In the 1970’s – at a time when residential hotels, were being demolished throughout Los Angeles, the city redevelopment agency made the bold choice to save and renovate the 60 single room occupancy hotels in Skid Row. Now, many of those hotels have again fallen into disrepair and one non-profit owner of 29 hotels has gone bankrupt. This project excavates this history, addresses the current situation and assesses what’s now needed to make the Skid Row Hotels into decent, truly affordable housing.

July 22, 7pm: “What if we Bought it?

Vancouver, British Columbia’s downtown has historical similarities to LA’s Skid Row, including a significant affordable housing stock of SRO hotels. Learn how community organizers are saving the ninety hotels that remain. How did they buy their first hotel? What is their model? What is their plan for sustainability? What works well and what remains challenging?

HOTELS IN CRISIS (AGAIN) Panel conversation moderated by John Malpede and Rosten Woo
with Wendy Pedersen and members from the Vancouver Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative and Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust.

April 15, 7pm: “What if we owned it? What if we ran it?

This panel Next steps for SROs explored bold and exciting solutions to the current crisis in the SRO housing model.

Panel conversation moderated by Rosten Woo.
– Justin Szlaza, founding director of the Future Communities Institute and LASHA commissioner, envisioned a pathway to resident ownership.
– Jenny Scanlin, community Redevelopment Agency LA and currently Chief Development Officer at HACLA
– Jonathan Hunter, community design and engagement manager at Venice Community Housing talks about models for resident governance
– Amanda Spiva with the LA Tenants Union talks about her vision for resident governance.

March 11, 7pm: WHAT TO DO?
Panel conversation moderated by Rosten Woo

For the third “learning in public” event, we learn from people and organizations who are thinking about what to do next.

Panel conversation moderated by Rosten Woo.
– Skid Row Action Plan’s Permanent Housing Resident Council members Barron McCall and Kevin Cedano
– CD14 Councilmember Ysabel Jurado
– Mark Acena, LA Tenants Union
– Becky Dennison, Legal Aid Foundation LA,
– Jade Arellano and General Dogon, LA Community Action Network.

This panel brings together leading experts in housing policy and specifically SRO design and financing to talk about lessons we can learn from the recent and ongoing crisis with downtown’s SROs and the demise of Skid Row Housing Trust. Come join the conversation about what is happening behind the scenes, and how we can think big picture about the future of this crucial housing supply in Skid Row, and California at large.

This is the next stage in our exhibition, HOTELS IN CRISIS (AGAIN). The exhibition is unfolding in a “learning in public” format, where each new stage of the exhibition will be informed by public conversations.Come be part of the conversation, and help develop the exhibition (and, we hope, the future of housing in Skid Row) with us!

Panel conversation moderated by Rosten Woo, with:
– Jerry Jones, Greater LA Coalition on Homelessness
– Marc Tousignant, director of supportive housing for Enterprise’s Southern California Market and lead author of “Preserving Affordable Single Room Occupancy Portfolios Across California”
– Claire Knowlton, non profit finance expert and lead author of “Redesign Required: Lessons for Permanent Supportive Housing from Skid Row Housing Trust Buildings”
– Mike Alvidrez, former CEO of Skid Row Housing Trust

An interactive workshop with Bjorn Krondorfer & Thomas Mann Fellow Susanne Beyer.
Co-presented by Thomas Mann House and Los Angeles Poverty Department.

This workshop explores our need of belonging, especially in times when our sense of “home” has grown fragile—because of uncertain futures, voluntary exile, forced displacements, or natural disasters. What is home or the loss of home for us? And what has it been for generations before us who made their home in a new place/country?

Participants are invited to explore these questions in open conversations and through non-verbal components and movement.

Join Los Angeles Poverty Department and Los Angeles Tenants Union for an evening of films that excavate the history of SRO hotels in Skid Row.

It’s a history of successive crises, attempts to address them — and the obstacles to creating and sustaining comfortable and affordable residences, that has resulted in the crisis of today. We’ll be viewing footage from the sixties, eighties, and today, listening and reflecting on how to make housing work for people. The presentation will include rarely screened gems from the SRHMA archive & Visual Communications.

This evening is part of LAPD’s new project, HOTELS IN CRISIS and will include a short performance by LA Poverty Department.

Presented by Critical planning Journal
This event brings together tenant rights lawyers, community organizers, practitioners, and scholars to discuss what can be done to improve landlord practices and strengthen tenant protections in Los Angeles. The panel will run alongside an exhibition by Rosten Woo on the decline of SRO hotels in LA, offering an important spatial and historical backdrop for the discussion.

About Critical Planning Journal
Critical Planning is the graduate student-run journal of the UCLA Urban Planning Department. CPJ began in 1993 as a forum for the urban studies and planning communities to debate current issues, showcase emerging research, and propose new ideas concerning cities and regions. The core mission of Critical Planning is to promote criticality and social justice. In pursuit of these ends, Critical Planning seeks out new forms of knowledge and modes of representation. The journal is thus not only a space for planning scholars and practitioners, but also activists, artists, organizers, and others who take “the city,” however demned, as their object of inquiry.

PANEL CONVERSATION with
JACOB WOOCHER (TENANTS’ RIGHTS LAWYER)
ALEXANDER FERRER (UCLA, SAJE, THE DEBT COLLECTIVE)
CHELSEA KIRK (CO-FOUNDER, RENT BRIGADE)
KENIA ALCOCER (UNION DE VECINOS)
TAKAO SUZUKI (CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF LITTLE TOKYO SERVICE CENTER)
CHRIS TYLER (LA TENANTS UNION, SAJE)

Stephanie Bell, Henriëtte Brouwers, Iron Donato, Ruben Garcia, Tom Grode, Jaiye Kamson, John Malpede, Leyla Martinez, Lorraine Morland, Tiffany Nelson, Richard Vollis.

This project is funded in part by The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS).