BY WENDY GILMARTIN
For the residents of L.A.?s Skid Row, public space is a priority.
From the October 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine
Speed bumps and curbs that narrow the street to slow traffic. Safety zones for women and LGBTQ residents. Vegetable gardens with citrus trees. Drinking fountains, storage units, and cell phone charging stations. This isn?t a laundry list of community benefits in your local affluent suburb; it?s a wish list for the nation?s most concentrated homeless community in downtown Los Angeles: Skid Row.
Where just five years ago tents, shopping carts, and makeshift campsites lined the streets in this eastern portion of downtown, gleaming luxury condominiums now stand with a Whole Foods market and designer clothing boutiques at street level. Even more high-end stores are under construction in an area that already lacks open spaces and parks. Skid Row, with 11,000 residents living in an area of roughly 50 city blocks, has one of the highest populations of homeless individuals in the United States. After decades of being ignored, and more recently being uprooted and relocated, the stirring of this grassroots mobilization for awareness within Skid Row includes greening and urban grassroots planning initiatives by neighborhood nonprofits and service providers in partnership with and on behalf of the homeless community, each with a different take on the most immediate needs of the community.
And yet it?s notable that for a community whose membe...