Mike Alvidrez and Michael Maltzan worked together to develop apartment buildings for the Skid Row Housing Trust. For more than thirty years, the organization campaigned for humane living conditions in Los Angeles’ centrally located deprived neighborhood. What vision do the former manager and architect have for Skid Row?
Who is homeless in Los Angeles?
Mike Alvidrez As everywhere, those people who are on the lowest rung of the income ladder are homeless. Some have been homeless for years. Some work, others study. Many are homeless because it has become so incredibly difficult to find affordable housing – not only in Los Angeles, but everywhere in California and the USA.
Ethnic factors are also clearly recognizable: Nine percent of the approximately 10.5 million people in L.A. County are Black; of the homeless forty, in Skid Row even about seventy percent. It is obvious that ethnicity, social status and development opportunities are closely linked. In addition, in many cases we are talking about transgenerational poverty. Some of the people live on the streets for ten or twenty years, some for most of their lives. And the numbers are rising, even though the last survey for L.A. suggested a slight decline in those affected and threatened by homelessness. You have to keep in mind that these are cut-off date surveys – the actual number is likely to be three times as large.
What is special about the situation in L.A.?
Mike Alvidrez California is the “end of the rainbow” – the dream of an America that offers jobs and training opportunities en masse. People from all over the world come here because of the good weather, the great universities and jobs. On the other hand, L.A. in particular stands for “sprawl”; Downtown, i.e. the historic city center, was completely neglected with the planned urban sprawl of the surrounding area from the sixties onwards.
Los Angeles has marketed itself as an alternative to the dense cities of the East Coast. Here you could go anywhere by car, you didn’t have to squeeze into overcrowded buses or metros. You could have your own house where you fire up the barbecue after work or on weekends. You didn’t have to accept that the noise from the neighboring apartment would bother you. L.A. relied absolutely on its vastness – the county covers 1200 square kilometers.
At the same time, the varied landscape and climate attracted the film industry, and aircraft construction also created many jobs. All this, however, was settled outside the city proper. This is one of the reasons why people have moved to the suburbs, and this is why homelessness is most severe in downtown.
So let’s talk about Downtown, specifically about Skid Row, the district that stands beyond L.A. as the epitome of misery.
Mike Alvidrez Downtown L.A. was once very lively, people lived and worked there. But when the aforementioned suburbanization in the fifties also caused retail and restaurants to disappear from the center, only administrative buildings and offices remained; it was left to the homeless after work, so to speak. There was no longer an attractive night program – only kiosks and cheap pubs.
The eastern districts of downtown, including Skid Row, have emerged as working-class quarters. With the connection to the Transcontinental Railway (1876, editor’s note) came many untrained workers. They worked in agriculture, in factories, in the oil fields and lived in so-called Single Room Occupancies (SROs). After World War II, many veterans stayed in Los Angeles, many had mental problems, were alcoholics; and the last affordable apartments for them were the SROs of Skid Row.
What do these SROs look like?
Mike Alvidrez Most of them were built of brick in the twenties and thirties. They usually have two to five floors with twenty to ninety small rooms of 12 to 14 square meters. There is a bathroom on each floor that is shared by four or five residents. There are also larger houses with up to twelve floors and 400 to 700 rooms.
Over the past thirty years, the city has been trying to make downtown more attractive again. With new apartments and the cultural offerings that have been settled in Bunker Hill, for example, the pressure on Skid Row is also growing. To what extent is this problematic?
Mike Alvidrez From the beginning, the plan to develop Downtown was to push homelessness out of parts of the center to provide housing for people with better incomes. A containment strategy was to concentrate the homeless in Skid Row: the area became a designated zone to upgrade other neighborhoods. Part of the plan was to open shelters – the common approach in the sixties: People should learn skills that would make them “useful” to society. It was ignored that many of them have physical or mental problems, struggle with addictions and are inadequately treated. Skid row in its vehemence is the result of wrong political decisions.
That was in the sixties and seventies. What happened after that?
Mike Alvidrez In the 1960s and 1970s, many old houses in downtown were demolished so that they could not be purchased or used by people with low incomes. The massive pressure from outside to develop downtown then set in – in the eighties and nineties. All the emblematic office high-rises didn’t exist thirty or forty years ago. Only about ten percent of the Angelenos had ever set foot downtown. They came at most to have a passport issued. The center was “out of sight, out of mind” – so very few people knew what consequences the downtown renewal would entail. And so most were in favor of downtown being “cleaned up,” especially Skid Row.
Michael Maltzan: Homelessness was a very isolated phenomenon that was invisible to the majority. Only with the need to increase the density of the city do the worlds meet. And that creates friction. Since I started working with Mike and the Skid Row Housing Trust, the number of people in need has also increased. Homelessness has long since left the borders of Skid Row behind. This is also due to the fact that areas are now being developed that have long been the last remaining places of retreat.
How is the city tackling the problem? Or will the task remain in the hands of private individuals?
Mike Alvidrez The Skid Row Housing Trust was a non-profit organization. We have worked together with the municipal administration and with private donors. When we founded the association in 1989, no one was interested in the problem. We started to renovate the old SROs and only got headwinds. Over time, and at the latest when we started working with Michael in 2004, the tide turned. More people were interested; only the new neighbors clearly wanted to know what we were doing there – why are we concerned with homeless people when they stand in the way of the prospects of downtown shining in new splendor? There was a lot of resistance, although some also understood that it is better for everyone if fewer people live on the streets.
How did the Housing Trust raise money?
Mike Alvidrez : There are a few public housing subsidy programs. Under the Reagan administration, so-called “low income housing tax credits” were introduced (Tax Reform Act, 1986, editor’s note), which were intended to incentivize investors, mainly banks, to finance housing projects through tax breaks. Of course, this was aimed at relieving the state of its obligations. On the other hand, there are also government programs that provide rent subsidies. This money will ensure operation and maintenance. Thirdly, private organizations come into play that offer services. Many of the people in Skid Row are dependent on psychological, psychiatric or medical care. These costs are not on the capital side, but are billed as social benefits.
The different programmes and financial grants are very fragmented. In one of the first projects with Michael, the Star Apartments, we drew on funding from 22 sources. This also means that you have to go through a very specific application process in each case. Of course, this slows down planning and construction.
Although even the city council now calls homelessness a crisis, the administration – the city planning office or the building supervisory authorities – does not behave as if it were one. So here we have the politicians who say it is urgent, and there the bureaucracy, which is too sluggish to meet the urgency.
The projects resulting from your collaboration are architecturally high-quality. Where does this quality claim come from?
Mike Alvidrez : I became aware of the Housing Trust in the late 1980s when they were repairing the SROs. They have already done this with a great deal of architectural sensitivity. You could see from these projects that those who developed them cared about the people who would live in them, even if they were in the middle of Skid Row. I was thrilled when they asked me to join their project management in 1990. Then we slowly shifted interest from SROs to new construction projects – to “permanent supportive housing”, a form of housing in which residents can find a permanent place to stay and community. The rooms became apartments, and services were part of the space program. This model was novel and programmatically complex. Working on it with an architect has enriched the matter. The Housing Trust has always had a claim, perhaps more implicit than explicitly expressed, to enrich the environment and the city beyond the individual building. Each building is designed to make Los Angeles better and more livable as the city it is, and the city it could be.
How permanent is an apartment in “permanent housing” designed?
Mike Alvidrez The term is to be understood primarily in distinction to “transitional housing”, i.e. the temporary emergency shelter. Permanent housing offers people an apartment for an unlimited period of time, they can live there for as long as they want. However, the buildings are very attractive because there are services directly in the building: psychological services, doctors, drug help. In addition, because the residents of these houses have so little money, they hardly take advantage of the offers that a city makes. They don’t go out to eat or to the cinema, they don’t go to the beach. That’s why it’s important that their home offers them more than a “normal” residential building.
In order to really stabilize people in the long term, they also need a community – the neighborhood or household acts as a social network. The architecture of the house is also important for this.
Homeless people have had many bad experiences, also of a spatial nature. We want to reverse the narrative pattern. Instead of experiencing the same rooms over and over again that convey: “You’re not worth it”, they should feel valued and say: “I like my home.” They are so used to passing through offices and reception centres that are pragmatic at best, but in shabby condition at worst. Nobody deserves that.
Michael Maltzan I’ve often had to listen to the question: “Why do you put so much effort into making the buildings look so good?” It made me angry. On the one hand, because a disparaging view of people in need becomes clear. On the other hand, there is also a strange view of the city in it: Why should you build anything that makes your own city ugly? Why put an unimaginative house in your city when you have the opportunity to enrich it?
How are the rents measured?
Mike Alvidrez: Normally, they amount to a third of the monthly income. Since the tenants have little money, there are government subsidies to come up with a price that covers the operating costs.
Why was the Housing Trust wound up last year?
Mike Alvidrez : On the one hand, the operating costs could no longer be covered. The subsidies were far too low, especially to keep the old SROs in good shape. On the other hand, there is the very fragmented situation of financial sources, which I have already mentioned. Keeping track of this complex situation requires very special management skills: You not only have to know how to get the money to build a house, but also how to ensure its operation.
Then Covid complicated matters. The community activities are extremely important for the clientele and fell away in one fell swoop. Everyone was isolated again – this time not on the street, but in their own apartment. Covid has taken a hard toll on the homeless community. Poor people were far from having access to medical care. The trust has not been stable for a long time, but Covid has driven the nail in its coffin. Other non-profits suffered a similar fate.
It is frightening how big the gap is between the necessary offers of help and what is possible. We are probably experiencing the worst housing shortage and homelessness situation that the United States or other developed nations have ever experienced. It shows how little attention society pays to a sustainable improvement of the situation.
Who will take care of the buildings and the people now?
Mike Alvidrez One of the last official acts of the management was to transfer the property rights and service offerings to other providers, most of whom are also non-profits.
Michael, have you already worked with other organizations?
Michael Maltzan: We built a building in Long Beach for the Excelerate Housing Trust. Long Beach is part of the greater Los Angeles area, but is an independent municipality with its own building rights. There were similarities, but also some differences in this project – thanks to leaner approval procedures, implementation was faster there.
Do you currently see developments underway that could help to ensure that homelessness is no longer a crisis in the foreseeable future?
Mike Alvidrez An end to homelessness is not in sight. The city must not only think about homelessness, but also about the costs and location of housing in general. I think we have to get away from the fairy tale of continuing to proclaim Los Angeles as a low-density city.
About three-quarters of the residential areas in L.A. are designated as single-family housing developments by the zoning code. Once again, this was intended as an alternative to city life a hundred years ago, but it remains a sacrilege to question it, even though the city has these dire problems. Obviously, the issue of traffic must also be addressed. It’s no secret that public transport in Los Angeles works very poorly.
I am sure that we will have homeless people on the streets for a few more decades. There are approaches to help, but until we provide more housing for low-income population groups, increase the density of the city and improve transport access without a car, no relevant improvement in the situation can be expected.
