The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing.

The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.

Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.

Is it the 21st century in the largest city of a state that ranks among the world’s most robust economies, or did someone turn back the calendar a few hundred years?

We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move.

L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez roams Greater Los Angeles with Times photographer Francine Orr and videographer Albert Lee and describes a scene of despair among the homeless.

On Thursday I saw a county health inspector on rat patrol between 7th and 8th streets on skid row. He was carrying a clipboard and said he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents, and I asked where:

Well, it’s nice to know somebody is doing something, but you don’t need a clipboard. I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.

The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.

Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it. Every time sanitation crews knock down one mess, another dumpsite springs up nearby.

You wanna take a tour with me of how things looked Wednesday and Thursday?

OK, the shovels were still out on Crocker Street, which was looking pretty good, so I went over to East 10th Street and Naomi Avenue, several blocks away, near the Coca-Cola distribution center.

The north side of 10th Street looked like a landfill. Trash was scattered in the street and on the sidewalk, and there was a little bit of everything. Splintered lumber, metal poles, soiled blankets and clothing, a sofa, buckets, boxes.

“Trucks come by and run over the trash,” said Ron Riego, 60, who lives under a tarp on the corner and pointed out where some of the debris has been flattened by traffic.

Riego said he was just back from the hospital, where he was treated for congestive heart failure and water on the lungs. On returning to his tarp, he discovered that someone had set fire to some of his belongings. Now he was sorting through his things to see what was salvageable, and planning to move a few feet to the west.

Be sure to visit the link for the pictures.

here: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-skid-row-rats-trash-20190601-story.html