June 21st. First Day Of Summer. June 21st to September 21st. Summer.
This Summer in Skid Row promises to be very powerful.
Some reasons why:
The LA Alliance lawsuit against the City and County of Los Angeles over homelessness began in March of 2020. Federal Judge David Carter oversees the case. In mid-April he issued a Preliminary Injunction for Skid Row and that dominated the Spring of 2021. The City, County, and Intervenors Los Angeles Community Action Network in Skid Row all appealed the Preliminary Injunction to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal is heard this July 7th and so perhaps that day or very soon after we’ll find out if the Judge Carter Preliminary Injunction will also dominate the Summer.
Skid Row has deeply engaged the Department of City Planning for several years over DTLA 2040 — updating the Downtown Community Plan. With new Land Use Policy and Zoning, the Community Plan will give strong guidelines on how land will be used or not used in Skid Row over the next twenty years. This past June 17th the final draft of the Plan went to the Planning Commissioners for a zoom meeting lasting six hours. 152 pages of written comment was submitted to the Commissioners prior to the meeting by 35 or so elected officials, coalitions, organizations and individuals. The Planning Commissioners will receive additional comment over the summer for possibly another six hour meeting on August 26 when they either sign off on the plan as is or make changes to it. Los Angeles experienced one of its greatest scandals in history with Jose Huizar etc. dealing with big money developers and a weak Community Plan.
Skid Row Cooling Resources (SRCR) began as a grassroots planning effort in response to the terrible heat waves of last September and the Urban Heat Island effect. At the early March meeting of the Los Angeles Central Providers Collaborative (LACPC), 51 folks representing dozens of government bodies and non profit service providers watched a SRCR powerpoint presentation by Lisa Boyle, an Environmental Attorney, and USC student Aria Catano, co-founder of Water Drop LA. On May 11, City Hall okayed a budget of over seven hundred thousand dollars with Homeless HealthCare LA designated as the responsible nonprofit. The powerpoint to LACPC said July 1 is when Skid Row Cooling Resources will be fully operational. SRCR is quite ambitious and so hopefully it will successfully roll out over the next several days.
The Japanese American Community and Cultural Center (JACCC) in Little Tokyo is the largest Japanese American center in the country. Located immediately north of Skid Row, JACCC announced five Artists Grant recipients in late May for the Kintsugi Spirit. The artists will create their artwork over this summer, place it in video form of three to ten minutes, and the videos will become an online JACCC exhibit beginning September 15th. JACCC gives this definition to Kintsugi: “Poetically translated to ‘golden repair’, kintsugi is the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”
June 21st. First Day Of Summer. June 21st to September 21st. Summer.