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Virus Galvanizes LA to House Homeless After Expensive Failures

One man has gone from Skid Row to an art deco hotel at beach

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Conrad Wallace and his son, Calvin, in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Conrad Wallace and his son, Calvin, in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Photographer: Allison Zaucha/Bloomberg

For more than a year, Conrad Wallace had been sleeping in a van, at the beach or on Los Angeles’s notorious Skid Row, where he was badly injured in a stabbing last year.

But since Saturday, Wallace, 59, and his son, Calvin, 21, have been bunking at the two-star art-deco Cadillac Hotel in the city’s Venice Beach neighborhood.