Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2016 There’s a Skid Row Everywhere, and This is Just the Headquarters: Impacts of Urban Revitalization Policies in the Homeless Community of Skid Row Douglas Mungin Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Mungin, Douglas, "There’s a Skid Row Everywhere, and This is Just the Headquarters: Impacts of Urban Revitalization Policies in the Homeless Community of Skid Row" (2016). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1693. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1693 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THERE’S A SKID ROW EVERYWHERE, AND THIS IS JUST THE HEADQUARTERS: IMPACTS OF URBAN REVITALIZATION POLICIES IN THE HOMELESS COMMUNITY OF SKID ROW A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies by Douglas Mungin B.A., San Francisco State University, 2007 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2012 August 2016 Acknowledgements Thanks for taking this journey with me my ocean and little professor. This project would not be in existence if it were not for the tremendous support and guidance from my advisor Rachel Hall. Thank you to my committee for your helpful advice. Ruth Laurion Bowman, Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, Helen A. Regis, Mike Barton and Jill Brody, thank you. The graduate faculty of Communication Studies and Anthropology at LSU. Donna and Tonya. My SFSU family, thank you for your consistent support. Vicky Valentine and Lee Jenkins, you both have changed my life in so many ways. The generous residents of Skid Row and amazing activist at LA CAN, The Catholic Worker and the Midnight Mission. I will see you all this summer. Carolyn, Douglas, A’shawn, Angela and Brooke, we did it. The Jacoby Family. The Brown family who welcomed me back home. Huckleberry Youth Programs. The Tonry’s. My brother’s Kevin, Robert and Ray. My cohort and the rest of the talented and thought provoking grad students in CMST. To anyone that I have missed in this document, thank you. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….ii List of Figures….…...…………………………………………………………………………….iv Abstract………………………………………………………………………………...……….....v Chapter One: Skid Row…………..…………………………………..………………………...…1 Chapter Two: Trash……………….……………………………………….…………………….48 Chapter Three: Policing…………………………………………………….…………………..108 Chapter Four: Failure………………………………………………..……………………….…148 Chapter Five: Thanatology of a City…………………………………………………………...195 Bibliography………...………..………..…………………………………...…………………..226 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………..………….243 iii List of Figures Figure 1. A depression-era soup line, shown in the 1930s. – Chicago Tribune archive photo .... 75 Figure 2. 1930s Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Advertisement ......................................... 78 Figure 3. Kathy Weiser. Jobless Men Keep Going, by the Chamber of Commerce. ................... 81 Figure 4. Operation Healthy Streets Workers. LA Downtown News. Photo by Gary Leonard ... 90 Figure 5. Skid Row City Limits Mural. Wikimedia Commons .................................................... 98 Figure 6. Pershing Plaza circa 1930s. Nathalie Boucher 2010 ................................................... 157 Figure 7. A 1951 photo of Pershing Square shows the clearing it underwent to construct an underground parking garage. (Los Angeles Times) ................................................................... 158 iv Abstract This dissertation tracks the historical shift from containment strategies for managing homeless populations in Skid Row to current strategies of using police and the penal system to periodically sweep the street of these unwanted bodies. This shift hinges on the construction of homelessness as a crisis requiring immediate and ongoing intervention. First, the state produces and reproduces homelessness as a state of crisis by withdrawing or denying support and public services and disallowing alternative, subsistence modes of survival. Then, it issues the performative utterance of the area as unclean or unsanitary. Developers and city officials mobilize the police to erase a visible presence of homeless bodies from the area. The “crisis” of homelessness, variously constructed as an issue of urban aesthetics, public health, and crime, enables public policy to be made on the fly. These policies have uniformly favored economic development at the expense of the needs of homeless persons and communities. The performative state needs the homeless to legitimate state intervention on behalf of developers. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how the racialized rhetorics of thanatology and revitalization have been used to construct homelessness as a crisis for the city in a manner that positions the homeless as threats to the life of the city. According to this rhetoric, it is cities that have economic vitality worth protecting and homeless people who act as an unwanted and degenerate economic species threatening their financial fitness, health, and well-being. I argue that the performative state produces homelessness as a material state of crisis and rhetorically constructs homelessness as a crisis legitimating intervention on the part of the state. The dissertation is organized according to the various ways in which homelessness has been constructed as a crisis warranting intervention: urban aesthetics, homelessness and practices of poverty as an eyesore (Chapter 2), public safety and crime prevention à la the broken windows v theory (Chapter 3), and the economic vitality of the international city (Chapter 4). This dissertation seeks to explore the stakes across various constructions of the existence of the homeless population and their practices of poverty. vi Chapter One Skid Row How I Arrived at Skid Row When I was in seventh grade, my mother was involved in a serious car accident that broke her back. My father's crack cocaine addiction increased from just recreational usage to full-blown addiction. A month before I graduated eighth grade my family lost our house. That year was marked by a missed Christmas, missed birthdays, missed meals, and abject poverty. The home that my family had lived in was the result of hitting the ghetto lottery. Two months before I was born, my father, a manager at a Jack-n-the-Box, was shot in the foot by LAPD officers during a robbery at his store. The cops, attempting to shoot at the robber, completely missed and hit my father in the foot, causing severe damage in his foot that remains today. My father won a settlement with the LAPD six years after the shooting. The result was a small amount of money, but it helped my family move into a large four-bedroom house in Gardena, California. We moved away from what was then the epicenter of urban blight and the crack epidemic of South Central Los Angeles, Crenshaw Boulevard. My family lived in that house in Gardena for over six years before we were kicked out. One day I came home from school to find all of the doors of our house with deadbolt locks attached to them. My father had to break into the house to retrieve our furniture and hastily got a moving truck and put our furniture there until we were able to find a new apartment. My mother and my two younger siblings went to live with a friend of hers. I went with my father to look for new housing. My father and I walked the streets of Los Angeles for five days looking for an apartment for our family. We were unable to find housing. My father's family had temporarily disowned 1 him for his addiction, incessant lying, and stealing from them. My father was left to rely upon his friends, fellow crack addicts. For five days we stayed in seedy motels and apartment rooms with stains on the walls and carpets. Rooms of piss, shit and vomit, of smoke and moans, of screams and pain. I remember the voices and sounds and smells to this day. For five days I would wake up late at night and leave wherever we were staying and just walk around the streets of Los Angeles. I would walk to figure out my surroundings. I would walk for no reason. Eventually, my father was able to find a small one-bedroom apartment in Inglewood, California. For four years my family would live in this location. My father and mother's relationship deteriorated to the point at which physical violence or its threat was a daily occurrence. My father's addiction became worse, and my mother became withdrawn from the family. I was left to take care of my brother and sister. I remember days of coming home with no electricity. We would have to make dinner by candlelight and stolen electricity from our neighbors. For two years we did not have access to a telephone, so I became used to having to walk or take buses to friends and relative’s houses just to communicate. I would just walk. I walked for hours and miles with nowhere to go. I walked to become invisible, to become visible, to find reason, to find a past, to find an alternative, to find an identity. I would just walk. Eventually, my mother kicked my father out of the house during my senior year of high school. My father returned the next day and physically assaulted my mother and tried to take my two siblings with him. Cops were called, and my father was put in jail. My father served a two- month sentence in the Los Angeles County Jail while I graduated from high school and left for college in San Francisco. Six years ago my father gave me a call; he congratulated me on the birth of my daughter. I was unsure of how to take the message.