Trapped in paradise: how we got the homeless situation (part 1)

438 then continue on to California one that's a great amazing [Music] so one of the things about an older neighborhood that it developed incrementally is that you have the same size Lots City Lots in San Francisco are generally 25 feet wide and about 125 feet deep you might have somebody who has the money who built one giant house on that lot and then next door there might be a duplex or a four-plex and in this case I think there are 20 units in it so they're very small they're like little tiny Studios and this happens to be a low-income housing that's organized through the church but millionaires might live Five Doors Down you get a mix of people when you develop this way so right now San Francisco is hyper inflated in terms of the real estate values but in the 1970s it was incredibly cheap to live here you know if you ask some people they say that the city was so much better in the 70s when it was at the bottom of the economy cycle because you could just find a place to live there was no pressure there was no stress about it other people say that well that was the worst possible time for the city because it was dirty and run down and crime ridden you know I know old people that paid almost nothing for these giant Victorian buildings in this neighborhood and people said they were crazy for living here because like why would you want to live in such a horrible place and then they became quite valuable and now people are also saying why would you live in this place it's so crazy expensive this is insane why are you here all right this home three years ago was like a warehouse probably like it is across the street so this is probably the furthest down the Dog Patch has evolved so far so yeah definitely so so this is a house this is a house inside here yes this is my magnificent pod and so there's basically two other people in the room two three three other people in the room okay we had a guy last week for four days I've been here like three months so there's a lot of turnover yeah I basically keep my tennis shoes here uh big bag of photographic film are you a photographer yes but my actual job is I'm a computer programmer okay I have a an allergy against uh paying 10 percent of my paycheck or more for rent and this is where my dirty clothes go and then I have a giant bag of film so do you mind being in a pod no I just I sleep here it's like a place where I sleep and an apartment that comes with its own friends I've already had my permanent life I was married I have kids uh the kid is all the way through college yeah I'm here because my job is here but it's too expensive to rent my own place what would be the price if you wanted an apartment one bedroom in this area would be four thousand dollars five thousand what do you pay for a pot about 1200 we have a pretty nice common space do you have your own these two that's true and you get a section in the refrigerator uh bathroom is there the job I have right now is the most high paying job I've ever had in my life and I can't afford a 5 000 a month apartment so I get a lot of people that when they I'll be like Oh I'm living in an encampment and they come and they like well hold on I was waiting 14. thanks to Home Depot for the things that they throw away we were able to get so it's not a coincidence you're next to Home Depot right so you got all this out of the dump all out the dumpster my thing is everybody that's homeless is not on drugs you know it's a lot of us out here because of financial reasons I came back from Arizona everything out here is Sky High if your rent is 2500 a month that's 7 500 just to get in the door then I have to turn around and come up with another 2500 for the following month that's ten thousand dollars I just had to come up with in two months it's impossible it's impossible to live out here before the houses was built this is how people lived we just got to show them this is what we're really trying to do you have a generator what is that I have a power box so you have yes I have electricity how does that work there's a lady that actually has a generator and I just run my extension cord to her and then I charge up the box but I'm trying to get my own generator I have a jump start generator and then you can put yes dead okay that's why I want to see how it goes ready hand crank it it's just a lot of work I mean it's a workout you'll get strong but it's you know it's like it's a lot worse they it works so you could hand crank that to get to enough juice to last for your phone because I'm just really doing my phones you're able to I mean what do you use electricity for light lights in our phone I work off my phone and what I do is I go to my app and then go to the nearby jobs this is the main one I do good eggs whenever I want to I can click on like if I had my car today I can click on and I can go to any one of these like I tell them learn how to prioritize and spend your money on what you need like next month I will be getting my portable toilet camping shower how's it working um you just fill it up with the water it's five gallons you just put the hose back on once you fill it up and then we just sitted in the Sun let it sit for three hours and you'll have your hot water it's a lot of Camp stuff that translates to cut off bread yeah you just gotta know how to make it work so what we do is yeah the holes right okay you just have to attach to the water okay so you have water yes okay take this Barrel put the water in the barrel heat it up on here which is the stove gas stove then propane propane okay and then this is our motor for the park and then shower and if there's coverage all the way up and it's a shower tent so that's our community that's how people like a lot of people I meet that just moved here why are you here oh well you know I was coming in for a better life do you not see all these homeless people out here trying to make it better for themselves anywhere in the world at this point is cheaper than the Bay Area I lived in Fresno two bedroom two bathrooms 650 a month here you're looking at about 34 000. and then a lot of the officials and everybody tell you go sign up for Section 8 go sign up for housing it's like a lot of us been on the list for over 10 years and there's nothing happening and then shelters are full so our next step is doing what we're doing most encampments you see them shooting up dope you see them smoking all over the place y'all see none of that here none of that because that's not what our encampment is about you know what I mean we're all trying to in have somewhere to call our own [Music] everybody you know that is homeless or transient is not just trying to live and have anything just look under Peaceable even though we on the streets you can still make it your home you know [Music] [Applause] when you live in a one-bedroom apartment there's not a lot of space for things and I'm very keen on emergency preparedness so what I have in here are these five gallon buckets and this is a queen size bed and I have 24 of these buckets and this is basmati rice and there's wheat and there's all this other stuff in here why do you think it is that you're prepared and it bothers you and it doesn't bother anyone else so growing up I experienced lots of different challenges I was born to teenage parents who had the right intentions but no resources and we sort of went through one series of difficulties after the other when I was a kid we lived in a Volkswagen van like a little pop top camper van when I was little it was 1967 as a family we were having an adventure until it stopped being an adventure and my parents divorced when I was little and my father and the van disappeared and that was the end of that we never saw them again all right so it's my mom and my aunt and my grandmother so my mom reached out to her older sister my Aunt who had a young child as well my older cousin and the four of us managed to scrape by living in vehicles we live in the car and we found the gas stations that had decent bathrooms and we found the launderettes that we could hang out in the daytime when we needed to and both women worked really hard they were waitresses and they took different shifts so that one of them was in the car to look after us kids and we would start school and they would ask for your address and I think my cousin just wrote our license plate number one day you know and that set off alarm Bells at the school because like you know there was that was a problem right my mom was really trying to work it with no resources whatsoever she was actually trying to hold the family together and she did we eventually got an apartment it wasn't great and then there were other periods in our lives where things went ahead a little bit and we fell back she never wanted to say we were homeless because that wasn't really how she felt about it but we we were living in a car we were bathing in gas stations like and I think that other people who have never had those experiences don't understand that there's a broad spectrum of homelessness that sometimes your homeless for all sorts of reasons and it it's very often a temporary situation that you limp through until you get to something better for 20 years I had a house pull in Nevada and then I've been out here for two or three years for a while I was stuck in this spot my truck broke down and I had no money and I could not get out of town there's no work here it was I was trapped in Paradise it was actually a beautiful thing because there's a couple of food banks and you can actually survive with no money in your pocket it's a special town this sounds kind of unique in that it's amazing that it hasn't been discovered because it's if people knew about it yeah I don't know you're not supposed to tell people if you're ever on media you don't mention where you are okay that's how it's always been out here actually since like the 1920s when all they used to have a bunch of poets that were up here and they were all writing stories about all the poets and The Poets were very popular but they couldn't tell anybody where they were because they were all here and if people found that out they'd come here and ruin it tell me about how you ended up at this one in Bolinas yeah well I used to come here surfing all the time so I knew of its existence and then uh I had a house in Novato for 20 years and lost after foreclosure and I knew that ballinas is a place where you can do this really like other places people are doing it other places but Marin County you're constantly being moved along out here it's uh 72 hours for the parking and that's not enforced I mean I move all the time I just pull up so I drive around all the time but a lot of people don't they just stay here until they get a yellow sticker the sheriffs don't do anything until somebody calls to complain and and people do call and complain but not very often because they know that it doesn't matter the guy's just going to be one spot down so legally you can would be 72 hours a month correct that's total and and sleep in your mouth yeah that's legal that's legal yes okay and anywhere else can you sleep in your van and somewhere like in San Francisco or in other places can you I'm not sure I think it's come down I think the courts have all decided that it's completely legal to sleep in your vehicle because if you're homeless what you have to sleep under it I mean you have to go sleep in a park bench and leave your car alone it doesn't make any sense and uh some guy that was homeless uh he was waiting for his girlfriend who worked at a pizza place and he fell asleep in the car that he lives in but he was waiting for her to get off work so that where's the line he was just waiting for her to get off work it's a car it's registered it's in illegal space so that's where everything got cloudy and different cities have been had this issue in there it is a problem for the cities because all the people are using the services you don't know where their poop's going so it's an issue so there's people that conform there's people that just they don't care they're drug addicts and whatever so there's two sets out here there's two sets everywhere in every Community there's people that are you know trying to live a decent life and choose this and there are people that ended up here but still throwing a little bit decent life and then there's the drug addicts when I first bought my houses seemed ridiculous unattainable and then it got cheap as time went on and then I lost it due to whatever you know all kinds of situations and circumstances and now I can't even imagine trying to jump through the Hoops to even rent an apartment anymore I just to pay that much money to be someplace I really don't want to be doesn't make sense I'm here so so you can walk to the beach I mean everything's here so for you it's partly a choice now it's completely a choice absolutely but if at one point you did lose I had a house in there I never would have picked this hell no never but it's awesome it's absolutely awesome if I could go back and you'd give me my house and say you know what the next year is free on mortgage but after that you go back to your you know 1600 a month payment I wouldn't take it I wouldn't even take the house back just because that house owned meat I worked for it to pay for it all week long and then on the weekend I worked on it it was ridiculous half the things in the house were to take care of the house vacuum cleaners ladders you know all this crap to take care of the house yeah it's kind of strange so then you bought an RV or how did how did the I just got this one 3 500 bucks 35 000 miles it's a 1992 it'll last it'll drive longer than I need it to the body's gonna fall off but because of the water damage I can fix that it won't continue but the water damage made it affordable for me to use as a disposable RV I don't have to worry about hurting it or depreciation anything like that sorry the very back corner and then there's your toilet uh well I just got this thing so I haven't really right now stuff's in there come on stop buddy this is the bed obviously okay refrigerator it's not on yet I gotta get gas and stuff okay I mean I just got this like a week ago so far everything works I haven't put gas in it yet propane gas but the Water Works oh yeah and this works wow I have a generator it works I'm gonna get solar so I don't have to use a generator the solar will power everything I need I mean I have no bills I have a 60 Bill a month for unlimited Wi-Fi this right here is a router this thing can hook up 15 devices of any kind yeah 60 bucks a month that's it now you don't need a cell phone you don't need anything you know we were just talking to a guy in town and he was saying that there's some people who are starting to talk in town about what to do about all the people parked here it's another yeah that happens all the time it does yeah there is a certain amount of Tolerance but balliness has always been in a constant state of flux in that all these houses over here probably seven out of 10 are owned by people that are using them for bed and breakfast now so they're out of town people that are using them as Investments and they care about their property value obviously all homeowners would but most people that come to Bolinas know what bellinis is and they wouldn't buy a house here if they didn't want them they are accepting of the unusual people and culture and actually enjoy it and you know which is part of the fabric yeah exactly and it is but those people you know once they're looking at Investments if they get one bad review on Yelp they're oh my God we've got to get rid of all these homeless people they're ruining our business and it's not I mean they're going to keep renting their place out and these people have been here they'll be here like right now this is an unincorporated City but they're trying to pass something where if you don't have an address here on this street you can't park your vehicle here which would be ridiculous because it's this is not a city there's no jurisdiction there's no government in place that has authority to do so there's no Police Department here there's nothing everything reverts back to County all of us we know that the people that have trash around their vehicles any possessions outside of their vehicle so that that's a problem because it just looks bad and it looks like you're moving in you're not ready to go you're not going anywhere it's just right you know there's a guy down there with a broken surfboard and a refrigerator and he lives in a car not gonna people lose their minds out here so you think that people should be a little more respectful of the common space yeah but then again a lot of the people that are here are here because there is something wrong with them and there's no place for them to go it's not like you can't lock them up in the crazy bin because they don't belong there so they're here and what do you do with them but that's that's what upsets these people and then you know you gotta they don't really have compassion for the humans that have no place to go there are some kind of hostile crazy people but what do you do yeah yeah they still you know they're not they don't belong in prison they don't belong in a psych ward so they're here with us thank you this town is just bizarre that it's left alone yeah every once in a while there's a flood of people that come through that when that happens and they start getting chased out the sheriff's starts running them out but there's really nothing they can do as long as they're already Parts legally and behaves the van dwellers are everywhere and so there's this blue van there right there's a blue spinner van you can see there's solar panels on the roof and there's a little ventilation unit and you see these all over the city and these are basically homes there's all these different versions of home like if you ask the people who are living in that Sprint around they're not going to say they're homeless they're like no stay home you know I have a job I work this is where I live because it's just insane to try to pay crazy rents here and very often their jobs are mobile so they might be in one place for a few weeks or a month and they'll be someplace else I've seen families living in these you know like you can see through the windows that they're like they're making dinner and they're sitting down to the table and stuff and this basically what I did when I was a kid too it's a structural problem you can generally get a loan for a 50 or 60 000 new Sprinter van where you can't qualify for an apartment so there's that weird like you know what institutional Finance mechanisms allow you to enter one thing but not another but then there's the people who are like you know you're gonna you're gonna spend six hundred dollars on some really sad old Winnebago that's held together with tape and that limits where you can park it right and then when it fails you have to pay to repair it and you don't always have the money for that so you have to park it in a place where it can stay for long periods of time as you're trying to get it to run again I just moved here I've only been here about three weeks are you looking for work are you traveling um in what uh Tech and so rents are too much oh yeah obviously I don't have a job yet but you know it's so great and so it's so fun you know I might just keep doing it after I get a job save money it is fun it's not hard well it's a lot more work there's just a lot more like daily things I have to do you know take apart my bed and put it together a drive first thing in the morning somewhere where I can park it find a bathroom it's just more things you have to think about the more things you have to do more safety concerns yeah so I was sleeping I was over in Alameda and someone came and checked the lock of my door like try like to see if it was unlocked at three in the morning it took me a while to get back to sleep for that one so there's just this is an underlying you know insecurity that comes with it but did you where do you move uh Portland okay and so you came [Music] knowing that the idea is that they're going to work here that's impressive it smells great I mean I didn't have to come to San Francisco but it is like the tech center of the world what do you do hash browns oh yes potatoes just High wages and the full deal do you think you'll be able to get work I haven't started looking yet but I've been training myself for the last year in self-study so I'm just about at the point where I'm ready yeah the bed is what this table like moves down here and then these cushions you know here and sleep that way okay and then this can pull out and can be another bed so it can sleep four people but I just use that as storage yeah and it's got a back compartment area where I put more of my gear and stuff did you buy it for this trip or did you have it I had it yeah okay so I've lived out of it before it was I have okay seven years ago oh this is my first rodeo I'm familiar with the lifestyle [Music] any of the refrigerator does it work yeah oh yeah probably original from the 80s early 80s just like everything so you have internet connection yeah actually I I found out the park here where I'm staying like has free Wi-fi so I can study and stuff in an event but you can plug in yeah I've got a little inverter here I bust this out sometimes just charge my laptop or uh my phone it's got a little hose there for filling up the water tank I have to like you know go pirate water sometimes like there's like bottle water key so I can like pull up and uh you know steal water sometimes no way just off of like just like some faucet on the side of some building well you can also stand up which makes a big difference I think this Van's where you have to be Crotched in they're still livable oh yeah this is a very comfortable band this is a beautiful I mean the views here are credible yeah oh yeah it's beautiful here that's part of the reason I like it just being on the water and oh it's a little nicer and I used to be you know a little grungier myself and and I it's easier to get away with it now people see me like parking in front of their house and they're like okay he's probably you know he might be okay you know so I I can I can go under the radar a little bit more even though I I have a camper van and it's it's pretty clear you know that what's going on do you have any idea well Tech pays pretty well so I could yeah but it's still outrageous and you know I figure I could take that money and just save it the money that I would have spent on rent and just save it and come out way ahead you know I take my breakfast very seriously we gotta pull you know multiple courses you know there's a long historical precedent of not accepting this kind of Lifestyle but it doesn't really make sense in in the Modern Age you can't have like really high rents and people being dispossessed and at the same time making it illegal not to pay that rent right that that just that doesn't seem ethical to me [Music] we've been here long enough to know where and where not to be at what times so we uh like to mix it up and live here for well how long we haven't parked here for a long time a couple months months oh wow yeah okay they kicked us out so what happened oh well we were sitting up front um he was doing homework over here okay and I was sitting over here in driver's seat and the police came from the opposite side of the street and pulled over to our side and said hey you guys got a movie we've been getting too many phone calls that you guys been parking here and then so he recommended a place for us to stay in what do you just left he recommended ocean beach with all the other fanduelers so there are there are definitely places that the police will stay like that's acceptable and there's places that they want to kind of Shepherd everything too yeah right okay but I don't want to stay over there I like over here yeah we volunteer at this um four basis yeah what are you doing just doing the habitat for the the plants doing wheezing and mulching it's kind of you can make your community I mean your residents of San Francisco so you could do all the same things that you anyone else would do if you had an apartment yeah yeah pretty much that's what we got kicked out this is why and then every morning we'll open the curtains and we'll see Golden Gate Bridge I've been living in Northeast for 17 18 years I refuse to pay rent basically I refused to make somebody else reach and if I don't like the neighborhood they're just starting with me how long have you been to San Francisco 35 years have you noticed a change in number five people coming out in the rounds very much so I'll tell you that it's easily easily eighty percent people that start living in RVs and vans and all that easy and I mean they're perfect they're people there's a guy who come soon in these electrical engineer and a contractor electrical contractor you got doctors they're doing it everything from all walks of life people paid what five six million dollars to have this View I get it for free but we have to respect this place we get it for free every morning I go I clean the beach I pick up all the garbage from the beach and all that because I I don't know if you've been like uh Southern Market there's a different kind of community that lives those are more um questionable and people that will uh uh profit on other people's misery these they live in a Visa intentional but it's totally different type of people over there it's survival over there is the jungle and if you go over there it's 180 degrees from us and Americans want to blame the individual because well obviously you're just lazy you're stupid you made poor decisions it's not that that's not always true it's just that how hard is it to correct after you've screwed up or how much of it was imposed on you and if I lived in a tent under the freeway I would have vodka for breakfast every morning too I really would because like what else are you gonna do so it's not just like you have to find a job but then you need first month's rent you need a security deposit you need to get the utilities connected you need to pass a credit test well how do you do any of those things starting at nothing and it's it's really hard when you see people living on the street you could say they're alcoholic they're drug addicts they're schizophrenic there's all the long list of reasons why they're living on the street but how do they stop living on the street right and how many of them started out being hard-working decent normal people who are trying to pay all their bills on a minimum wage salary when the price of the real estate just kept going up exponentially San Francisco used to have lots of naturally occurring market rate affordable housing they were old apartment buildings that were run down in bad neighborhoods and very often you could rent a room you didn't get an apartment you rented a room and there was a shared bathroom down the hall and there was no kitchen you would go out into the City and you'd have your eat meals out at a canteen or something and the city made a conscious decision decades ago to remove them or to radically renovate them and to bring them up to a higher standard because the city said let's have better quality people more Economic Development let's tear those down and build hotels and Convention centers and pull in Revenue which is a reasonable thing for a city to want to do at the same time the cities were buying to improve their demographic and pull in businesses and tax revenue is that one fine the suburbs were figuring out how to make sure that only people above a certain economic level we're going to live there and so you had laws that said every piece of land had to be this big and every house had to be a minimum size and every house had to have a two-car garage and of this and of that it was a way of filtering out lower income people you couldn't say we don't want you to live here because we don't like who you are those are say anybody can live here if you can meet this basic price plan as the decades went on and more and more places were removed and the new Replacements were much more expensive it just meant that the options for people lower down were and I understand why people would do this it's a rational thing for a municipality to do why would you want to attract lower income people with less money who had more problems right when everybody did this for 50 60 years the end result is that there is no place for them to live and while that was going on we also had the the mental health situation where there was a point and time when Americans had asylums if you were really crazy if you had a serious mental illness there was a place that the government would keep you and these were not good places I'm not arguing that they were great they were pretty bad most of the time but there was a place that they were kept they were housed as bad as they were both conservatives and liberals combined to close them down so they got together and they said we're just going to shut down all of the the asylums and that's when the thousand points of light were supposed to step in the churches and the and all the you know non-profit organizations were going to soak up that and nobody ever did so when you look at people living in tents because where else they're gonna go [Applause] thank you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,044,408

Keywords: homelessness, homeless, encampments, san francisco, bolinas, vanlife, van dweller, rv dweller, podlife, pod home, homeless encampment, car home, johnny sanphillippo, rv village, legal vanlife parking, property values, housing shortgage

Id: b5XIljwl5hI

Length: 35min 15sec (2115 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023