Response questions

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IIIGH-TECII HOMELESSNESS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

America's last Skid Row is a half square mile o f open-air tent en-

campments on the edge of the Los A ngeles downtown entertain-

ment district. In 1947, Hal Boyle o f the Evenin g In dep e n d e n t .

called the neighborhood "the poor man's underworld, a cross-

section o f American futility, the place whe re men who have lost

hope go afi:er they ha v e jettisoned th ei r dre ams."1 Fifi:y-eigh t ye a r s

later, Ste ve Lopez at the Los Angeles Tim es described the neigh ,

borhood as "a rock-bottom depository and national embarrass-

ment. A place [of] disease , abus e, crim e and hard-luck misery,·•

where business thrive s in Porta-Potties . . . and urine still runs in

the gutters ."2

I arrived in Lo s Angeles in December 2015 to explore its coor-

dinated entry syste m, which is intend e d to match the county's

most vulnerable unhoused people with a ppropriate available re-

sources. Touted as the Match.com o f homeless services, the coor-

dinated entry approach ha s become wildly popular across the

country in the las t half decade. Its su pporte rs include the US De-

partment o f Housing and Urban D e velopment (HUD), the Na-

H1GH-TECH HOMELESSNESS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS I 85

tional Alliance to End Homelessness, a myriad o f local homeless service providers, and powerful funders, including the Conrad N. Hilton and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations.

The proponents o f coordinated entry argue that the system creates a "no wrong door" approach to the often dizzying array of services available to the unhoused and provides a standardized intake process to reduce waste, redundancy, and double-dipping across agencies. The system also collects, stores, and shares some astonishingly intimate information about unhoused people. It catalogs, classifies, and ranks their traumas, coping mechanisms feelings, and fears.

For many, Skid Row personifies timeless corruption and hope- lessness. But, like any too-simple story, this narrative hides more than it reveals. In the 1870s the neighborhood was mostly orange groves. By l n l Skid Row offered all the necessaries for family hvmg: a public school, an emergency hospital, streetcar transpor- tation, churches, factories, workshops, warehouses, and retail. As the population o f migrant workers swelled in the 1930s, it be- came known as the poor man's district. The neighborhood was filled_ with inexpensive housing and economic struggle, but also thnvmg community and vigorous politics. The Communist Party, for enmple, organized dozens o f neighborhood Unemployed Councils under the motto "Don't Starve-Fight!," led protests of stmgy soup kitchens, and resisted evictions during the Great Depression.

Despite the stereotype o f Skid Row as home to older white men, th e neighborhood has always been diverse. In a 1939 issue o f the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Huston Irvine wrote "The population is probably more motley than that in a simila; dist ict o f any other American city,"3 describing the Jews, Greeks, Italians, Germans, French, Egyptians, Chinese.Japanese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans who worked,

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