Just before 9 a.m. on Aug. 3, the crew fires up the pressurized hoses on Crocker Street in Los Angeles' downtown skid row. Two young men --- dressed in red short-sleeve shirts and black pants, and wearing white masks over their mouths and noses along with white plastic gloves --- approach each other from 4th and 5th streets like lethargic gunfighters. With their broom-wide streams of water, they move methodically back and forth across the sidewalks, from brick walls to the curb.

They spray in doorways and around lamp posts. They hover over cracks and crevasses. It takes them nearly 15 minutes to meet up in the center of the short inner-city block.

Crocker's once grimy sidewalk now glistens in the morning light. Urine stains and excrement smears are gone. Even the overriding stale stench is replaced by the smell of wet cement. When the pavement dries, the dozen or so homeless residents standing around on the street will be able to move back their makeshift tents, cardboard boxes and other belongings to a cleaner and, hopefully, healthier spot.

Every morning for the last month, two-to-three other blocks have had their sidewalks washed down, with the grimier streets getting special attention.

Finally, somebody is doing something --- even if it is just washing down the sidewalks --- to clean up L.A.'s infamous skid row, which traces its roots back to the coming of the railroads to the edges of downtown in the 1870s and which is populated today by more than 4,000 homeless individuals.

Cheers all around, right?

Wrong.

Action and reaction
On July 11, downtown business leaders took a new and unprecedented step in their ongoing struggle to clean up skid row. With money from their own pockets, they hired a company that uses pressure washing to clean off the sidewalks of Gladys Street, one of the area's foulest streets.

The Central City East Association took the drastic action out of pure frustration, according to members, over the filthy and unsanitary conditions that exist on the street crowded with homeless encampments.

The action, however, drew immediate criticism from some homeless advocates, including Catholic Worker Jeff Dietrich, who protested by lying under a street cleaning truck and clutching a sign saying "House the Homeless. Don't Harass Them."

The advocates said that washing down the street is just the business leaders' subtle way of pushing out the homeless so the area can become gentrified, like much of its surrounding neighborhoods, with high-end lofts and tony restaurants. Moreover, they maintain, new well-heeled residents to downtown have raised pressures on city officials to at last do something about skid row.

In its recent front-page story, the Los Angeles Times observed that the fact a simple sidewalk cleaning was now a political battle just showed "how sensitive the issue of gentrification on skid row has become."

As director of operations for the Central City East Association (CCEA), Vicky McCormick is on the front lines of that urban struggle. And one of her duties is to handle the nitty-gritty details of the new sidewalk washings.

The procedure is pragmatic, reflecting the 53-year-old woman's 23 years on the Los Angeles Police Department. On afternoons before, flyers are handed out to folks living on the block saying the sidewalk is subject to cleaning between 8 and 11 a.m. on weekdays, and that it's necessary to "temporarily remove property from the sidewalk prior to the cleaning."

Shopping carts, except for those provided by the Catholic Worker, are considered stolen property and are picked up by CCEA workers. (So are easy chairs, couches and other furniture blocking the sidewalk.) But items inside the carts and on the sidewalk are put in plastic bags and tagged. The homeless decide what, in fact, is trash to be thrown away.

If no one is around to claim the tagged items after three hours, they're taken to a warehouse on Seventh Street, where they can be claimed for 60 days. Those people present during a cleaning are asked to move their belongings into the street, about a foot away from the curb, so they won't get wet.

Next workers sweep the sidewalks, pushing trash into piles on the street. And then the red-shirted pressure washers go into action. All runoff water is vacuumed up, filtered and taken away.

"The people living here are very pleased we started doing this," McCormick says. "Because they have no issues with it at all. They'll tell you, they like the sidewalk clean. And that's all we do is clean the sidewalk and sweep out the gutters and pick up the trash.

"After that first day, we've had no incidences. None at all," she reports. "Because we let the people know way ahead of time we'll be washing their block. And they gladly move. And then, half an hour later, they're back where they were."

Estela Lopez, executive director of the Central City East Association, says her idea was always to do the pressure wash in a professional and compassionate way. And she's made sure that those goals are being followed.

The 52-year-old former broadcast journalist also points out how complex today's skid row really is, with its mix of addicts and the mentally ill, career criminals who are "dumped" there after serving time in central jail and other institutions, along with formerly homeless individuals and families living in cheap SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels who are trying to turn their lives around. In addition, local toy and fish processing businesses employ thousands of low-income people who live in South and East L.A. but work in skid row.

"The population is just so terribly complex," she notes. "It involves people who choose to stay here as well as people who don't know who they are and can't make a decision.

"So it's a human tragedy of enormous proportions that most of the City of Los Angeles is only familiar with when they turn on the 11 o'clock news or read a snippet in the newspaper about it. But it's very difficult to get your arms around it and understand it."

Conditions on the row have been bad for decades, according to Lopez, but they became truly horrific in the 1980s, when cheap crack cocaine came on the scene. Winos were quickly replaced by addicts, blackouts by deadly overdoses.

A more recent, and almost as harmful, factor has been a legal ruling, she notes.

Last April, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department can no longer arrest people for sleeping on city sidewalks until there are enough shelter beds available for L.A.'s homeless population. As a result, she says, sidewalk encampments have increased throughout the area to the point where some streets, like Gladys and Winston, have basically become shanty towns.

"The court's decision has enabled people to live on the sidewalk without any rules, without any behavioral standards, and to do drugs day and night, seven days a week," Lopez laments.

Representing the business community, she reports that every day she's charged with wanting to drive the homeless away so that radical revitalization can take place. She counters that no lofts have gone up in the toy and industrial districts she represents, although she admits that rehabbed apartments are getting closer every week.

Lopez believes that she and homeless advocates are both fighting the same frustrating fight against public policymakers who have long looked the other way when it comes to skid row.

"The homeless advocates are doing what they're doing," she says. "I'm doing what I'm doing. Neither one of us is pushing people away from the area. Both of us are living under the enormous challenge presented by this terrible situation that public policy has yet to address.

"What I can do, at least a block at a time, is clean things off from the sidewalk. So that people who already have very compromised immune systems, people who are mentally ill, people who are drug addicted don't, hopefully, have to sleep in their own filth.

"People are dying out here," she adds. "Nobody believes it until you see it. I can't believe that three blocks from city hall this is happening. Three blocks!"

'Don't take my bed!'
The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a grassroots, residents-led community group, has filed more than 20 "Claims for Damages" with the City of Los Angeles for property confiscated and destroyed from homeless individuals living on skid row. In addition, a number of "Complaints of Employee Misconduct" were also filed on behalf of the homeless with the Los Angeles Police Department.

"Several city agencies, as well as the business improvement district, Central City East, are acting in concert together to harass the homeless in this community broadly," says Becky Dennison, LA CAN's co-director. "But when they just start literally taking people's personal property --- sometimes without following proper procedures, sometimes literally taking things out of people's hands --- we decided to take action.

Steve Richardson, an outreach worker with LA CAN who grew up in the area, says he was talking to a guy on the street recently who said he was watching the property of a friend who had gone to find a bathroom when a city crew came along. The workers asked everybody to stand next to their belongings. When the guy tried to explain, workers told him he could only claim one property. They took away the other.

Richardson also points out that LAPD officers, who used to just escort city workers, were getting out of their patrol cars and actually helping to remove items from the sidewalk to the street, where they're pushed by bulldozers into piles and carted away in dump trucks.

"Now the cops seem like they're attacking," he says. "They pull up, three or four carloads, jump out and intimidate people: 'You've got ten minutes to move your belongings.' People are rushing around, trying to get their stuff together. And then here come the trucks."

To prove his point, Richardson showed a video he shot of a recent skid row cleaning sweep. As city workers approached a middle-aged woman near a mattress, she screamed: "Please don't take my bed! Oh, don't take my bead. Don't take my bed!" When the crew moved in, the homeless lady slammed a plastic bottle to the ground between two police officers and stormed off.

Dennison says she's seen bikes, even a wheelchair, in a dump truck.

Both anti-poverty workers are convinced the increased harassment of the homeless on skid row is closely tied to the gentrification of the area. "We've been living and working here for years and years," Dennison notes, "and it used to be these tactics were used to clean up the area temporarily for special events, like the Democratic Convention or the pope's visit. But now they bring in the cavalry every single day."

The outreach worker nods. "Before they weren't doing it en masse like they're doing it right now," he says. "It seems like they're on a mission now."

Enabling addicts
Walking out of the three-story, windowless, fortress-like police station at 251 East 6th St., LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith, who commands the Central Division that takes in skid row, admits he's on a mission.

"The one thing I don't want to do is drive homeless people away, so that they become a problem for Newton Division, which is across Seventh Street or Rampart Division, which is across the Harbor Freeway," he tells a reporter.

"What we're trying to do is to remove the criminal element from within the homeless community, remove the criminals that are preying on the homeless community. And those criminals include drug dealers, who are young, well-dressed men who come down here to sell drugs. We got two of them yesterday from Compton up here in a rented jeep."

Capt. Smith stops to talk to two African American men trying to escape from the afternoon sun under the spotty shade of a Eucalyptus tree. Beyond St. Julian Park he questions a woman sitting on the sidewalk about the yellow pills that have spilled from a nearby prescription bottle.

Fifteen minutes later, he runs into a 57-year-old man named Duane, who is propped against a wall and breathing hard even with getting oxygen from a tank.

"Hey, that's quite a watch collection you've got on your wrists"

"Yeah," the black man mumbles, half smiling. "Been collecting them for awhile."

"How do the officers treat you out here?"

Duane nods. "They treat me good. Yep, they're fair. If they think you're doing something stupid, they'll tell you."

Now Capt. Smith is nodding. "OK, partner. We've got to run. Good talking to you."

Hitting the pavement again, the commander points out that being in favor of washing down the dirty streets of skid row doesn't mean that he or his officers hate homeless people.

While a big supporter of skid row missions who have programs to help the homeless get off the street, he admits having major problems with church and community groups who come to the area giving out sandwiches and Kool Aid, or handing out dollar bills.

"Anybody who's down here to try to help people, I'm totally in favor of," Capt. Smith says. "But just handing out food or giving a heroin addict some change at an on-ramp, all you're doing is enabling that person to inject more heroin in their veins and continue their suffering.

"People will fight to allow someone to die on the street," he adds, shaking his bald head. "It's maddening. People will fight me and fight my officers in order to allow somebody the opportunity to die on the streets of Los Angeles. And that to me is a tragedy."