As a teenager in the late 1970s, Steve Richardson was sweeping and stocking shelves at a toy store on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row when he noticed the first signs of a monumental change in the city. Day after day, workers, hired from the surrounding streets to unload trucks full of toys, would take the empty boxes and transform them into makeshift shelters where they would spend the night.

“They were called cardboard condos,” said Richardson, a Skid Row leader now known as General Dogon. “They went on block after block.”

At the same time, Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote about the shock he experienced when, for the first time, he saw a man scavenging for food out of a garbage can on a downtown sidewalk. L.A., he concluded, had a problem with “winos — or, more politely, hom

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