Center, which works with Skid Row clients.

“I think it’s laughable that the Health Department is talking about moving against Justiceville when it’s right in the shadow of residential hotels where the conditions are deplorable,” Mintie said. “It looks to me like they just don’t want to see it in the open.”