"There are people who shoot up and there are people who are mentally ill," said Koreatown activist and attorney Grace Yoo. "How do we ensure the safety for the homeless and the people nearby?"

We were having coffee in the Koreatown Galleria, the big mall at Western Avenue and Olympic Boulevard, in an area torn by a dispute over a proposal to build a temporary shelter for the homeless on a city parking lot near Seventh Street and South Vermont Avenue, also in the heart of Koreatown.

Yoo, who ran unsuccessfully against City Council President Herb Wesson in the area in the last election, is a leader of the opposition to the temporary housing, which is backed by Wesson and Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Garcetti has a lot riding on this project. Construction of such temporary housing in each of the 15 City Council districts is at the heart of his policy to find a place for the homeless, who now live in tents on sidewalks, parks and under freeways.
Without progress on the homeless issue, voters will undoubtedly be angry after voting for a $1.2 billion Los Angeles bond measure to build housing for the homeless and a county sales tax increase that will raise $355 million for mental health and substance abuse rehabilitation and other services. Failure to make substantial progress in solving Los Angeles' most pressing problem would hurt Garcetti as he contemplates running for president.

In addition, Garcetti is dealing with ethnic tensions in a Koreatown still feeling marginalized after the 1992 riot. Many residents were convinced the city stood by while Korean-owned businesses were destroyed. They also charge that the area has been neglected by city service providers and pushed around politically before and after the riot. Garcetti's skill in handling ethnic relations in his multi-ethnic city is something else that will be scrutinized in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yoo had emailed to say she wanted to get together with me to discuss her feelings, and the feelings of others, that "when it comes to the Korean-American community, we don't get a fair shake."

The proposed facility already approved by a council committee and awaiting approval by the full council, would house about 100 of a Koreatown homeless population estimated by authorities as around 400. Early drawings show a structure looking like a big tent. "It looks like a huge igloo," said Woo. Such housing, with a life span of three years, will serve as temporary housing, also providing rehabilitation services, for homeless people while they await apartments in affordable housing projects, most of which have not been built.

Yoo and her anti-project allies have two main objections: The temporary housing is in the wrong place, too near schools, businesses and residences. And she maintains neither Wesson nor Garcetti has reached out enough to the community to answer a number of questions, despite meetings with Koreatown leaders. Both the mayor and the council president strongly disagree, saying they have had a number of community meetings.

There are several nitty gritty questions about running such a facility: Who is going to build it? Who is going to run the place once built? How will the occupants be selected? Who will cook, clean, maintain utilities, mediate disputes, coordinate security with LAPD and substance addiction and mental health treatment?

The answer to such questions will determine the success of Garcetti's efforts. In his Executive Directive 25, the mayor is aiming to cut through the government bureaucracy. He ordered departments to appoint a project manager for emergency homeless housing, speed up the ponderous approval process and require that construction be completed in 90 days.

More than that, Garcetti will have to sit down again--and again--with residents such as Grace Yoo, tell them exactly what's going on and convince them the city has their back--not only in Koreatown but in other areas where emergency homeless shelters will be built. It's a big challenge and the next few months will show whether or not he is up to it.

Long after he left journalism, Murray Fromson never lost the curiosity, storytelling ability and intensity that made him a top CBS television correspondent during the Vietnam War and in the domestic fight for civil rights.

Fromson died Saturday of Alzheimer's disease, giving way reluctantly, fighting back as long as he could. Even when his memory was going, he'd surprisingly recall some old incident, friendship or feud from the past. We'd started in the AP, in different years, in the San Francisco bureau. We had mutual friends and, as we sat at a table in his rest home, I’d mention some, and it seemed to jog his memory.

As an AP and CBS reporter, he had covered the Korean War armistice talks, the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia, the Richard Nixon-Leonid Brezhnev summit meetings and American domestic turmoil.

At the height of the Vietnam War, when Washington was talking about the "light at the end of the tunnel," Fromson and R.W. Apple of the New York Times interviewed a high-up American general who told them the war was headed for stalemate. "Unless a more positive and more stirring theme than simple anti-communism can be found, the war appears likely to go on until someone gets tired and quits, which could take generations, “ he said. The powerful story played a part in turning the public against the war.

Fromson was a graduate of Belmont High School and a copy boy and stringer for the Los Angeles Times, then moved on to the Associated Press and CBS. He was a much-respected USC professor. As director of the School of Journalism from 1994 to 1999, he helped move the department and its students into the new world of Internet journalism. He was a founder of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

We used to meet for lunch. He talked about the memoir on the Cold War he was completing, and about the columns he wrote for the HuffPost. He had a gift of description and an eye for the visual, shown by his column on a visit to Cambodia:

"I returned to Cambodia a month ago, unsure that I wanted to be reminded once again of the haunted days in 1975 when I was a CBS News correspondent in Phnom Penh that was under siege and the Khmer Rouge was close to imposing its horror on the capital’s citizens — innocent victims of the Cold War. But there I was with my wife twenty years since our last visit, walking again among the barren walls of Tuol Sleng, a former high school converted into what came to be known as the Genocide Museum.

"We were not alone. Tourist buses stopped at the intersection of Sihanouk and Mao Zedong Boulevards, bringing dozens of people: young and old, Muslims and Christians, as well as curious international visitors who had never before been to Cambodia. They walked silently from room to room where some of the prisoners were kept and tortured. I turned to a young couple from Australia and said, “Just think about this grim example of madness unleashed when Cambodians tortured and killed other Cambodians.” The couple was not moved. They had nothing to say and just walked on.

"But if that indifference caused me to shake my head internally, imagine what it was like on several occasions when I attempted to ask young people on the street about the horror of the Khmer Rouge occupation. They did not seem to understand my question. I could only guess that they were too young to have experienced those traumatic days and quite possibly their parents never explained it to them.

"The old Hotel Royale, where a half century ago I was based with other correspondents covering the war in the 1960s-70s, has come under new management and now was catering to wealthy tourists, not journalists on cheap expense accounts. The hotel was modernized to cater to very wealthy travelers. A memorial honoring foreign correspondents killed during the war was said to be based on the hotel grounds. The new managers must have thought it was kind of an unpleasant reminder to its current breed of visitors. They moved the memorial plaque to a place a good walk away from the hotel itself. Curious citizens didn’t have a clue about why we were looking at the engraved names of the journalists, many of whom were colleagues I remembered well.

"The most popular restaurant in Phnom Penh, the Foreign Correspondents Club, we discovered, had no more foreign correspondents. Those who existed moved on to cover other wars. Now, the original pub had enlarged and become a highly successful hang-out for local expatriates and curious tourists. If they wanted to meet a real correspondent, they had to settle for a T-shirt on sale at the cashier’s desk, with the restaurant’s name splashed across it. I wasn’t about to tell anyone about my background, since I had retired from journalism into the doldrums of academia. But who cared anyway?"

Fromson often spoke of the civil rights movement and of his anger at "the old racists ..... who want to hang on to the embarrassing reminder of the Stars and Bars? Well, I’ve got news for them, having traced some grim events from the ugliness of Selma, and having made the march on behalf of the Voting Rights Act from there to Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King. It’s time to erase the memories of the past and instead welcome the dramatic changes throughout the glorious South that make us proud to show the remainder of the world that the United States today has a truly democratic society."

Fromson respected that society. He loved his family and friends. They'll be gathering in the next few days to tell stories about him and the old days. He would have liked nothing better than to be among them.