CAN HOUSTON BE FAR BEHIND L.A.?

Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control

By Steve Lopez

Los Angeles Times
June 2, 2019

The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing.

The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.

Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.

What century is this?

Is it the 21st century in the largest city of a state that ranks among the world’s most robust economies, or did someone turn back the calendar a few hundred years?

We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move.

On Thursday I saw a county health inspector on rat patrol between 7th and 8th streets on skid row. He was carrying a clipboard and said he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents, and I asked where:

“Everywhere,” he said.

Well, it’s nice to know somebody is doing something, but you don’t need a clipboard. I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.

The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.

Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it. Every time sanitation crews knock down one mess, another dumpsite springs up nearby.

You wanna take a tour with me of how things looked Wednesday and Thursday?

OK, the shovels were still out on Crocker Street, which was looking pretty good, so I went over to East 10th Street and Naomi Avenue, several blocks away, near the Coca-Cola distribution center.

The north side of 10th Street looked like a landfill. Trash was scattered in the street and on the sidewalk, and there was a little bit of everything. Splintered lumber, metal poles, soiled blankets and clothing, a sofa, buckets, boxes.

“Trucks come by and run over the trash,” said Ron Riego, 60, who lives under a tarp on the corner and pointed out where some of the debris has been flattened by traffic.

Riego said he was just back from the hospital, where he was treated for congestive heart failure and water on the lungs. On returning to his tarp, he discovered that someone had set fire to some of his belongings. Now he was sorting through his things to see what was salvageable, and planning to move a few feet to the west.

“Rats chased me out,” he said, so he was surrendering his lean-to to the rodents.

“Someone came by in the middle of the night and dropped all those bags,” Riego said, telling me such dumps were common. “I looked out and saw a nice new white pickup truck stop and toss everything, then he took off,” he said.

The bags, some of which were split open, contained spoiled fruit and trimmings from pineapples and mangoes. That part of town has a lot of produce wholesalers, and it’s no secret that some of the illegal dumping is done by local merchants and customers. Nor is it any secret that food scraps attract rats.

At East 16th Street and Compton Avenue, just south of the 10 Freeway, trash billowed at the corner and tapered gradually to the east along a building tagged with graffiti. The debris included boxes, bulging trash bags and a crushed Lime scooter. The centerpiece was a heaping shopping cart.

I saw a few encampments nearby and standing, murky green water in the gutters. Were the drains clogged with trash? Is a water or sewer line leaking? You just never know, and you almost don’t want to think about it. I go through a lot of antibacterial wipes after a day here, and I take my shoes off before I enter my house. It’s horrifying to think about how many people live in the middle of all that muck.

I went back to 16th and Compton the next day to find a city crew cleaning up the mess, and I spoke to James Campbell, who runs the uniform rental company on that corner.

“I call the city and they usually come within a week, but then it’s always piled right back up again,” said Campbell.

“I don’t even like stepping out here because of the needles,” said Campbell, who told me he cringes when customers come to his office and witness what’s at his doorstep.

“It’s embarrassing,” he said.

Yes, but it’s not Campbell who should be embarrassed. It’s L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and the 15 members of the City Council who run the city and have not responded with the urgency necessary to deal with the homelessness and trash problems that plague Los Angeles.

They alone did not create the social and economic woes that have contributed to the city’s major problems, and it’s not as if they’ve been completely unresponsive. About 27,000 people were housed last year, for instance. But even more people have ended up in their cars and on streets and riverbeds, and taxpayers are right to wonder why City Hall keeps losing its most important battles.

When I called Councilman Jose Huizar’s office about the trash piled on Ceres Avenue, a staffer told me issues like that are complaint-driven, and if no one has called, the office might not know the problem exists.

What, they don’t have eyes?

Look, I know Huizar might be a little distracted, given that the FBI has hauled records out of his home and office as part of a City Hall corruption probe, and the councilman has other legal problems too.

But council districts have as many as two dozen employees and in times of crisis they ought to have more than a few of them in the field, spotting and solving problems, and cracking down on illegal dumpers. Not just with citations, but with handcuffs, perp walks and mandatory trash pickup duty.

The city has thousands of workers on the streets every day writing tickets, fixing potholes, driving trash trucks. Every one of them ought to be reporting issues they see on their rounds.

“If you’re writing a parking ticket and someone dumps a toilet in the street, you should call sanitation,” said Estela Lopez of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, or BID.

The crews that clean the streets of that BID are homeless or formerly so, and they’re employed by the nonprofit Chrysalis, which tries to get them all housed and self-supporting. James Blackwell, for instance, supervises Lopez’s crew and told me he just moved into his own place.

It’s a terrific program — clean the streets and get people off the streets at the same time. Chrysalis staffs 16 BIDs in L.A. and 10 Caltrans crews, and would like to do more. But an expansion proposal has gotten bottled up at City Hall. Stay tuned for more on that in the near future.

Meanwhile, let’s keep the pressure on City Hall.

I drove a little farther south Thursday and found a monumental dumpsite at East 25th Street and Long Beach Avenue along the railroad tracks. I took photos during my survey to share with City Hall, and I’d like you to do the same.

Get your camera or phone and send me photos of eyesores in your neighborhood or near your place of employment. Include the address, and I’ll take a look at as many as I can get to, publicize the filth and count the days until City Hall cleans it up.

If we don’t take charge, who will?
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Homeless camps’ feces and other filth lure rats to L.A. City Hall, report says

By Dakota Smith and David Zahniser

Los Angeles Times
June 3, 2019

When faced with complaints earlier this year from city workers about rats infesting L.A. City Hall, most city officials said little about whether the problem was connected to several homeless camps right outside.

But a newly uncovered report from a pest control company hired by the city has raised fresh questions about whether officials wrongly downplayed that possibility during discussions at City Council meetings.

CatsUSA Pest Control, brought in to assess areas outside City Hall and nearby buildings, warned that homeless people create “harborage for rodents,” according to the report issued Dec. 28 and obtained last month through a public records request by a frequent critic of City Hall.

The company said it found “poor sanitary conditions” — including leftover food, human waste and hypodermic needles — and recommended that the city clear away the homeless population living in the Civic Center.

The findings were a topic of internal discussion for staffers at the Department of General Services, the agency that maintains city buildings. The day the one-page report was issued, a maintenance official sent an email to the department’s general manager, Tony Royster, describing the filth that had accumulated in the pits that surround City Hall, which are covered by metal grates.

“The homeless are using the grated areas above the pits as their bathroom and relieving themselves,” wrote David Costa, building construction and maintenance superintendent. “This is also attracting the rats. Custodial will need to do some hazmat cleaning of the grates and the pits. There are even hypodermic needles being tossed in the pits along with human waste and other garbage.”

Two months after the report was issued, officials in the Personnel Department told council members they believed the increase in rat activity was triggered by the demolition of Parker Center, the former L.A. Police Department headquarters on Los Angeles Street. They delivered the same message to city workers in a letter sent the same month.

Councilman Joe Buscaino, who has criticized the city over its handling of sidewalk cleanups of homeless people, was the only council member to argue during council meetings that the camps attract vermin.

He said he was unaware of CatsUSA’s findings until he was contacted by The Times last month and said he always viewed the encampments, not Parker Center, as the reason for the surge in rats.

“At the onset of this mess, I saw a correlation between the rat infestation and these encampments surrounding the Civic Center,” Buscaino said. “I’ve worked skid row as a police officer. I’ve done cleanups as a council member.”

The Department of General Services said in an email to The Times that it responded to the CatsUSA report by ordering regular cleanups of the sidewalks around City Hall and nearby municipal buildings.

Department officials didn’t directly mention the homeless encampments, or CatsUSA’s recommendation to clear them, at any of three council meetings devoted to discussing the rat infestation earlier this year.

Asked why that information wasn’t presented at the Feb. 8 meeting — the first one — Royster told The Times that his agency had been asked to talk about strategies for addressing the rat problem.

The “discussion therefore primarily focused on the plans and steps taken by [various city departments] to comprehensively address this problem on the interior and exterior of City Hall and surrounding area,” Royster said.

Discussions with the council were based on observations by CatsUSA and county health officials that identified burrows, trash from uncovered dumpsters, debris from homeless encampments, unsecured food and overwatering of plants as possible sources of rodents, Royster said.

Cleanups of homeless camps currently take place every weekend in the Civic Center and include the disposal of hazardous materials, the removal and storage of items owned by homeless people, and the power washing of sidewalks, said Elena Stern, spokeswoman for the city’s Bureau of Sanitation.

Royster said General Services also does daily cleanups. City agencies can’t permanently remove homeless people from the areas around City Hall because they have a legal right to be on the sidewalks during certain times.

On Sunday, Council President Herb Wesson declined to comment on the CatsUSA report, saying he hadn’t seen it.
However, at a council meeting on the rat issue four months ago, he cautioned the public against blaming homeless individuals for the problem.

"I really want us to get to the facts,” Wesson said. “I do not want to have people who are unfortunately living on the streets blamed for something that they might not have anything to do with, but they're just an easy target."

The report was included in a larger trove of city correspondence about the city’s pest problem that was obtained by Eric Preven, a member of the Studio City Neighborhood Council. Preven secured the records through the California Public Records Act and shared them with The Times.

The documents provide a window into the alarm from city employees over rat sightings, rodent droppings and other pest-related issues. On Dec. 28, one exasperated department head emailed General Services noting that her staff had removed food and plants, but had discovered that rodents also were eating paper.

“In my 31 years, I have never seen anything like this,” wrote City Clerk Holly Wolcott. “I again have to ask if efforts can be increased.”

The documents also show there were pest complaints — rats, mice or fleas — made at about 20 different locations within City Hall for a five-month period through February.

Preven said the report he obtained and the conditions it describes show a clear need for public restrooms to be installed outside City Hall.

“It’s the only humane, hygienic thing to do,” he said.

Since the rodent issues were identified, city agencies have trimmed trees in the Civic Center and removed vegetation. Those efforts have been carried out amid larger concerns about the spread of disease in downtown and other neighborhoods, as Los Angeles County prepares to reveal its annual point-in-time report on Tuesday that will probably show an increase in the number of people living on the streets.

Last month, state officials fined General Services and the LAPD after uncovering a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions at the agency’s Central Division station in skid row. General Services has filed an appeal.

The LAPD said one of its employees at the station has contracted the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever, although it’s unclear how the worker became ill.

County health officials also declared a typhus outbreak last year in downtown L.A. and one Los Angeles city employee, Deputy City Atty. Elizabeth Greenwood, has filed a $5-million legal claim against the city, saying she contracted typhus while working in her office at City Hall East.

Greenwood said she believes she contracted the disease from a flea. Typhus can be spread to humans through flea bites or contact with the feces of infected fleas; its symptoms include a rash, fever and fatigue.

Asked about the December report from CatsUSA, Greenwood said through her attorney that the city did not take seriously the recommendations of its own pest control firm.

“Ms. Greenwood believes weekly cleaning of the trash and human waste is not sufficient,” said Gayle Eskridge, Greenwood’s lawyer. “Ms. Greenwood states that the trash, urine and feces are occurring on a daily basis.”

In a separate report issued in February, CatsUSA said it found no evidence of fleas inside City Hall or other municipal facilities. The report was posted on the council’s website, unlike the one issued two months earlier about unsanitary conditions in the Civic Center.

EDITOR’S NOTE: San Francisco and L.A. have become shit holes … and cities, like Houston, that have a growing homeless problem can’t be far behind.