Invoking the 1950s civil rights case Brown vs. If politicians can’t provide solutions, Carter said he wants to explore what powers the court has to deploy remedies to deal with the crisis - and whether he should use them. The judge told city and county officials to account for any progress made to address the problems raised in the lawsuit. He visited the area during a major rainstorm last week and witnessed “appalling and dangerous” conditions endured by women, some without shoes and suffering from hypothermia, the judge wrote in a strongly worded order issued Sunday. The lawsuit was filed by a group of business owners, residents and community leaders called the LA Alliance for Human Rights.Ĭarter said he convened the Skid Row session because he worries people are “not seeing and feeling” the reality on the ground. He is overseeing a case brought last March that accuses the city and county of failing to comprehensively address the desperate situations facing homeless people - including hunger, crime, squalor and now the coronavirus pandemic. It's incredibly irresponsible of Netflix to peg this "eerie murder mystery" on a place where people are simply trying to survive.“This is an extraordinary hearing,” Carter said, acknowledging the setting but also the scope of the problem facing the court. For many, Skid Row can be a difficult place to escape since only 25 cities out of 88 in Los Angeles County offer services for people dealing with homelessness. The docuseries also doesn't address how leaving someone without any resources might severely impact their mental health.Īccording to a study by UCLA, as of 2020, African Americans constitute 34% of LA's homeless population, but only 8% of the general, while Latinx people make up 36% of the homeless population and 48% of the general. McSorely referred to it as a place to "contain anything bad that's going on in the rest of the city," but there was no mention of the fact that this mainly affected these marginalized groups and is still doing so today. In 1975, the city adopted a redevelopment plan, which included the "Policy of Containment," a program that concentrated people experiencing homelessness and social service agencies in one area. In the '70s, Skid Row was mostly compromised of single, older white men, but after "decades of racialized residential segregation, employment discrimination, and financial redlining," the area became disproportionately populated by people of color, specifically Black Americans. However, the show fails to point out the history of Skid Row's connection to systems of white supremacy and how that's ultimately led to addiction, crime, and mental health issues over the years. The docuseries paints Skid Row as the reason for the decline of the Cecil Hotel by exploiting the stories of former Cecil Hotel residents, including Kenneth Givens, who moved to Los Angeles after losing his job in New York in the '80s, and featuring interviews in which the participants refer to it as the "Wild West" and "a space where people are allowed to just suffer." At one point, McSorely even tells a story about how he once witnessed a man biting a pigeon's head off purely for shock value.
![skidrow california skidrow california](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KbTSDuQET94/maxresdefault.jpg)
"After people are released from prison or jail or from a mental facility, they are dropped off on Skid Row because the city wanted to make sure that these types of people remain separated from the rest of Los Angeles." "Almost all of our homeless services are located in this one area, so the only really place to go if you're homeless and want assistance is Skid Row, and it's become a dumping ground," Skid Row historian Dr. It's one of the poorest areas in the world, and approximately 8,000 to 10,000 individuals currently reside there.
![skidrow california skidrow california](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/08GSVZPkaJw/maxresdefault.jpg)
The area surrounding the Cecil Hotel is called Skid Row, which is a 56-block area in downtown Los Angeles that's existed for over 100 years.
Skidrow california series#
The series unpacks the story by detailing the chilling coincidences associated with her disappearance, offering theories as to what may have happened to her, and analyzing a troubling elevator video, but it completely glosses over the real history of Skid Row, or, as Detective Jim McSorely irresponsibly calls it, "a free-for-all, where people are allowed to sleep on the streets, buy drugs, sell their bodies." Netflix's Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel revisits the case of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student who was found dead in the Cecil Hotel's water tank on Feb.