ABSTRACT
At first glance, the fifty square blocks of Skid Row to the east of Downtown Los Angeles are a welter of despair, castoffs and disarray, the last resort for the most deprived of populations, dumped unceremoniously on America’s most misery-encrusted square mile. Pavements are impassable from encampments and lean-tos; the denizens themselves are tired, frustrated and desperate, under the gun from merciless structural forces and the controlling gaze of the LAPD; and every second storefront promises help for the destitute, the abandoned, the addicted and the lost. A quarter of all shelter beds in the entire county (10 million people) are in Skid Row (DeVerteuil 2006), along with a bewildering array of detoxes, flophouses, addiction treatment centres, mental health drop-in centres, and the like, some wedded to no-strings care and others to a ‘recovery zone’ model that aggressively seeks to shield clients from the temptations of the street (Stuart 2014).
