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Vandalized Public Toilets Highlight Skid Row's Ongoing Public Health Crisis

Hayley Burgess |
September 3, 2013 | 8:55 p.m. PDT

Staff Reporter

(One of skid row's five automated public toilets on the corner of 5th and Los Angeles/Hayley Burgess, Neon Tommy)
(One of skid row's five automated public toilets on the corner of 5th and Los Angeles/Hayley Burgess, Neon Tommy)
The public health crisis in downtown Los Angeles is hard to ignore. From the minute you step out of the Pershing Square Metro station, the odor is overwhelming.

Trash litters the sidewalk and aging gutters. Dirty water spills out from the cracks in between people sitting and sleeping on the sidewalks.

These unsanitary conditions are just the tip of the iceberg. Walk several blocks further east and you find yourself in the heart of skid row, where the health crisis deepens.

Skid Row is in desperate need of more public toilets. The area is comprised of about 50 city blocks (0.4 square miles) and is home to about 8-11,000 homeless people on a daily basis, according to the L.A. Chamber of Commerce.

These roughly 10,000 people only have access to five aging public toilets, and the issue worsened when all of the automated public toilets on skid row suddenly went dark.

Starting Aug. 16, the five automated public toilets on skid row went out of service after vandals broke in and stole expensive computer chips from each one, rendering them useless.

Skid row’s residents were left stranded without bathroom facilities.

“That’s thousands of [bathroom] uses per day that suddenly went back into the community,” explained “General” Jeff Page, a well-known skid row activist and member of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. “That’s exactly what it meant: people weren’t able to use the restroom.”

The toilets were installed by the city in 2006 in an effort to improve public health and clean up downtown streets. Page played a major role in the installation of the fifth and final public toilet, which sits in Gladys Park.

Starting at $250,000 apiece, the installation of these toilets was a heavy investment by the city but in turn, the toilets spurred positive and collective action among the area’s homeless residents.

“That could wake the residents up that hey, we could actually do something if we really try,” said Page. “It started a positive movement on skid row.”

CBS/Decaux Street Furniture restored all five toilets two weeks ago, once again giving skid row’s homeless population access to public restrooms. Although the toilets are back in action, the fact that skid row only has five working toilets is indicative of a larger problem in the area.

Since their installation, Page has urged the city to focus on public health issues. This past spring he led a tour for a few L.A. county officials to show the realities of the sanitation issues on Skid Row.

The group reported their findings to then Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and in June, officials from the L.A. County Department of Public Health started working to survey the area and draft a report.

They discovered that skid row was in violation of several health codes.

“There was a high concentration of hypodermic needles, a high concentration of urine and feces and a high concentration of rat infestation,” said Page.

 “The report documented 88 vermin burrows, 13 hypodermic needles and 90 accumulations of human or animal waste,” according to L.A. Downtown News.

In response, Los Angeles created Operation Healthy Streets, an initiative managed by the Department of Public Works to clean up skid row. While they didn’t add anymore of the automated toilets, they instead set aside $1.2 million for cleaning.

The two to three week cleaning period started in late June and included power washing and properly disposing of contaminated objects left on the sidewalks.

This was followed in mid-August by a second, week-long round of cleaning.

According to KPCC’s Blog Downtown, “Assistant Director for the Bureau of Sanitation, Adel Hagekhalil, said the week-long ‘comprehensive cleaning’ is part of a new maintenance plan for the area, which will include massive quarterly cleanings and smaller bi-weekly ‘touch-ups.’”

The city will also deliver 21 more trashcans to the skid row area.

While a solid start, it is unclear whether or not Operation Healthy Streets’ efforts will be effective in the long run.

In the meantime, Page wants to focus on exploring options for more toilets in downtown and skid row.

“We need more toilets. That’s just a broad statement, not a solution,” he emphasized.

He suggests looking first at what types of toilets would be available, looking to what other cities have done to address the issue, then explore the logistics and feasibility of each option.

“What are the different options of what toilets can look like? Surely there’s another type of toilet that we can put on the table… let’s start there.”

 

Reach Staff Reporter Hayley Burgess here.



 

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