We have the largest homeless population in the country.
The city council is expected to declare
homelessness a local emergency today.
Homelessness is dropping in much of the country,
but not in California.
Imagine 2,500 people living on the streets and sidewalks
in a 49 square block area
and utilising only nine permanent rest rooms
and four new temporary ones have been added.
So let's be kind and say that we have 13 total restrooms
for 2,500 people.
That's 180 restrooms shy of a minimum standard
for a Syrian refugee camp.
You're Hollywood right, you're in LA,
you're in the land of myth making through film.
And when we talk about the American Dream,
the ultimate myth, right, you know, it's often inextricably tied
to the ownership of a home.
This is Los Angeles, home to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood,
the city perhaps most synonymous with the American dream.
But this is also LA.
Walk by here at night.
Every doorway there's a homeless person sleeping in it
all the way down the street.
The City of Los Angeles declared a State of Emergency
in September 2015 due to rising homelessness.
Almost 60,000 people in the county are living without shelter.
Many of them live in Skid Row in downtown LA
which has long been considered the centre of homelessness in the city.
Up to 1,000 people sleep at the Union Rescue Mission,
which was set-up in 1891, on any given night.
I actually contracted three flesh eating diseases,
E. coli, Staph and Strep from the sidewalks,
when I had a wound boot on,
and I ended up after two years in a wheelchair
I ended up losing my lower right leg.
And that is the condition of the health on Skid Row
because of the shortage of restrooms.
It really is a crisis.
Then we have a certain strain of TB
found only in the world on Skid Row.
According to the Stop TB campaign poverty fuels tuberculosis,
a disease that passes from person to person and affects the lungs.
They say a lack of basic health services, poor nutrition
and inadequate living conditions all contribute to the spread of TB.
The situation on Skid Row and other areas was so desperate
that in December 2017, the United Nations sent Special Rapporteur
Philip Alston to examine conditions in the United States.
His conclusions were shocking.
The way in which those
in the bottom 20 percent of the population exist
is in dramatic contrast to the wealth that is in the country.
I've never seen anything like this in my life.
The tents.
The people that are on drugs, the mental conditions.
It's unbelievable.
Filming on Skid Row was no easy task.
While some were eager to share their stories
others understandably didn't want to be filmed.
We ain't no stars.
We don't wanna be stars either.
Put that camera down.
Los Angeles probably represents in civilisation
one of the largest dichotomies of civilisation where you have
what you see here, tents, people,
which is the absolute low of poverty.
And on the other side we have Hollywood,
which is Tinseltown, the movies.
So what is Hollywood doing?
The authorities have taken a heavy handed approach.
The LAPD and law enforcement are regularly called on
to clear the homeless from the streets.
While arrests in the city declined 15 percent between 2011 and 2016,
arrests of homeless people by the LAPD were up 31 percent.
There is a lack of facilities to deal with the scale of the problem.
Skid Row is home to the biggest concentration
of homeless people in the US.
We spoke to the mayor of LA at the official groundbreaking
of a new affordable housing complex for the homeless on Skid Row.
Well, I'm mayor of this city,
but I have no dollars for health care,
mental health care, social services.
Housing dollars, we have a few but really
those come from the State of California and the federal government.
So everybody has made sure that it's not their responsibility.
I've taken the leadership, saying
even if I don't have those dollars I'm going to lead.
We have a county that's working with the city
for the first time and we finally have a plan.
We went to the voters not just once but twice,
and we now have $4.5 billion to spend over this next decade.
So it won't end overnight.
But I believe in that decade
by the time the Olympics come here in 2028,
that we can get everybody off the streets.
But the crisis has worsened under his leadership.
Over the last six years homelessness has shot up
by an incredible 75 percent.
And as the Mayor assured us, housing is being built in LA,
but most of it isn't for the people living on Skid Row.
Yes, so that's the building.
If you look it has the sign that says Broadway Palace Apartments.
And you see how there's a hole there and a hole here?
They're working on building a bridge.
You heard correctly.
A bridge is being built to connect buildings
at the latest luxury development of billionaire property tycoon
Geoffrey Palmer.
It's his way of making the homeless invisible
to those living here at the Broadway Palace Apartments
just blocks from Skid Row.
To answer your question too -
everybody has to go through a criminal background check,
a credit background check,
a rental history and an income check.
So everybody has to be screened
before they are approved to move in.
Palmer was a key supporter of Donald Trump
during his presidential campaign,
donating five million dollars.
We would like to have spoken to Palmer
to find out why he believes affordable housing is "immoral"
and if he really hasn't paid any federal taxes
for 30 years as he claimed in 2015.
He rarely gives interviews
and didn't respond to my request for one.
Probably his vision of Making America Great Again
is to take it back to the 1920s
and to wipe the entire district of Skid Row off the map
as he has done in this brochure.
For most, the 1920s was an era of poverty,
not too dissimilar to what is happening on the streets in LA today.
Well I think what we are seeing is that the people
who are most affected by the lack of affordable housing
ended up on the street and became homeless.
But that affordability crisis
exists for many more people now than it once did.
We have a tremendous need for affordable housing,
not only in the city of Los Angeles,
the county of Los Angeles but the entire state of California.
The ones who are suffering from homelessness
are disproportionately those from minority backgrounds,
especially African-Americans.
There's a lot of money going around, that we see like,
we're all Americans but at the end of the day,
we can't really see where the money is going in the community,
and if they do they use the money for other things
other than helping the people in America, like black people.
Women and LGBTQ people are also disproportionately affected
by the homeless crisis.
On Hollywood Boulevard, we spoke with Alexandra,
a trans Latina woman who just two years ago slept in her car
while studying at a university and struggling to make ends meet.
So you're seeing a rise in homelessness
because of the cost of tuition,
because of the cost of housing and how expensive it is,
and not only that but you're also seeing this
because of the discrimination that people in the community face.
Nobody would hire me at the gas station,
nobody would hire me at any of these places,
and I needed to pay my bills.
So, what do you do?
It was all of those reasons, like I said before,
that led me into sex work.
A 2017 report from the California Housing Partnership Corporation
showed a shortfall of over half a million
affordable homes in LA County.
Rent continues to spiral,
rising by 17.5 percent between 2005 and 2016
while wages only grew by 8 percent over the same period.
This extreme shortage of affordable housing and rising rent prices,
is forcing people, 10,000 to be specific, to live out of their vehicles.
Many of them have jobs, or did until recently.
Mo arrived in Los Angeles a week before we spoke to him.
He once co-owned a restaurant in Florida,
but when we met him he was sleeping on the beach.
The jobs aren't paying that good any more, if there's any jobs.
So I guess that affects a lot of people.
A lot of people come with a lot of hopes.
We're going down there to LA and doors are gonna open,
but you get faced with reality –
ain't no doors gonna open unless you make it happen.
For the past two months, Jordan and his partner
have been forced to rent out their couches for 17 dollars a night
in order to pay the 3,000 dollar a month rent
in their small one bedroom house.
For the most part if you're a new renter in Los Angeles,
you don't have rent control, the rent is going to go up every year.
Unless you've been here for like, a decade,
and have some kind of rent control.
Otherwise the developments keep happening.
They just keep springing up at an alarming rate.
And all these companies can do whatever they want.
In a tent in his backyard, there's a couple
who used to rent Jordan's couches.
But what started as a way for him to pay his rent
has extended to helping others out of good will.
This couple no longer pay Jordan anything.
I was like sleeping at hostels and shit,
but it was like tough to constantly pay for that so
sometimes I had to sleep outside.
I had a tent just like this and was sleeping outside.
I mean sleeping on the beach wasn't too bad.
Despite the enormity of the crisis,
community organisations are fighting back.
One of these is Defend Boyle Heights
who describe themselves as an autonomous coalition,
committed to building community power
against gentrification principally through direct action.
Other organisations such as the LA Tenants Union
are also involved in pushing back
against spiralling rents and displacement.
We recently won a very high visibility campaign
where folks who were living in non-rent controlled
or rent stabilised units were about to be evicted
because the landlord was trying to raise the rents
by about 60 to 80 percent depending on the units.
The average was I think about 60 percent.
We were able to keep those people in their homes.
They negotiated a collective bargaining agreement
between the tenants and the landlord.
And folks were able to stay.
They were able to stay in their neighborhood,
they were able to stay with their people.
A state of emergency, a health crisis and skyrocketing rents -
all on the doorstep of Hollywood,
in the world's biggest economy.
It's a humanitarian crisis that we would more typically associate
with extremely low income countries,
and one which provoked the UN Special Rapporteur to say that
"the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion."
The people must come together and make a righteous stand.
Only then shall we have housing
and stability in the people's hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment