Skid Row Research Articles

Contextualizing Overdoses in Los Angeles's Skid Row between 2014 and 2016 by Leveraging the Spatial Knowledge of the Marginalized as a Resource

Opioid drug overdoses in the United States have continued to rise since 2014. Overdoses are one of several interlinked health challenges faced by marginalized populations. Here we side with the argument that these populations can also be a valuable resource to address these challenges, and we use methods that can elevate this critical belief into real-world application. In this article, we use spatially inspired interviews from both marginalized and provider participants in the Los Angeles Skid Row to map out the microspaces of drug activity. The resulting map reveals a complex space in terms of drug types and associated social activities. These geonarratives reveal a nuanced space of locations, activities, and context—how these substances enter Skid Row, the associated violence, and the physical and emotional toll on the marginalized. We find both quantitative and qualitative support that the “street” community is complex, full of variation in terms of where people live, how they live, and the social fabric that has evolved. We suggest that these data can be used to reduce the structural violence often found in many “solutions” to the homeless and their problems. Instead we show that the marginalized could be used to provide a vital resource not only in terms of their knowledge and their communities but also in delivering medical care. We end by suggesting that this approach to data collection could evolve into an ongoing resource that could develop into a near-real-time tool to reduce overdose mortalities. Key Words: geonarrative, GIS, marginalized, overdose, Skid Row.

Drift report from Downtown LA

Abstract In March 2016 I walked around Downtown LA in an attempt to move beyond a neutralized contemporary version of psychogeography with its subjective, personalized relationship to space, towards an engagement with collective intensities held in the fabric of the place. The 3000 word text generated from these walks has drawn on earlier drawings, photographs, notes and recordings of the architectural ruins and social conditions left in the wake of deregulated capital. It maps a web of tactics and strategies undermining gentrification; points of intensity/contested sites include MacArthur Park, Skid Row, Union Station, Bradbury Building, Grand Central Market and the abandoned cinemas of Broadway.

Built community: architecture, community, and participation in a permanent supportive housing project

ABSTRACTHousing and the social processes that create it are an important part of a better world. The permanent supportive housing movement holds that housing, in addition to a variety of human services, is the most dignified and effective way to help people without homes. But the design of such initiatives matters. This community-based, qualitative research project investigates the connection between space, participation, and community. It draws on the experiences of residents of an innovative housing organization on Skid Row in Los Angeles, California. Residents of the program find community space to be both promising and contested. Their experiences also reveal the way that institutional space can be trauma-informed and impact their overall wellbeing and opportunities for interacting with others. However, their feelings of being a part of the community and their involvement in activities are not always connected, as identity and social context can cause residents to identify or dis-identify with their community despite how involved or uninvolved they are. Intentionally designed community spaces in permanent supportive housing units can respond to trauma and set the stage for interaction, but they cannot solve all problems.

The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis by James Eli Shiffer

The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis by James Eli Shiffer

Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. By Forrest Stuart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 352. $27.50 (cloth); $19.00 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsDown, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. By Forrest Stuart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 352. $27.50 (cloth); $19.00 (paper).Julian ThompsonJulian ThompsonUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author University of ChicagoPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Social Service Review Volume 91, Number 4December 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695491 Views: 204Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review | Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

Book Review | Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

Forrest, Stuart, Down, Out, & Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row.

Forrest, Stuart, Down, Out, & Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row.

Down and Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. By Forrest Stuart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xii+333. $27.50.

<i>Down and Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row</i>. By Forrest Stuart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xii+333. $27.50.

Book Review: Down, out, and under arrest: Policing and everyday life in skid row

Book Review: Down, out, and under arrest: Policing and everyday life in skid row

Waiting for Bobos: Displacement and Impeded Gentrification in a Midwestern City

The degree to which lower–income residents are displaced by the process of gentrification has been the subject of considerable debate. Displacement is generally framed as a possible, and potentially remediable, outcome of gentrification. This portrayal of the link between gentrification and displacement is problematic, though, because gentrification can proceed without substantial displacement, while displacement frequently occurs in the absence of gentrification. In this article, I use a historical case study to examine the link between displacement and gentrification. Drawing on archival research and media accounts of redevelopment over the course of 50 years in Wichita, Kansas, I demonstrate how a displacement–first strategy has characterized all attempts to transform the city's “skid row” into the hub of a gentrified downtown core, and I describe how, despite widespread displacement, the gentrification of downtown Wichita has been largely unsuccessful. I discuss the implications of these findings for sociological theories of gentrification and displacement.

Book review: Forrest Stuart, Down and Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

Book review: Forrest Stuart, Down and Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

A People's Theater on Skid Row

In Acting Like It Matters, James McEnteer gives a compassionate account of John Malpede&amp;mdash;actor, activist, and co-creator of the political theatre troupe the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)&amp;mdash;and of the Skid Row community that is the organization's heart and soul. The story of Malpede and the LAPD is one of life as art and art as life, and its protagonists are the dehumanized homeless citizens of Los Angeles and their compatriots in cities across the United States and the world, who represent a growing part of today's global working class pushed out of the formal economy.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Down, Out, and Under Arrest Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

Skid Row is the neighborhood for those whose lives skid out, who are unhoused, unemployed, ailing from addictions and mental health conditions. In other words, it is for those who do not fit in other, proper neighborhoods. This is the common frame of mega-shelters, of police, and even of some Skid Row residents. Yet other residents resist this frame and work to create a viable neighborhood. In this exemplary ethnography of a Los Angeles neighborhood, we see the effects of community and institutional framing on the policing of poverty, on social service delivery, and on everyday resistance. In Down, Out, and Under Arrest, Stuart delivers a highly engaging ethnography of multiple sites in Skid Row, analyzing the far-reaching effects of neighborhood frames and what he defines as therapeutic policing. This style of policing is built on an assumption that poverty is fundamentally a behavioral issue and on the negative framing of Skid Row. Police are activated in a form of “social work that aims to transform and reintegrate residents as productive, self-governing citizens” (p. 15). In therapeutic policing, police are deep collaborators with mega-shelters, the non-profit organizations that provide emergency food, shelter, and rehabilitative programs. This new approach to policing has infiltrated the daily lives of Skid Row residents and has sparked new forms of everyday resistance that both perpetuate and eliminate its various effects.

Reading Henry Miller in the New Millennium

Reading Henry Miller in the New Millennium Daniel Manuel Mendoza (bio) Sit in on any creative writing course and you are likely to see a lot of unwarranted praise. The writing workshop as it exists today is equivalent to group therapy, where the professor—instead of reading every MFA candidate’s work with a critical eye—applauds even the most embarrassing attempts as works of creative genius. The issue is that writers in the MFA programs rarely read the greats. How could they? The MFA workshops typically consist of a three-hour weekly meeting where we get to hear embarrassing attempts at memoir or poor imitations of Alice Munro. The MFA reading lists I have seen have two primary texts: some kind of writer’s handbook full of silly exercises more appropriate for old ladies and works of contemporary fiction—provided by the professor’s friends. Professors, critics, editors, and writers feel the overwhelming necessity to give lip service to the “concerns” of authors who are a racial minority or who identify with an alternative lifestyle. The politically correct environment of contemporary arts has brought on this necessity. Today, every genre has a community that serves as a “safe space” for these groups. They all come complete with a university funded journal, a small press, and a set of conferences at AWP every year. Even the parties at AWP are designated by genres. If you do not fulfill the aesthetic or moral aspects of any such genre, you are unwelcome. Me and Joe Haske—another working-class writer—accidentally walked into a party sponsored by a big east coast writer’s retreat one night in LA. We were quickly made aware of our mistake when an older man in a camel hair jacket turned to us and said, “Well young men, you certainly look like you have a few tragic stories to tell.” The rest of the crowd snickered and we finished our drinks, drank a few more, and then headed back to our bar on skid row. I don’t take issue with the growing diversity of contemporary literary fiction. If it weren’t for the encouragement of diversity, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities to study where I have and then work with American Book Review, Pleiades, or Boulevard. I do take issue with the vacuum it has created. We have become a culture that is afraid of stepping out of our groups. We no longer challenge our assumptions and we have failed at creating a more complex body of literary work. In the world of literary fiction today—both in MFA programs and in the journals—the works of Miller would have no place because they challenge the politically correct assumptions we have come to accept as fact. When Miller is talked about it’s usually in the context of his antifeminist and hyper-misogynistic attitude. One recent critic of Tropic of Cancer (1934) asserts if it “has traveled from banned book to spiritual classic that tells us ‘who we are’? A reasonable objection is that ‘we’ cannot include women, unless a woman is comfortable with her identity as a half-witted ‘piece of tail.’” Is it reasonable to object to Miller’s work as one that is unacceptable for contemporary readers—particularly female readers? And what do we make of the female readers that find other valuable aspects of Miller’s “spiritual classic”? Further, should we ban all books that portray women in a negative way? Perhaps the Old Testament and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) should be off the shelves, as well? When we evaluate a work of art we should keep in mind the importance of analyzing it with the complexity it deserves. To consider any work of art from any time period with one-sided judgments does a great disservice to our culture. When we threaten the legitimacy of Miller’s art because of one narrow aspect of his work, then we risk making the same mistake this country has made in its attempts to ban the works of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Like Whitman, Melville, Twain, and countless other American writers, Miller’s work provides a wealth of philosophical and...

Don't Try

But these personae flout their limits, fusing body and language to avenge their suffering. They appropriate monstrosity, transforming into cannibals with teeth for hearts, mermaids drowning unsuspecting males. Eve as Anaconda threatens, “Call me murderess.” She is “Venus-trap,” her womb empowered receptacle (“Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum”). Finally, Cannibal’s personae commandeer “the master’s tools” for their indigenous voices, “furred in dialect,” evoking “the simple language of our cannibal sea.” The “I” becomes a “wild diviner,” “incorrigible ,” wrestling with an “onerous verse,” aiming “to tack it down, / the indefinite I, I, iamb; to tease this venom out—its cerasee vine grown thick as my hair.” As iamb shapes “I,” a unifying self acquires a mighty voice. By section 5, “Crania Americana,” Caliban’s snaky female avatar , “predator coiled eager at the edge / of these maps,” prepares to dismantle “the master’s house” with the syncretic tools of exile: “Master, Dare I / unjungle it?” Teasing out their venom, these incantatory “songs” redeem the voice of Caliban and of all those “cannibals” spawned by Western conquest. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Nathan Brown & Jon Dee Graham. Don’t Try. Norman, Oklahoma. Mezcalita Press. 2016. 96 pages. Contemporary poetry can be formulaic: the vague flow of emotion Mary Kinzie calls the “Rhapsodic Fallacy,” the neoconfessional anecdote Donald Hall refers to, succinctly, as the “McPoem.” Instead of a formula, Don’t Try gives us a chemical reaction resulting from the mixture of countercultural legend Charles Bukowski, former Oklahoma poet laureate Nathan Brown, and gravelly voiced singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham. Each poem in this book takes its title from a line in a Bukowski poem, which Brown and Graham use to launch their own poems, sometimes trading back and forth within the same poem and sometimes each writing parallel poems inspired by the same line. A careful reading of the prefatory material seems to suggest that, of the two typefaces used in the collection , Brown is represented by a Times New Roman style and Graham by something like Courier. The reader will enjoy watching the interplay of these three voices. Bukowski clearly sets the tone of the book. For instance, the first poem in the collection takes its title from some very Bukowski math—“Zero Times Zero Times Zero”—and then offers conjecture on what that equals. For Graham, it is “the distance between my beliefs / and my illusions / divided by what I know.” For Brown, it is “the miles per hour / at the end of the accident .” This tone of wry, down-and-out wisdom runs through the book all the way to the back cover, where Brown and Graham offer, in place of the usual blurbs, snippets from the worst reviews they have received. The best poems in this book are emotionally honest and directly observed. In “Only Hollywood Boulevard,” Graham vividly re-creates a late ’80s LA street scene, including the “panhandler / using a badly broken and / defaced ventriloquist’s dummy” to solicit dollars from passersby. Brown starts “In the Middle of Texas” with a stunning image of the “hell-hearted sun” on a summer day driving “its golden nail / straight through the planet / and out the other side.” Nearly every page of this collection offers such fine observations and memorable images. Graham, known to most as a songwriter, holds his own with Brown, and both Brown and Graham prove themselves worthy successors to Bukowski’s Skid Row brand of poetic beauty. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Blanca Castellón. Water for Days of Thirst: Selected Poems. Trans. Roger Hickin. Lyttelton, New Zealand. Cold Hub Press. 2016. 173 pages. Blanca Castellón’s use of language in the collection Water for Days of Thirst is at times sparse and direct and occasionally disorienting due to minimal use of punctuation throughout. Much of the collection seems haunted by the voices of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath—though even in English translation, it is clear that the writer’s voice is planted in Latin America. What Castellón delivers in this collection is carefully crafted, self-aware, and unflinchingly introspective. In an effort to understand self, the speaker in this collection has compared herself to a desert, which at first may...

The Rise and Fall of Atlanta's Skid Row

The Rise and Fall of Atlanta's Skid Row

The Prisonized Old Head: Intergenerational Socialization and the Fusion of Ghetto and Prison Culture

Over the last four decades, the United States’ criminal justice system has undergone a historic expansion, which has disproportionately impacted poor urban neighborhoods. The meteoric rise in the percentage of the urban poor either on their way to, in, or recently released from jail or prison has led a number of scholars to theorize a “fusion of ghetto and prison culture” (Wacquant 2001). The exact sources and contours of this fusion, however, remain unspecified. How, concretely, are the cultural contexts of prisons transmitted to poor urban neighborhoods? This article proposes that intergenerational socialization is a key mechanism in this process. We contend that the dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades has given rise to an unexpected and peculiar form of socialization, provided by a new social actor—what we term the “prisonized old head.” We define the prisonized old head as an individual who exhibits three particular characteristics. They are (1) older individuals with extensive experiences in, and wisdom about, the criminal justice system; who (2) informally socialize neighborhood residents to embrace the cultural schemas and routines learned inside penal spaces; to (3) navigate the daily exigencies routinely faced in the neighborhood context. Stated simply, prisonized old heads leverage ways of life developed “on the inside” as strategies for living life “on the outside.” We articulate the emergence, mechanisms, and implications of this form of socialization drawing on fieldwork data in Los Angeless’ Skid Row neighborhood—one of the premier reentry communities in the United States. We show that although this socialization may contribute to desistance and self-transformation, it can simultaneously constrain upward mobility and limit reintegration.

Use of information and communication technology among street drifters in Los Angeles

We report a qualitative study of ICT (information and communication technology) use among a group of homeless people on Skid Row, Los Angeles. Participants in our ethnographic study frequently used mobile phones and computers, but not for the purposes documented in other studies such as managing friendships, enlisting family support, finding housing, and seeking employment. They were instead seeking respite to escape their stressful daily lives. We argue that urban communities should adopt a multi-agency approach and provide support centers offering homeless people access to computers and Wi-Fi. Increased access to ICT would both facilitate homeless people’s capability to cope with their difficult environment.

Becoming “Copwise”: Policing, Culture, and the Collateral Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

Over the last four decades, the United States has witnessed a historic expansion of its criminal justice system. This article examines how street-level criminalization transforms the cultural contexts of poor urban communities. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in Los Angeles’ Skid Row–the site of one of the most aggressive zero-tolerance policing campaigns to date–the study finds that residents develop and deploy a particular cultural frame–“cop wisdom”–by which they render seemingly-random police activity more legible, predictable, and manipulable. Armed with this interpretive schema, “copwise” residents engage in new forms of self-presentation in public, movement through the daily round, and informal social control in order to deflect police scrutiny and forestall street stops. While these techniques allow residents to reduce unwanted police contact, this often comes at the expense of individual and collective well-being by precluding social interaction, exacerbating stigma, and contributing to animosity in public space.

The Other LAPD

Based in Los Angeles’s Skid Row and comprised largely of the area’s formerly homeless, the Los Angeles Poverty Department creates performances from the writings, stories, and experiences of its participants. The mission of LAPD (yes, their acronym is purposeful) is to illuminate the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. This article describes, and includes excerpts from, State of Incarceration, an LAPD production that taps the inside knowledge of core company members, including Kevin Michael Key, Riccarlo Porter, Anthony Taylor, and Ronnie Walker, and roomfuls of other participants, some from parolee reentry programs in the area.