Just off Los Angeles’ financial district is Skid Row, a neighborhood where about 8,000 homeless people live in tents or on the streets. A running group helps drug addicts and ex-convicts fight their addiction and get their lives in order. But it’s about much more.
5 am. Tent after tent line the dark street of downtown Los Angeles. Downtown with the ultra-rich banking district is just two streets away. The lights of huge skyscrapers twinkle in the clear night, but seem false and alien in Skid Row, the homelessness capital of the United States. Because nothing sparkles here. Street lamps throw a dim light in the corners of houses and on people crouching on the bare sidewalk. It stinks of garbage and human waste. After misery.
According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 580,466 people were homeless in 2020, more than a quarter of them in California and about 64,000 in LA County. Former US President donald trump said in the fall of 2019 that LA’s homelessness was a “shame” and had become a “crisis” — and the tent cities should be cleared by the police. All over LA County was the homelessness rate 12 percent in 2019, and even 16 percent in the city. With the pandemic, this trend continued even more strongly.
In the 50-block industrial district of Skid Row, about 8,000 homeless people and drug addicts (crystal meth is particularly common) live on the streets. In tents, cardboard huts – or just on the sidewalk. In the middle of Los Angeles. The host city of the Super Bowl mega event last Sunday. The film metropolis. The center of California, the largest industry in the USA. Beverly Hills, home of the super rich, is not far away. Venice or Santa Monica, where tourists and Instagram models take photos on the beach, can be reached by metro. Money and misery are close together and yet far apart, nowhere is the huge gap between rich and poor in the United States clearer. Because nobody goes to the Skid Row ghetto in Los Angeles. Too dangerous, too gross – and too sad. Nobody here can even dream of the myth of the American Dream.
When it comes to running, everyone is equal
Craig Mitchell calls the district in an interview with ntv.de: “The American landfill for people whose lives have gone down the drain.” Mitchell – tanned, wiry body, gray hair slicked back, early 60s – works as a criminal judge in LA and founded the Skid Row Running Club ten years ago as part of a program offered by a charity, the Midnight Mission, in the middle of Skid Row . The mission offers shelter to homeless people if they stay drug-free and pass regular drug tests. Twice a week, before sunrise, drug addicts and ex-offenders meet people from completely different social circles to run together.
Mitchell, whom everyone here just calls ‘Judge’, knows some of the fates of his runners from the courtroom. Many he sends to prison commit crimes to raise money for drugs they buy on Skid Row. But Mitchell doesn’t believe that one act of violence defines a person as a whole. With his running group, he supports those who are willing to change. “I knew how important running is for my physical and mental health, so I suggested starting the running club,” says the judge in the sleeveless jogging shirt in the darkness on the urine-stinking street. “Running creates chemical reactions in the brain that suppress the urge to use drugs.”
At 5:30 am, the running group warms up in the dark before the Midnight Mission. Stretching exercises in colorful running clothes next to sleeping homeless people. Next door, a warehouse worker is spraying the driveway clean with water. Away from the skyscrapers, which stand for everything that doesn’t exist in Skid Row, 20 runners set off: drug addicts, doctors, convicted criminals, IT people. Running eliminates the social differences between the group members, there is no poor or rich, no homeless or penthouse, but the fast and the slow runners, the Nike swearers and the Adidas disciples; those who like to chat; and those who prefer to run for themselves. Only the here and now counts, mistakes from the past are forgotten.
It goes past overflowing garbage cans and tents. All around, the homeless have piled up their few belongings: suitcases with clothes, crockery, an empty birdcage. “It’s an experience that profoundly changes how people look at and interact with one another,” Mitchell says of the jogging sessions. “If you look around after a run, how everyone is hugging and laughing with each other, it shows how much the same we all really are.”
In the US, equality of opportunity is only on paper, and in LA in particular, it’s easier than anywhere else to drift into homelessness. It’s mainly their fault absurdly expensive rents in the city and the ailing social system in the USA. Drug addicts live on the streets of Skid Row – but also people who pursue their normal job after they could no longer pay for their apartment and had to give up.
The pandemic has fueled the latter process again, the tent cities grew all over Los Angeles. The virus soon spread through Skid Row like wildfire. The lack of emergency shelters for the homeless made containment almost impossible. Wave after wave, the most vulnerable residents of Los Angeles suffered the most, with little access to testing or vaccinations, and sometimes suspicious of social workers and their offers of help because past promises about housing, for example, were never fulfilled. The Midnight Mission now not only offers tests, the Running Club also continues to take place.
“I’ve been on drugs since I was a kid,” Ted Maguire — a former composer, late 30s, of medium height with tattooed arms — told ntv.de while running. He used to take speed and drink alcohol, then, at 23, broke his neck in a car accident and became addicted to the painkiller oxycodone: “It really went downhill from there. I used to take drugs for fun, but since the neck broke my life has been completely uncontrollable for the past 15 years. I lost all my ambitions in life, got sick every day without drugs. It’s been a really tough journey.” Painkillers cause around 70,000 deaths in the USA every year, and the composer almost became one of them.
Maguire is still visibly marked by his long drug addiction: he fiddles nervously with his watch, which is dangling from his right wrist, rubs his face or scratches his nose. A friend took him to the Midnight Mission shelter in Skid Row. There he wants to leave his alcohol and drug addiction behind and rearrange his life. You sleep in bunk beds in huge halls. For a year and a half, Maguire has to submit to the tasks of the shelter, he can no longer trust himself. He has to stay clean for a year and a half and is only allowed to leave the mission for certain tasks. Once he has already relapsed, the next time he is thrown out.
“Runners have broken with their families”
Outside life moves on, for Maguire it stands still. The novice runner doesn’t have much to look forward to in their teetotal life. The jogging sessions are his only highlight. “The Running Club is like family to me,” he says. “I have big problems with my self-esteem and suffer from my insecurities. But in the running club I feel at home.” Judge Mitchell and the others would say “Hi!” to him in the morning. say and shake hands – for Maguire, experiencing that little bit of humanity has not been a matter of course for a long time. Not even from his own family, who had eventually turned their backs on him after he had exploited and hurt them too often.
“In the shelter, it’s like God put you on the brakes on your own life. But when we go running and chat about what’s going on in our lives, it just feels good,” says Maguire , a little out of breath but amused: “I haven’t been a part of anything for a long time. Thanks to the Skid Row Running Club, I have people who value me again.” The running club creates a sense of community and gives those left behind by politics and society a new start.
“The runners have broken with their families, lost marriages and jobs because of their dependency,” said Judge Mitchell. “Now there’s a group of 20 to 30 people here who care and appreciate them. They realize they haven’t been completely forgotten. We’re not a substitute for a real family, but we’re close.”
Instead of taking drugs to deal with the harsh reality, Maguire now has the running club to address his problems. He calls it a spiritual awakening, an “eye-opener”. “I never thought I would do it: normally the last thing I would want to do is get up early and go for a run,” says the composer. “I used to just run away from the police. But after my first run at Running Club I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really peaceful.’ When I put my feet on the pavement and start running, it’s like my problems go away. It’s a way for me to escape from reality and I’m really grateful for that.”
The reality that calls for a run is different for each member of the running club. Some have to go to Skid Row in their bunk beds or their tents, while others drive to their homes or to work. “But their attitude towards each other has changed profoundly,” Mitchell describes the process that his running club triggers. “People who are returning to their homes or to their jobs now know that they are not very different from the people who live in Skid Row.” The judge wants everyone to question their privilege and realize that if they had made different decisions, their life could have taken a completely different direction.
“I’m worried that I might take drugs again”
The last few meters of running through Skid Row. Lorenzo, a former drug addict who got out of addiction and homelessness thanks to the running club, has a small boom box for the music. It’s Britney Spears. The sky is slowly turning orange. An absurd beauty descends on the awakening district, deliberately forgotten by the rest of the City of Angels.
“When I get up in the morning to run, I know I’ll meet people from outside, people who have normal lives and will welcome me with open arms,” says Maguire, who has lived his entire life before running club on the East Coast in Boston . “I don’t have any friends or family here. I’m trying to connect with the other runners because I’m worried about the time when I get released from the mission. I’m worried that I might start doing drugs again. But The running club gives me a network I can build on.”
Before the Midnight Mission, helpers are now distributing bread and soup from food trucks in the light. Long lines of people form, dirty, toothless faces marked by the sun, alcohol and drugs. In the business district right next door, business people get out of their luxury cars and start their working day.