Skid Row Is No Place for Children

Re “It’s Checkout Time for One Old Hotel on L.A.’s Skid Row,” Nov. 29: Like most everyone else in the world, I too love children and playgrounds, but I don’t think that skid row is the place for either. The only time that children and families have appeared in this neighborhood of almost exclusively single adult males is when they have been imported for profit or fund-raising purposes.

In the 1980s, unprincipled hotel owners reaped enormous profits from recent immigrants by packing entire families into tiny single-room-occupancy hotel rooms with no kitchens or sanitary facilities. While these families were ultimately relocated, with city assistance, to more appropriate dwellings, some nonprofit organizations continue to import families into the skid row area because, let’s face it, children and playgrounds are much more appealing on your fund-raising brochures than the indigenous population of single, adult African American males.

Destroying 25 units of very low-cost housing to build a playground is a bad trade-off in this neighborhood, where the vast majority of the population is decidedly adult, with many making their homes each night in cardboard boxes.

Jeff Dietrich

Los Angeles Catholic Worker