Skid Row Planner’s Dressy Style Masks Reliance on ‘Street Sense’

You don’t often find well-dressed people on Skid Row, but there Martha Brown Hicks is, striding down South San Pedro Street in an Oleg Cassini suit. When she became head of the fledgling Skid Row Development Corp. 10 years ago, she says: “People said to me you’re going to have to change the way you dress.�

She pauses for a traffic light. “I said, ‘Oh no I’m not.’ People who know me know I love to dress. I like designer clothes. I’m not going down there wearing jeans, because people will know I’m a phony.�

She continues walking, crossing 5th Street, which street people call “The Nickel� and which is the meanest on Skid Row. A group of men stare at her. She ignores them. “I grew up poor,� she says. “You have a street sense and a confidence. These people don’t bother you.�

Then she adds, “I don’t even own a pair of jeans.�

To say the least, the 54-year-old Hicks is an unusual figure on Skid Row, a carefully polished presence who looks as if she happened there by mistake, as if her car broke down while she was driving through.

The nonprofit corporation she heads was formed by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency in 1978 to stimulate economic development on Skid Row. Since then, it has built one commercial building in the area, renovated another for light industrial use, started three small businesses and taken on the management of two homeless shelters.

A woman who began her rise up the ranks after taking her first government job in the Great Society years of the 1960s, Hicks provides a sharp contrast to most other Skid Row program heads, who closely associate with the people they serve.

Managerial Style

She projects a managerial style. “Hello,� she greets a startled homeless woman when she arrives for her monthly visit to Transition House, a shelter in operation since 1983. “I’m Martha Brown Hicks, from the corporate office.�

“I hope you’ll be very happy here,� she tells another, sounding like a hotel owner.

“This isn’t a dungeon,� she comments moments later as she walks through the lobby of the spacious, 130-bed facility, which is painted in blues, yellows and reds. “Simply because you’re dealing with the poor doesn’t mean you have to be drab.�

When assessing Hicks, people often first mention her style, which amuses some and puts off others. Critics, citing her political alliances at City Hall, do not speak about her on the record. They say more should have been accomplished in 10 years, that she identifies with the business community too much and has not created enough jobs for the poor living on Skid Row or the transients seeking to change their lives.

Critics also note that although Skid Row has started to undergo a revitalization in the time Hicks has been in her post, the trend is due to a heavy influx of toy manufacturers and seafood processors--a development that came about independent of her corporation. In fact, the new businesses, who call the area “Central City East,� tend not to want the needy and their social service groups around.

Hicks’ supporters say she is good with people, combines charm with tenacity, but above all is a good manager--despite a funding crisis two years ago that nearly forced Transition House to close. Jim Wood, chairman of the CRA, cites as an example the San Julian Emergency Shelter, which Skid Row Development runs with CRA funding.

“Other cities have had horror stories with these emergency shelters,� he says. “In Los Angeles we have 134 people every night and you haven’t heard a single word about it. There is no better measure of success than that.�

Response to Critics

“I respect what the businessmen are saying, because we too are business people,� Hicks says, in response to her critics. The corporation’s 37,000-square-foot Commercial Light Industrial Center, she notes, is leased to “tenants who must be labor-intensive and hire a percentage of low-income people.� The building contains a wholesale meat distributor, garment and toy manufacturers and a bakery.

But then she notes that only about 15% of the employees are local, and adds: “I don’t want to tell you everybody in this building is a Skid Row person. That isn’t true. We attempt to get people (hired) who live in the area.�

The corporation’s two maintenance companies, Broadway Maintenance and Transition Enterprises, have about 15 workers. But its paper recycling business, which had one employee, was shut down this year.

Job Readiness Training

The purpose behind Transition House, Hicks says, is to make more Skid Row people employable.

Renovated from an old warehouse with federal funds Hicks secured 10 months after she got her job, Transition House was one of the first facilities in the city to do more than shelter homeless people for a few nights. Its residents stay an average of five weeks and receive job readiness training--how to seek and apply for a job--and other counseling.

On this morning, Transition House is nearly empty because almost all the male residents are out working at the First Interstate building, helping clean up from the recent fire.

Nearly all shelters for the homeless now strive to provide similar services, but “we were doing it before it was fashionable,� Hicks says. In 1985, the shelter won a merit award from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development.

Flexible Definition

She claims a “63% success rate out of Transition House,� based on an in-house study of the nearly 5,000 men and women who have stayed there. She readily admits that program officials used a flexible definition of success. “One success story is a person getting a job. But if we see someone suffering from some form of psychosis,� she says, “and relocate (him) to a board-and-care facility, that’s a success story to us.�

Like other programs on Skid Row, however, Transition House seems to have little success with the hard-core homeless who are increasingly part of Skid Row and downtown street life. The street people call it “T-House,� and some of them who were recently camping around City Hall said they would never go to the shelter because it has too many “rules�--such as a 10 p.m. curfew, tidiness requirements and clean-up duties.

Calls Rules Necessary

A street person named Jerry sneered: “It’s an institution.�

Hicks tends to dismiss people such as Jerry. “You can’t run a 130-bed facility and not have rules,� she says. “That segment, it does not fall within the kind of things we see ourselves doing.�

Asked how they could be reached, she says with a shrug: “I really don’t know.�

She is clearly more comfortable with Transition House residents such as Laurie Raymond, who had only recently become homeless. Raymond says she likes the shelter because “it’s homey, not like the street.�

“I’ll keep you on my prayer list,� Hicks tells her.

Hicks’ primary concern these days is meeting the $477,000 annual budget of Transition House. She receives money for it from Skid Row Development’s leased commercial space--about $140,000 a year--and gets another $170,000 from CRA. Hicks says she is trying to raise the rest, close to $170,000, from other sources.

‘I’m Way Behind’

“Seventy-five percent of my time is spent on fund raising,� she says. “It’s really tough. People want to (contribute to) new stuff. Here we’ve been running a program for five years and the dollars just don’t seem to be there.�

So far this year, she has raised $36,000. “I’m way behind,� she complains as she heads back to her office.

A worker walks along with Hicks, carrying two paper plates. Hicks had made a fuss over the lunch served at Transition House--liver and gravy--and the beaming cook gave her some.

Back at the office, behind securely locked doors, she gamely eats all the liver.

Hicks was born in St. Louis, the daughter of a minister and teacher. She attended Howard University, left for financial reasons, and graduated from St. Louis University.

Employment Background

After moving to California and landing a secretarial job in the Planning Department of the city of Compton, she got an urban planning certificate, a graduate program that is not as extensive as a full master’s, at UC Irvine. She eventually became an assistant city manager in Compton, and was interim city manager for six months.

In 1974, she was hired by the City of Santa Monica as director of grants and community services. “I felt I needed a non-minority experience,� she says. “I think the people who interviewed me for this job might not have talked to me had I not had the Santa Monica experience. It showed I could work in a minority community and that I could work in a wealthy white beach community.�

‘Not a Condo Person’

Along the way she married, and divorced, and raised three children, all now adults with careers of their own. She recently sold a condominium downtown and is moving to a house in View Park. “I’m just not a condo person,� she says.

She modeled herself, she says, after a black attorney named Mary Bush Wilson, who came to speak on career day at her St. Louis High School. She watched Wilson, she recalls, and decided: “I wanted to be successful, professional, I wanted to be slim and svelte, I wanted to have prematurely gray hair and two last names.

“And I did.�