City's core a caldron of neglect
By Marcos Bretón - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, October 7, 2007
Story appeared in METRO section, Page B1
Spend just two hours watching Sacramento police officers work, and their
role in our city becomes abundantly clear:
We expect cops to clean up our failures. We expect them to control a
preposterous concentration of low- income hotels downtown, places where
people live in conditions that can't even be described as squalor.
If you have no clue that your teenager rides the light rail downtown to
loiter instead of going to school, the police will do your job for you.
Then, there's the political failures that become police problems. For
example, what do you think happens when buildings remain boarded up for
years? Or are populated with questionable tenants? Would you believe they
actually attract criminal elements? I know. I was shocked, too. But there it
was. One minute I'm talking to a cop in front of the Greyhound station on L
Street, and the next we had a felony arrest.
A young woman was picking up her girlfriend at Greyhound while blaring
the stereo in her yellow convertible. The music was so loud, West
Sacramento undoubtedly heard it. She was oblivious to several shouts to
turn it down, and got a ticket for her trouble. A simple background check
found an outstanding warrant on the young woman who had just gotten off
the bus. Off she went in handcuffs, while a resident of the Berry Hotel next
door invited us to see his room.
Up we went, traversing stairs that moved as you stepped on them. To call
it a tenement would be an insult to tenements. The smell of the hallways
made you dizzy. The ceiling panels were torn and frayed. People were
paying more than $400 a month for these places.
At the Marshall Hotel on Seventh Street, I met an amiable man who told
police he was a registered sex offender. Another man showed us his hovel
of a room, the floor water-damaged, walls with black mold -- and spoke of
mice infestations. There are proposals to turn the Marshall into a "boutique"
hotel. The Berry is supposed to be cleaned up. The Greyhound station is
supposed to be moved. Blah, blah, blah. They are what happens when bad
property owners meet bumbling city officials.
And it doesn't stop there.
A short walk away on the K Street Mall, we found a man who had fallen on
the street. Turns out he was well known by police, in a program for "serial
inebriates." That means he's been arrested at least 25 times for public
drunkenness.
The K Street Mall was most heartbreaking of all, where scores of teenagers
loitered with no purpose. Where were their parents? Why weren't they in
school? Why would we expect the cops to be their babysitters?
This quagmire is vividly illustrated in the ongoing battle between the city
and Moe Mohanna, who owns many of the threadbare storefronts on K
Street and has an option to buy the Berry Hotel. Mohanna hasn't made
anything of properties he's owned for 20 years; his idea of tenants seems
to be tattoo parlors and low-end clothing stores that attract vagrants.
The city, which has been incompetent in dealing with him, will sit down with
him again Wednesday. Fine. But we're way past demanding accountability
from both sides. The city core remains a sewer with police as garbagemen,
dealing with the refuse of civic failures.
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