- [Announcer] Documentary
for the Cecil Hotel. - [Man] Is there something
evil going on here? - There's a neighborhood in Los Angeles that we need to talk about, it's called Skid Row. Last month, there was this really popular true crime documentary on Netflix. It was like the number
one most watched show here in the United States
and maybe around the world. And it was about this hotel that was right here in Skid Row, it's about a 21 year old Canadian woman who disappeared after exhibiting some very strange behavior in an elevator. And yes, there's gonna be
plenty of spoilers here. - [Woman] The Hotel Cecil is content and it's got some sort of uncanny force. - The show is haunting, and confusing, and thrilling, and an
appalling and insensitive abuse of the power of documentary filmmaking. The whole series feels like
a true crime documentary but there ends up being no crime at all. And the whole energy of this series is founded on the idea that this hotel is haunted with dark energy. - [Man] I think that
we're hoping for a ghost because it's what we've come to expect. - I'm here to tell you
that the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles doesn't have dark energy, that's a tantalizing, but
very lazy explanation. And it exonerates the people and policies that built modern day LA. Instead, there's a much bigger story here. One that the documentary decides to largely ignore or mischaracterize. The story worth telling
here about this hotel and the neighborhood in which it resides is the story of how
cities draw boundaries. These subtle borders that are meant to contain the city's least wanted people. Once you understand what this looks like and how it happened in LA, you can understand how it
happens in a lot of cities and it helps you understand what's really going on
with the Cecil Hotel. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] It's the story of a city in the microcosm of the "American Dream." - Okay, first, let's establish what and where the Cecil Hotel is in LA. Here's Downtown LA, and you have this Financial District here with all these big buildings. A few streets over it,
you have the Cecil Hotel, right on the border of this 50 city block neighborhood
called Skid Row, right in the heart of Downtown LA. Go to Skid Row today and you are quickly brought into the plight of basic survival for nearly 5,000 homeless people. - The reason why I come to
so many tents out of here is because people can't
afford to live in a house. - Nearly half of them
are considered to have serious mental illness and life expectancy here is 48 years old, 30 years less than the US average. This small block of streets is surrounded by highly developed districts that every year become more
shiny and more expensive. So how did Skid Row, this one small block of Downtown become where so many of the city's sick and marginalized gathered? (upbeat music) Way back when California was first taken from Mexico to become part of the United States, loads of Americans were moving West, moving to California. Some of them were looking for gold and some were just
looking for a new start. The US used to be really
good at railroads, and they built a railroad
across the entire country. That railroad ended right here in LA, right in the location
of modern day Skid Row. - [Reporter] There is
probably no single area holding so much of charm and beauty and the good things of life
as Southern California. - [Johnny] We see a lot of people arriving around this train
station, looking for work. This area developed a reputation as being full of transient people
coming to the West with dreams of gold and a new start, and instead ending up with
neither, no jobs, no homes. It was a part of town
that no one wanted to go. - [Reporter] Los Angeles County has a gregarious fun zone where everybody has a good time. - As LA grew, so did the
bad reputation of Skid Row and so did the homeless population. The neighborhood was sort
of for the untouchables and when anyone considered helping them or figuring out a policy to
solve this, people resisted. One columnist of the day wrote, quote, don't help this class, it is a crime against
the community to do so. The Cecil Hotel was eventually
constructed in the 1920s right here on the outskirts of what was becoming this
undesirable part of town. At the time, it was a Grand Hotel built for business travelers. What turned the Cecil
Hotel from this to this wasn't dark energy or mysterious forces, nor was it the fact that YouTube played a concert on the roof right next to the Cecil
Hotel in the late '80s. (rock music playing) No, no, no, no, no, no. What happened to the Cecil Hotel is something that happened to this whole neighborhood,
starting in the 1970s. When city planners and politicians started reinvisioning Downtown LA, drawing lines on maps to contain the growing population of
mentally ill and homeless. The goal here was to bulldoze all the decaying buildings in Downtown and to make way for a
new business district, full of tall shiny buildings. The original demolition
plan included Skid Row, but the community leaders fought back saying, listen city of LA, if you demolish Skid Row without solving the underlying issues, you're just gonna have a
bunch of smaller Skid Rows pop up scattered throughout the city. Homelessness isn't gonna go away if you just bulldoze the neighborhood, the city was like, yeah, you have a point. So they agreed upon setting firm borders, that would be the quote, containment zone where the homeless and mentally ill could stay so that the
surrounding neighborhoods could build nice big office buildings without the presence of these
undesirable populations. Within Skid Row, they
constructed public bathrooms and benches and public spaces so that as the city officials said, those amenities could quote, act as a magnet to hold the undesirable population
elements in Skid Row. Undesirable population elements, wow, that is just a fantastic way to take human beings and
turn them into units. (bells chiming) So weird. Even though the borders of Skid Row based on the city plan
were not like walls, they were just city streets but the city planners made sure that they would have quote, 'strong edges' that will act as a buffer between Skid Row and the
rest of the central city. They promised that when Skid Row residents enter the buffer, the
psychological comfort of the familiar Skid Row
environment will be lost. So how did they do this? One way they did this
is with harsh lighting. Back in the old days, they had these historic
lights on main street which is one of the borders of Skid Row. They replaced those with
like harsh prison lights to make it very, just unpleasant
to walk across the street. They put locks on the trash cans in the surrounding districts so people wouldn't leave Skid Row to come scavenge for food. Residents of Skid Row also reported that police officers would be
patrolling these borders and anytime someone would cross they would be approached, yet, they would be left alone for a time if they stayed peaceful
within the containment zone. All of this happened throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s as rent prices started to go up all throughout this area. So rent is getting more expensive, at the same time, funding for
mental health institutions was drying up and the war on drugs propagated by the Reagan
Administration was also heating up. Skid Row literally
became a dumping grounds for mental health institutions who would drop off patients right here knowing that they would be contained. The idea of saving Skid Row by drawing borders around it came from the community
leaders of Skid Row itself. It was a solution to
keep affordable housing, keep the community intact, but soon this solution
was used as an excuse to neglect the people within these lines. Street cleaners and trash collectors came less frequently
than in the rest of LA. City maintenance for streets sort of stopped showing up, but the one city resource that did show up in
abundance was the police, whose job it was to keep these quote, undesirable population
elements within this zone, criminalizing the poverty
inside these lines, and yes, here's the Cecil Hotel right within these firm
containment borders. So if you look at the Cecil
Hotel under this lens, you now see the danger,
the drugs, the violence, not being caused by
some creepy dark energy that lured in this woman from Canada. Instead, this was the result of a policy intentionally creating
borders within the city to keep the city's problems
contained into one area. A spot that had real culture and community values and history, and yet because of these
dehumanizing policies, Skid Row became defined as a series of statistics
and social problems. What I've found by looking
into these policies is that this wasn't an
inevitable course of action, the city could've put its money and effort behind the harder thing to do, which is addressing the underlying issues of unemployment, mental
illness, drug addiction, and unaffordable housing stock. And yet the policy they pursued was fixing this problem with a band-aid, using policing and the
power of redevelopment. The real problems were swept under the rug to be dealt with another day, keeping the city's problems contained neatly in this border and
hiding them from view. (bright upbeat music) So let me tell you about
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sponsoring this channel, thank you all for watching, lots more to come. I have been all over the place when it comes to topics. I feel like it's been Russia, not in Russia, I'm fascinated
with Russia lately. It's been Janet Jackson, it's been the US Military, Skid Row, I just, I'm all over the place. I've got a really big story coming out early next month that I'm excited to share with you. So stay tuned, subscribe to my channel if you are not subscribed, and I'll talk to you later, bye-bye.
“Haunted” means a lot of different thing to people. Skid Row is haunted by the billionaires that refuse to care for our nations needy and the greed of the small person that thinks he’s rich too and votes for pieces of shit. Morons.
I mean, a good third of the show was dedicated to the fact that it was on Skid Row.