HOW TO CURE URBAN "POLLUTION"
While laws regulating environmental pollution are not as strong as many would like, and enforcement is even weaker, city officials in many metropolitan areas will spare no expense to regulate what they see as unwanted refuse: the homeless and the poor. In City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis offers a particularly harsh window on efforts in that city:
This conscious "hardening" of the city surface against the poor is especially brazen in the Manichean treatment of downtown microcosms. In his famous study of the "social life of small urban spaces," William Whyte makes the point that the quality of any urban environment can be measured, first of all, by whether there are convenient, comfortable places for pedestrians to sit. This maxim has been warmly taken to heart by designers of the highly corporate precincts of Bunker Hill and the emerging "urban village" of South Park. As part of the city's policy of subsidizing white-collar residential colonization in Downtown, it has spent, or plans to spend, tens of millions of dollars of diverted tax revenue on enticing, "soft" environments in these areas. Planners envision an opulent complex of squares, fountains, world-class public art, exotic shrubbery, and avant-garde street furniture along a Hope Street pedestrian corridor. In the propaganda of official boosters, nothing is taken as a better index of Downtown's "liveability" than the idyll of office workers and upscale tourists lounging or napping in the terraced gardens of California Plaza, the "Spanish Steps," or Grand Hope Park.
In stark contrast, a few blocks away, the city is engaged in a merciless struggle to make public facilities and spaces as "unliveable" as possible for the homeless and the poor. The persistence of thousands of street people on the fringes of Bunker Hill and the Civic Center sours the image of designer Downtown living and betrays the laboriously constructed illusion of a Downtown "renaissance." City Hall then retaliates with its own variant of low-intensity warfare.
Although city leaders periodically essay schemes for removing indigents en masse--deporting them to a poor farm on the edge of the desert, confining them to camps in the mountains, or, memorably, interning them on a derelict ferry at the Harbor--such "final solutions" have been blocked by council members fearful of the displacement of the homeless into their districts. Instead the city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the "containment" (official term) of the homeless in Skid Row along Fifth Street east of the Broadway, systematically transforming the neighborhood into an outdoor poorhouse. But this containment strategy breeds its own vicious circle of contradiction. By condensing the mass of the desperate and helpless in such a small space and denying adequate housing, official policy has transformed Skid Row into probably the most dangerous ten square blocks in the world-ruled by a grisly succession of "Slashers," "Night Stalkers," and more ordinary predators. Every night on Skid Row is Friday the 13th, and, unsurprisingly, many of the homeless seek to escape the "Nickle" during the night at all costs, searching for safer niches in other parts of Downtown. The city in turn tightens the noose with increased police harassment and indigenous design deterrents.
One of the most common, but mind-numbing, of these deterrents is the Rapid Transit District's new barrel-shaped bus bench that offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable sitting, while making sleeping utterly impossible. Such "bumproof" benches are being widely introduced on the periphery of Skid Row. Another invention, worthy of the Grand Guignol, is the aggressive deployment of outdoor sprinklers. Several years ago the city opened a "Skid Row Park" along lower Fifth Street, on a corner of Hell. To ensure that the park was not used for sleeping--that is to say, to guarantee that it was mainly utilized for drug dealing and prostitution--the city installed an elaborate overhead sprinkling system programmed to drench unsuspecting sleepers at random times during the night. The system was immediately copied by some local businessmen in order to drive the homeless away from adjacent public sidewalks. Meanwhile restaurants and markets have responded to the homeless by building ornate enclosures to protect their refuse. Although no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to the garbage, as happened in Phoenix a few years back, one popular seafood restaurant has spent $12,000 to build the ultimate bag-lady-proof trash cage: made of three-quarter inch steel rod with alloy locks and vicious outturned spikes to safeguard priceless moldering fish heads and stale french fries.
--from A backbone of facts to stand up to spineless power, by Common Courage Press. <www.commoncouragepress.com/quartz.html>