“You almost forget you’re in Los Angeles,” Leilani Farha remarked, looking up at a shabby hotel with a cartoon palm tree on its sign — a reminder of Southern California, the dream, in a part of the city better known as a nightmare. Skid Row is a place thousands of people sleeping in tents call home. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on housing, Farha stepped over trash and around the many people camped out on the sidewalks in a quest to better understand this otherworldly America, just blocks from luxury condos.
“I need to understand that world,” Farha had said a couple of hours earlier, Wednesday, at a public forum hosted by the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a Skid Row advocacy group. Appointed in 2014, the human rights lawyer and head of the nonprofit Canada Without Poverty was in town to identify obstacles to the realization of “the right to adequate housing and land.” She received an education, with people from across the region telling her what is like for them to sleep in cars and tents in a place oft-sold as paradise.
The obstacles were readily apparent within minutes: too little affordable housing and too many police.
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