Growing up fast in Skid Row hotel
At 5:45 a.m., 16-year-old Jamaica is escorted through the dawn darkness by her mother, Grace, past the barred and gated lobby to a bus stop a block away.
Later, sister Ankara, 14, sleepy-eyed brother Franklin, 13, and sister Egypt, 11, take the small elevator from the family's fifth-floor quarters. Once on the sidewalk, they pass people in bedrolls, corner drug dealers, prostitutes and mentally unbalanced denizens of one of the nation's most densely populated homeless enclaves.
The Arburtha youngsters are among more than 800 children who live in Los Angeles Skid Row hotels and missions, according to recent studies. Families with four or five children frequently occupy a single room, with a hot plate or microwave for cooking and shared community bathrooms.
Before she moved to the Ford on East Seventh Street, Jamaica said, "I had never seen people who were crazy." Now the tall, athletic girl said, she often sees people who take off their clothes on the street — and has even witnessed a slaying.
"A lot of people want to mess with you," she said.
About 400 to 500 children inhabit the half-dozen hotels clustered in the heart of Skid Row, an area with an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 homeless people, according to a study by University of Southern California researchers. Surveys counted more than 140 children living in the Ford Hotel, 112 in the Frontier Hotel on Fifth Street and about 70 at the Huntington Hotel on Main.
Trouble-prone
The USC team found that children living in the hotels and shelters were frequently ill-fed and were more likely than other children to suffer chronic illnesses, asthma, depression, behavioral problems and learning disabilities.
Crime data paint a troubling portrait at the hotels. At the Ford alone in the past 19 months, police took 111 crime reports and made 21 arrests for offenses such as drug sales, domestic violence, shoplifting, robbery and murder. They removed four bodies. The city attorney's office recently started a task force to track convicted sex offenders in the hotels.
The Ford, a gloomy-looking six-story tan structure with 295 rooms and nearly 500 residents, is in a commercial zone dotted with garment and printing shops, seafood processors and wholesale produce markets.
The sidewalks around the Ford routinely fill with transients looking for day work, people pushing shopping carts, tattered men curled up in bedding pitched dangerously close to curbs and mothers moving quickly, holding tightly to their children.
Echoes in the halls
Inside the Ford, the narrow hallways echo with laughter, angry shouts and crying babies. The blue walls and painted green concrete floors are reminiscent of an aging hospital or prison. In the lobby, a desk clerk behind a barred window receives residents and visitors.
A bank of video screens monitors cameras trained on the building's hallways and exterior. Guests are closely screened and must provide photo identification and a $20 deposit to visit a resident, measures taken to increase security. A locked, gated door in the lobby controls access to rooms.
The Arburthas have lived at the Ford two years. Grace Arburtha, 46, pays about $340 monthly for two connecting rooms the size of large walk-in closets. She and her five children — Jamaica, Ankara, Franklin, Egypt and 3-year-old Joel — sleep on two sets of bunk beds. She purchased a tiny refrigerator and has a microwave oven. When money runs low, they sometimes go to a mission or soup kitchen to eat.
The family was living a fairly comfortable life in Pomona, east of Los Angeles, when the children's father was sent to prison for robbery, Arburtha said. Her job as a caretaker to an elderly woman did not pay enough to keep up rent payments on the house, and after about a year they moved and stayed with friends.
Feeling they had overstayed their welcome, they moved again and lived on the street in Pomona briefly before migrating to downtown Los Angeles' Union Rescue Mission. But boys older than 10 must sleep in different quarters from the rest of the family at the mission, and the others did not want to be separated from Franklin. Arburtha heard of the Ford and checked in.
After quitting the caretaker job, she worked periodically cleaning houses but said the needs of the children were too demanding and so she applied for welfare. She receives about $800 in benefits monthly but has not been able to find low-rent housing for a family of six. She is eligible for subsidized Section 8 housing but may have to wait a year or more for the aid.
The $340 she pays now is a bargain even on Skid Row, where hotels frequently charge rents of $600 or $700, according to the USC study. Arburtha also pays $60 a month for bus passes for her children to get to school.
"Sometimes the kids complain, but they've got friends here now and they get used to it," she said. "I never get used to it."
Cracking down
The Ford Hotel, built in 1925, has been a target of the city's slum task force in the past. In 1999 it was declared a public nuisance, and owners were ordered to clear trash and properly dispose of needles and condoms, upgrade security and evict lawless tenants.
It was also in that year that a mother threw her 9-month-old daughter from a sixth-floor window and then jumped herself. Neither survived.
More recently, June 6, Doris Helen Moore, 30, was stabbed to death on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Many residents, including three of the Arburtha children, witnessed the slaying. Moore had lived in the Ford with her four children for several months, said Los Angeles Police Detective Robert Solorza. Another hotel resident, Donovan Holland, 48, was charged with murder.
"A lot of grown-ups could have helped her, but they were just standing there like they were frozen," said Jamaica, remembering that day. "It made me even more afraid." She and her sisters attended the funeral.
New ownership
By 2002, the hotel was being run by a nonprofit organization and operated primarily as transitional housing for homeless families. Authorities determined that conditions had improved and lifted the public-nuisance designation. In 2003, the hotel changed hands again and is now owned by Ford Hotel LLC, a company headquartered in nearby Arcadia.
Zelenne Cardenas, director of the United Coalition East Prevention Project, a neighborhood activist group, said problems remain.
"What goes on at the Ford and other hotels would never be tolerated anywhere else," she said.
Harold Greenberg, an attorney who represents the Ford's owners, said his clients were addressing concerns, including working with the police and city attorney's office to evict problem tenants.
Greenberg said he recently examined the building and, as a result, inoperable toilets and showers and pushed-out window screens were being fixed.
Overall, he said, the building is properly secured and maintained, with four maintenance people during the day and two during the evening, an armed security guard in the evening and internal and external security cameras.
Settled in
Although the Ford is a place where people usually stick to themselves, it can sometimes take on the air of a community, with the rhythms of Tejano music pouring out of some rooms.
On the second floor, Angelica Palafox, Hilario Madrigal and their four daughters sometimes while away the afternoon hours watching television on the two small sets that Madrigal retrieved from the trash.
An unemployed janitor, he has lived with his family in the Ford for nearly four years, paying about $300 monthly in rent for a small room with two bunk beds.
The small patches of floor space not taken up with the beds are occupied by several cardboard boxes filled with pastries donated by charities, as well as chilies and citrus fruit that Palafox uses to make salsas.
Cockroaches roam the shelf by the sink and the walls, and a light fixture dangles from its electrical wiring.
Going to court
To protest what they alleged were poor living conditions, the family withheld a portion of their rent and then were served with an eviction notice. In a recent court proceeding, they were awarded $2,000 in relocation money and were supposed to move by the end of August.
Deciding they needed more time to look for a new place, they waived the relocation funds and were instead given rent-free months until January, when they are supposed to move.
Madrigal said he didn't feel good about his daughters living on Skid Row. Before she joined a church-based residential youth program, his 16-year-old oldest girl had been forced to sleep on the floor.
Both parents want to be out of the Ford soon. Madrigal's brother is buying a new house and he hopes there is room, at least temporarily, for the family.
On a recent afternoon, dozens of kids at the Ford streamed into a room off the lobby to meet volunteers from School on Wheels, who help them with homework and provide school supplies. The program visits the Ford and Huntington, the Union Rescue Mission and the Midnight Mission twice a week, often encountering emotionally fragile youngsters who are ashamed of being homeless and fret over the uncertainty in their lives.
"Some have untreated vision, hearing and malnutrition problems," said the program's founder and director, Agnes Stevens. "I think more of these children would be classified as having special needs. But some also stand out for being seemingly well-adjusted, calm, getting good grades. The opposite poles are sometimes in the same family."
Indeed, many hotel children are resilient. Many of the Arburtha children are doing well in school. Ankara says she wants to be a neurologist.
She recently enrolled in the Big Sister program and has been taken to art galleries, museums and the theater.
"It's tough now," she said, "but I definitely see a future."