By Johnny Magdaleno.
Since the mid-1980s, artist John Malpede has watched nonprofits in Los Angeles’ Skid Row district aid small wins against tide after tide of downtown development.
The Los Angeles Community Action Network was instrumental in pausing a hotel construction boom in 2006 so that the city could figure out ways to renovate affordable housing. In 2012, the United Coalition East Prevention Project and other groups prevented the delivery of a liquor license to a ground-floor restaurant in a mixed-income housing development, citing concerns that some low-income residents living above may be recovering addicts.
Malpede’s Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which claims to be the first performance group whose actors are homeless or previously homeless, eventually turned that dispute into a play. And with a new zoning plan for the neighborhood that would pit social services providers against market storefronts by 2040, it doesn’t look like his troupe will come up short on sources of inspiration anytime soon.
More than 5,000 of Los Angeles County’s 47,000 homeless residents live in Skid Row. They line the streets in camping tents, shopping carts and cardboard boxes, and fill up the more than 60 temporary shelter hotels nearby. Malpede charges that the new zoning blueprint, called DTLA 2040, will hide this problem more than eradicate it.
“The zoning plan is going to shred [Skid Row] completely,” he says.
His LAPD is coordinating a series of performances and workshops that started this May and run the entire summer, called the Back 9. He wants L.A. residents and the millions of international visitors who flood through downtown every year to learn what’s going on just a few blocks away from the double-decker bus tours.
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