The Times’ investigations into Skid Row’s troubled housing providers
Skid Row Housing Trust and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation have been two of the largest landlords in Skid Row, operating more than 3,000 apartments combined for formerly homeless residents.
But in recent years, these two prominent nonprofits have experienced profound problems in their operations and with their tenants’ safety and living conditions. For Skid Row Housing Trust, which had widely been lauded for decades as the model supportive housing operator, its financial collapse was the result of years of mismanagement that led to increasingly poor maintenance of its properties.
The subsequent efforts by the city of Los Angeles to save the buildings and help the tenants inside them have been costly and marred by missteps.
Residents in AIDS Healthcare Foundation buildings also face severe habitability issues. The powerful charity promised to open and operate homeless housing faster and cheaper than government agencies and other nonprofits when it expanded its mission from healthcare to housing six years ago. But its tenants’ rights rhetoric has conflicted with the realities in its buildings and its pattern of evictions.
With so much attention being paid to the city’s unsheltered homeless population, the troubles of both nonprofits show the perils of operating aging buildings for formerly homeless people who may experience long-term mental and physical health crises.
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For more than 100 years, single-room occupancy hotels have housed thousands of people in Skid Row. Now, L.A. leaders are saying their time has passed. Some fear losing them will displace their formerly homeless residents.
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An affordable housing shortage has stymied efforts to get people off the streets. The dismal state of SROs leaves L.A.’s poorest with even fewer places to go.
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After Skid Row Housing Trust financially imploded earlier this year, the L.A. City Council is close to approving $40 million to stabilize 1,500 formerly homeless tenants.
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A Times investigation has found that many of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s more than 1,300 residents live in squalid conditions, with dozens under the threat of eviction.
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Twenty-two Skid Row Housing Trust tenants lost their homes in a fire in February. Residents remain scattered and scarred, unable even to recover most of their possessions.
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It’s the third time in recent years that a statewide initiative to repeal rent control restrictions will be on the California ballot.
- 7
Months before City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto recommended Mark Adams for the equivalent of an open-ended, no-bid contract to oversee 1,500 Skid Row tenants, Adams hosted a fundraiser for her campaign.
- 8
Mark Adams, the receiver responsible for overseeing 1,500 tenants in Skid Row, resigned Thursday after a turbulent three-month tenure.
- 9
After a testy hearing, a Los Angeles Superior Court authorized a new loan to stave off insolvency for the receiver overseeing the repair of 29 dilapidated buildings and approved the removal of seven buildings from the receivership.
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Mark Adams is overseeing the welfare of 1,500 tenants in Skid Row. In prior cases involving Adams, tenants faced the risk of eviction and property owners lost their houses.
- 11
The Skid Row Housing Trust was a model for nonprofits housing homeless people in Los Angeles. Behind the scenes, it was imploding — leaving tenants in squalor.
- 12
Los Angeles housing officials are planning to step in with immediate help to stabilize residential buildings that the financially strapped Skid Row Housing Trust is unable to maintain in habitable condition.
- 13
As an incoming L.A. city council member in 2020, Kevin de León requested a meeting with city officials about their oversight of residential hotels owned by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. But he didn’t tell the city the foundation was paying him, officials say.
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Faced with a desperate financial situation, one of the largest owners of affordable housing on Skid Row is trying to transfer all its buildings.
- 15
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has spent tens of millions on pro-tenant causes. Yet elderly and disabled tenants at one of its buildings complain they have spent months at a time without a functioning elevator.
