Fallout of Skid Row Housing Trust collapse big and small: broken promises, homelessness, lost dentures
LOS ANGELES -- Nearly eight months after a fire left their downtown single-room occupancy hotel boarded up and uninhabitable, the building’s 22 former residents remain scattered and scarred.
Some have become homeless. Others are unaccounted for. Another group remains in temporary housing, chafing under a nightly curfew and a no -guest policy, rules that didn’t exist at their previous residence, Skid Row Housing Trust’s Dewey Hotel. Some who have been relocated to different trust properties said they only agreed to do so out of fear they’d otherwise be thrown onto the streets.
Like other former Dewey residents, Marvin Danzey III said in the wake of the fire he’d been promised a subsidized housing voucher that would allow him to choose a new place to live. But no such voucher has materialized.
Danzey still hasn’t even been allowed back inside the Dewey to collect belongings he had to leave behind. Most of his clothing. Family photos. His dentures.
“We feel like we’re being punished for our building being set on fire,” said Danzey, 58.
The tumult faced by former Dewey tenants provides one of the most striking examples of the ongoing disarray caused by , once the largest landlord of last-resort
