Downtown L.A. and The Homeless (City) Problem

Downtown L.A. and The Homeless (City) Problem

My name is Moshe Shiko Hacmon. I live in downtown LA, and I have 82,000 neighbors
That lives on the street next door, my door. It is very common for me to jump over a couple of what seams to be empty cardboard boxes and trash bags to get to my door.
In downtown every street corner is a public restrooms, and you don’t have to recycle anything, there is always someone that will go through your trash and will separate every different recyclable element, and will make sure it will get to the recycling center.
There is a very complex relationship between the city that has rejected those people, to the people themselves, those relationships come from the adjustment these people had to do in order to survive in a capitalist city with no capital, or no way to make capital.
And they have adjusted; the adjustment was successful on their side, by recycling every element that can be found on the streets, which helped them in creating communities, and opportunities for social life.
The marketing world teaches us a very important lesson, we design our life through the objects we design but we can never completely predict the way people will use the objects we design, for that reason after the first round of design we adjust the product again to the new condition, which create a chain reaction with our adjustment again….
I don’t know if the homeless people are the product we designed or is it the city that has designed them, but either way it seams that the city never adjusted back and recognized the new condition.

The new condition was created from the adjustment of those people to the fact that they are homeless, looking for ways to survive in this urban landscape, fruit-picking in garbage cans and creating shelters from leaves (cardboards). This new tribe living among us has no effect on the physical condition of the city, as the city still functions well as far as supporting the capitalist machine. At the same time the people that are part of this machine feel very uncomfortable with this new condition, since this new homeless tribe use the streets for every function they need including very privet ones, since they have their bedrooms, kitchens and even restrooms out in the public.
A new approach needs to be taken in order to live comfortably in this transformed environment. For example I would rather have a public restroom, which is connected to the sewage system, in my buildings parking lot then having the strong smell of urine next to my front door. I would rather have my trash ready for them to use instead of them going through our trashcans and leaving half of it out on the street.


How can the city accommodate the homeless people within its built environment?

We can do that by offering a variety of different levels of dwelling; the smallest unit today is the studio room, which is not enough if you want to provide shelter for the very poor people, the price one would pay to live alone is higher then sharing a two bedroom apartment. This people who are very poor and don’t own almost anything would fold their cardboard box and hide it somewhere until the evening, sometimes you would see those empty shells in the street, which looks like a pile of garbage but you are actually stepping into someone’s bed room.


The city landscape today have very clear rules, in the day it is mostly commercial and at night it is a privet property of the homeless, no one but them use these streets at night, even today when many people move to downtown you cannot invade their privacy, it feels like you are entering somebody else’s privet property, assuming that you are not afraid to walk there at night, which most people today are.
I think that it is important to understand the social relationship that the city has put in front of our eyes, as we have a strong and growing consumer society we also have a strong and growing recycling society, the function of both of them is important to our economy and environment as one. We can see how today developing countries like China and India are buying every possible raw materials from every country in the world which will recycle and sell those materials to them, recycling is going to become one of the most powerful and profitable business in the capitalist society.


As the homeless people could not find place in our competitive economy they are able now to find a place in a very important role as the “fruit-pickers”, recycling has also become a big goal in our designs, which try to make products from elements that are fully recyclable, some complex products, as electronics and furniture, are up to 95% recyclable.
At the same time it take more labor to dismantle them, labor that is accessible and cheap.
These materials have higher value then the waste collected today by the homeless, so the reward for them is higher too.
These new relationships need to be expressed also architecturally, and in that I refer to the fact that people live on street, which has no infrastructure or space for them, the cities exterior scale is not made for the human being, it is made mainly for cars and some time for pedestrians transportation, as the exterior walls are very high and flat, fences are everywhere, and most of those buildings functions are public ones, which means that they are empty at night.
And some structures doesn’t even have interior, like parking lots, which Los Angeles is full of them. I do not offer that we should accommodate anybody inside any structure, but I do suggest that the exterior will be in human scale that the exterior will be able to accommodate people in a balcony like structure (looks like the NY fire escape) or by creating walls which has small spaces in them for one person to sleep, those spaces most be open and on the exterior, since this is the only way to ensure that no illegal activities will take place in them.
This social structure of one people living of other people’s garbage already exist and to fix it means to have great social changes, which are mainly political, in the mean time we can improve the city’s conflicts by giving it a home.
By taking those social structures into the building, which become into a social machine, the spaces of the homeless people are very similar to the street conditions they meet first, but this time they are more enclosed and are part of the urban systems, just like a garbage disposal machine of the building.