Print U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s order to Los Angeles officials to sweep homeless people off skid row into shelters or housing is grounded in his conviction that a wrongheaded focus on creating permanent housing has perpetuated racism, spread encampments and caused the avoidable deaths of Black people. But the complexities of the lives of homeless people on skid row suggest that shelters may be, at best, an incomplete and unwelcome solution to the homelessness that has persisted in the 50-block district downtown for more than 50 years. “They’re putting the smallest Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound,” said skid row activist and poet Suzette Shaw. “They don’t think we are real people.”