Los Angeles recently launched an initiative intended to improve public health, empower the destitute, and advance sanitation efforts in the epicenter of the city’s homeless crisis: Skid Row.
On Monday, Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the formation of the Skid Row Clean Team — a new street cleaning program targeting the roughly 54-block area best known for rat-infested piles of garbage, a typhus outbreak, and sidewalks lined with tent encampments. He said the new project currently employs “about two dozen” homeless and formerly homeless individuals to help pick up the trash in their neighborhood.
Garcetti maintained that the team members are all determined to make a better life for themselves, adding, the endeavor is “just as much about cleaning the streets as it is about lifting up the people who live on them.”
Our new Skid Row Clean Team is empowering homeless and formerly homeless Angelenos through a program that’s just as much about cleaning the streets as it is about lifting up the people who live on them. pic.twitter.com/q2m3pONyIM
— Mayor Eric Garcetti (@MayorOfLA) August 26, 2019
The workers were hired and primarily trained by the contracting organizationUrban Alchemy and are not city employees. According to KFI Radio, they are paid “$15 an hour or more.” The minimum wage in L.A. increased to $14.25 an hour last month for businesses with more than 25 employees. – READ MORE