(Un)housed in paradise: how the homeless can get off the street

uh in the city of Los Angeles right now we have somewhere between 70 and 100 000 people we don't know for sure how many people are homeless right now we have to get people inside because if we continue to allow the homeless population to grow continue to allow people on the streets to die to have mental illness unchecked to have addictions unchecked business will implode the neighborhoods will implode Public Safety will go away and our city will be crying out for help if we're not already all those people are living out of their campers some of them some have kids that go to school they cannot have a house so they have what they do they have to live in these things now about 60 of people we meet on the street put their hand up straight away and say hell yes I'm ready to do anything I want to get off the street there's another 20 or 25 percent of people who go you know what I actually don't need your help if the encampments are going away I'll get off the street myself and they'll do what's called self-resolve they have family they have friends they have a job they can actually break the cycle of homelessness to themselves now that misnomer that there's people on the street who don't want to come inside it's true there's probably about 10 to 15 percent of those people and they're the people who have been out there a long time they're the chronically homeless bigger amounts of mental health issues bigger amounts of addiction issues and it's going to be very expensive and very hard for us to get them in the first step where we are in the city of Los Angeles right now is getting that 60 to 70 percent of people who want to get off the street straight away foreign [Applause] so this site here is LA's first tiny home Village we absolutely go out into a catchment Zone which is somewhat about three and a half miles now the reason that's so important is if you're going to have a homeless shelter in your community you should see people coming off the street in your community you should see your neighborhood clean up likewise in Los Angeles there is such resistance to homeless shelters every time we open one of these sites we get the death threats and we get all of these sorts of things so it pushes a little bit of that back by being able to say you know what this is going to benefit your community and there's not going to be people coming from other parts of the city it's not going to create a magnet for the homeless coming to your neighborhood and the very first thing that's going to happen is we're going to go pick you up in our van we're going to bring you in and you're going to go through security we're going to lay everything that you own out here and we're going to go through it to make sure there's no drugs alcohol or weapons so as soon as you've gone through that you're going to come in and you're going to experience our tiny homes so it comes straight through here and we'll kind of show you what it's like to join our tiny home community so the very first thing you're going to do is come over to our hot showers here and you're going to have the longest hottest shower that you've ever had you're going to get a clean pair of underwear because that just makes you feel human again okay so you've got the shower on the left the toilet on the right and each and every one of our guests the very first thing that they're going to do is they're going to get a hot shower clean clothes clean underwear just so they can feel human now once you've had a hot shower the next bit of magic that we believe in is eating way too much food but you're going to sit over here and you're going to eat until you are completely full and you basically feel alive again we have laundry facilities here we're going to throw all your clothes in the laundry facility and then you're going to sit down with the real people who make magic now our case managers are the best people in the world because we believe people are pretty awesome in fact humans are incredible they'll overcome about 90 of everything in their lives but sometimes there's a big blockage whether it's mental health an addiction issue Trauma from past violence or maybe just a series of incredibly dumb choices so they're going to sit with a case manager they're going to work out what is it that's made the person homeless and keeping them there and then at that moment they're going to build a case plan for however long it takes so now you've got a case plan we're going to bring you into our tiny home Village we actually don't have any empty units at the moment but we'll sneak down and see if we can find somebody who wants to show them some money each of these units is housing either one or two people depending on whether you're an individual or a couple now one of the best things about this site is how each and every person personalizes the unit for themselves people making a home because there's some pride in ownership here can I film you yeah do you keep a nice place you keep it so neat yeah please what do you keep so you have like your closet here yeah it's my little wardrobe that yeah you know just you know just very simple very simple yeah do you feel like this is enough space you know what uh it is but maybe just a little bit but I mean I don't know me like personally after a shower your own shower yeah my old shower well it seems like you keep things neat so you maybe like your own real like particular you know certain things I'm real like oh no exactly no it seems like you have this place organized yeah I mean I'm organized so that's just you know my my person yeah how long were you without housing before you moved here you know what they it's a little weird one like yeah like for like 2014 I believe so you were seven years on the street about I mean really did you have a tent um you know what at the very end the buy got a tent yeah it's cool it feels good yeah yeah you can feel uh hard it's it's so there is some good insulation problems yeah there is and also the other thing is that there is some space you don't have the feeling it's probably like it's it's very high and when you want a table you use the tables outside or you I'll use uh here and do you do Sharon wash you know where you do your own wash yeah yeah of course okay yeah yeah it's not not hotel service here I'd be embarrassed you know wow yeah it's really your own house yeah yeah before finding this place how long were you on the streets or beyond the signs which is not have a house oh I didn't have a place so I went through a divorce and then I became homeless I met a friend and she had some tents up here by Chandler and then I sign up for here and here I am don't want to leave but I gotta leave but it's it's nice it's nice here you know you you have to get used to a curfew okay but you don't I've been in prison many times you know where I had to have a curfew you know I had to go inside myself you know so I wasn't used to it but I had to get used to it again you know what you do when you have to bed inside you you read you what you can come out you can come back up but you can't go out of the facility but you could if you had something to do you just sign out let them know and then you come back you know by six in the morning you have to come back and check back in yeah sign in and sign out you know be here for count you know in your meals or whatever yeah what time is the curfew the curfew is from 10 00 P.M to six in the morning bye baby yeah my other dog was stolen from me where does he sleep like you can shoot her here in this bed I've been up here because I was gonna sweep him off the floor this is my bed and then I have you know less stuff I'm gonna wash some stuff right now yeah my laundry I'm gonna do it right now I'm doing it right now yeah it's easy yeah yeah that's another thing you know you get to wash your stuff you don't have to be worried about what you're gonna wear the next day and stuff yeah because remember in the tent did you have a shower uh no we used to have to go to churches and stuff to take a shower yeah and was that kind of difficult yeah it was kind of difficult because you had to know what church is and what time you know to be there yeah so it was kind of rough and for meals for meals they would feed you at the church also yeah you watch it and now you have some food in here now yes I have plenty of food and coffee they Supply the air conditionings there already goes real cold yeah and then the heater we got a that's here built in already so that's pretty good you know to a place like this and you have a cooler and a heater that is really good that's 100 good yeah and then my son got me a TV yeah I mean I'm satisfied with this you know people have to ex you know if they want to meet if they're homeless a lot of people don't want to come to places like this no no the homeless people they say because um the check-in and check out and they're not used to you know people you know telling them what to do and what not to do you know I think that's not Freedom yeah they figure it's not part of freedom [Applause] I don't know I learned to accept it you know I had to accept it this is their play area you put them in there and you and chain them and they can just play with the other dogs or or yeah it's really an old Community yeah it's like a little community and a lot of people they don't want to separate from their pets so it's good meat right here on these benches right here yeah they serve the food right there by the office you don't always have your next meal you know when you're homeless you know and when I came here I was just like you know because I have everything here you know I think it you know I always tell them I don't want to go nowhere I don't care but that's not an option yeah no it's not yeah they want you on your feet and they want you to get it ready to go yeah yeah yeah I think that's a good message it's a message for me and it helps yeah I wake up to that every day yeah when I was using drugs you know they know people know I mean the facility knows just your reactions or whatever and then when I told them that I was ready to get clean and I was working on it they can tell they can tell and I can tell that they accept me and they they were happy to hear that and they know when and they started talking to me they always talk to me but it was more conversation more you know hi how you doing and glad to see you're going going the right way yeah stuff like that so it's good to hear that what's that is that while you're here before it knows when I was here when you're here yeah was this a place that felt like you finally could say exactly it was because I can look forward to a place of my own yeah and that's good because it's hard to get a place these days it's hard and pay that rent yeah yeah thank you guys for stopping by yeah I really appreciate that whenever you guys want to stop by yeah well hopefully you'll have your own little house I know huh yeah hopefully there used to be that 85 percent of our just less than four years ago 85 percent of our houseless people were from this city we also had no no clear idea of how many people were homeless but it was considered to be between 3 000 and 6 000 depending on who you were talking to but since the acceleration of the economic disparity people have been coming from the interior of the country where it's oftentimes way too hot or way too cold for people to be able to survive and more and more people have been just thrown out of their housing so there's thousands more people Millions more people on the west coast who I would say who are homeless than ever before it doesn't have to be like people see most of the time where people are just stumbling around with filth all around them and strung out on drugs one of the things that is a virtue of our city is that we have these DIY models where people can actually be stable on a piece of land and work with other people we have all these permutations on the idea of people being able to self-organize and kind of not just organize a shelter but actually organize to make decisions together and to keep each other safe to keep each other secure to make sure everybody is fed and everybody has access to health so dignity Village was unprecedented the first of what it is but it's informed by you know all kinds of initiatives so there's this essential template and the basic self-governing guidelines are always the same the conditions for being there like you know no violence no drugs no theft no continuous disruption things like that basic agreements and you can see as we approach dignity you can see that there are a lot of people out here who are kind of close to the Village and probably get some services from the village but what we're seeing right now is the result of the inaction of the current mayor because we now have a model that would serve all of these people and the difference between dignity Village and what we just saw in the street is just simply the desire to do anything yeah we can park in there I think about five years ago the mayor that we had been just declared as of winter in like four months all of the women will be off the street and he accomplished that and then he said all of the veterans will be off the street next and he accomplished that that was just kind of beautiful and sickening too like wow so this is how easy it is just to decide to do something of course they have to declare a state of emergency so that they can wave building and planning codes temporarily but you know there's all these buildings out there that are just sitting there or vacant spaces and all people really need is a space to lay down a bed roll and a place to go to the bathroom and get water hi I'm Mark I called you earlier for Lisa here give me just a minute okay unit is quite different so the idea is that there's lots of experimentation yeah this one happens to be the gate house but there are five other straw clay structures here in the village and most everything's made out of recycled materials and here is the president of the village hi Lisa how are you doing I just got back from the Britain rafting trip with most of the village so I've never been rafting before in my life and I've lived on the Rogue River for years oh wow I'm going to kind of run back home because my shoes are well I lost one up on the trip so let me go home grab a pair of shoes so I can casually walk with you okay thank you okay so you you need a place for security so this is their Gate House you need an administrative office where people can organize and store things make decisions and lately to have computers you need commercial spaces and so these buildings here receive donations they process them they put them on eBay to sell them so if there are donations you know if they have more donations than they actually need for themselves then they can use it as a resource to you know pay bills or something so as you move around the village you see gathering places everywhere this building it's the great common house of the community so it's big enough for a large amount of the village to be able to be together to stay warm in the winter time and also to make decisions together there's you know facility for showering there's a facility for cooking everybody has places to live yeah we have people that don't ever want to move out we are to our knowledge dealing City sanctions self-supporting self-governing homeless community in North America but 75 a month per person how can anybody go wrong with that you have a roof over your head you have a door you can lock you're safe your family your pets cannot be with you and we become a family [Laughter] you pay all of our own bills the only thing that's branded to us is the land that we're on and it was the least composting site so how much does that will we cost in the other general population and that's what I love and the fact that we don't have a mortgage we tried a lot of different solutions and in fact dignity had a nomadic phase of more than a year moving from site to site very strategically sometimes arriving on sites to set up their Village their ephemeral nomadic Village in a way where they chose the site to be polarizing they wanted to bring the city council to the conversation and they were upsetting so many wealthy people whose neighborhoods they were going into that the city council finally had to ascent and say okay fine we'll talk we'll find you a site the village is two acres just below two acres how many people 65 we can have up to 60 we tend to run about 52 to 55. how long have you been here 11 years wow and so you live on site yes yeah and where were you living before I was out on the streets for two years with my husband who lives with me here he's a man of my dreams he went through schizophrenia he finally got here got on meds got off meds got on meds he's now been off meds for seven years and he's got it under control and it's because of being safe here but it works is everyone welcome as long as you're over the age of 18 and homeless we'll pitch you on our wait list and eventually you'll get in here long waitlist but probably four maybe five on waitlist right now okay and how long do people usually stay probably three to four years and some of those cases uh like it took a couple years for Scott to get better you know with his head so it takes a while for some of that to happen and then for us to heal some of these tiny homes when you look around you see an incredible diversity of ways that people actually create shelter some of them have solar panels some of them have water catchment everyone's kind of collecting stuff around them and doing their projects obviously this person is passionate about bikes you know this person has some sort of equipment that they might be using in some sort of job a lot of these people maybe most of the people here at the Village actually do work for a living but in the American reality they can't quite make enough to pay for living in a conventional circumstance so this helps people you know not to fall through the cracks of the society I think some people are saying these are homeless people what are you what are you talking about they're broken and homeless people are the first ones to admit that they have challenges but they also everyone thrives when they have responsibility this place has had for long periods of time the lowest crime rate per capita in the city and the highest rate of community participation but part of what makes it happen is this kind of model where dignity Village will take trees that are cut down in the urban environment instead of having them just thrown into the dump or mulched instead dignity Cuts up these these trees and then Seasons them to then sell them to portlanders to then meet their fuel needs so here are people that have all kinds of skills and talents and they can certainly contribute to meeting their own need one of the advantages of this place which I think hasn't been thought about enough and can't be overstated is that this these people are able to be here without the burden of a mortgage so they're able to start at a different Baseline than other people in order to create a better life for themselves so this model is almost like what you might call a void in The Matrix because it just really plays by different rules while working with really almost no budget at all they're for several years we had the lowest crime rate in this neighborhood with 33rd what we call 33rd Estates out there with our bees I don't think we're still at the lowest crime rate anymore but we didn't count them we would be yeah because we take care of our own there's a thief here if there's somebody who's violent they get kicked out and we make that choice we use a village so it helps yeah take care of our own police our own and you know the old phrase We Don't in your own backyard well we try to make sure of that I transplanted myself here from Florida about three weeks ago I didn't find out until after I got here I mean I thought I did my preparing you know like for about a year and a half I planned you know mentally prepared for this and I did whatever I could to plan and I saved but there's so many catch-22s with the way they run the system it's like they don't want people moving here unless you have like a ton of connections and money they say you need a an ID and proof of work to get a job but some jobs won't well not over the floor like they all want a California ID and they all want a proof of work so but some jobs won't let you won't hire you unless you have California ID so it's like it was like I kept hitting brick walls everywhere it's about 10 years ago at that time in L.A there's a law you could not sleep in your car your vehicle so we had to drop it in about four and a half years ago the law was changed and we started up again we have churches we have two synagogue or three synagogues we have a city locks County Lots there's a lot of vacant Lots in the city is that the basic idea oh there are well that's not necessarily vacant you use like this they during the day it's used and at night they let us use it this is the first location we've opened so the Rector she's the first person that along with her congregation they came to us wanting to be the first safe parking lot in Los Angeles and they are people living in their vehicles are one step above the people living on the streets it's not comfortable it is not something you want to do for the rest of your life yeah oh here okay the objective is to provide 12 hours of safe sleep for someone so they can face the next day and eventually hopefully within a couple of months find some living quarters I did not know until after I got here that they banned people from sleeping in their vehicles here and then I kept looking and searching and I'm like okay there's the green lines of okay zones but then they didn't renew those so I'm like where where can I go now and then I found this there were green streets yeah and there still are but they made them fewer yeah like I looked on the website at first and the the the the the green zones that just they they didn't renew them they're like June was when they cut it off and that was right when I got here like it was July 7th so they're allowed to park there at night yeah but like the like she said they're they're shrinking but the lap I was looking at they said that they didn't renew them and so I was like looking on online why don't you find safe parking I I found the the safe parking website and we give each person a plaque placard to hang on the rear view mirror that has a number on it yeah we uh we each get one of these once we're official so that means you can keep have you been back a few times oh I've been here uh solid almost two weeks now seems a lot yeah yeah I came here uh I was invited to this particular lot and I've been coming back here yeah so where are you during the day I mean I usually go to Valencia so I mean I drive there and go to the library because it's like there's free parking and it's safe and it's quiet and it's you know it's easy to get around up there so that's where I do to work and look to find work so I don't have a bed I mean I just have like a couple pillows in the back but I don't have like a whole lot but I move all this stuff out of the way so I can like sleep on the pillows at night yeah this is most of the stuff I came here from Florida with and then to just put it off to the side yeah back there is it comfortable enough it's comfortable enough I have these side windows here they they open up to a screen I can get air in when I close this at night so I'm nice and secure so and so do you did you expect to come and sleep in your car when you okay I am mentally prepared for it if I had to I was kind of hoping I didn't know there was going to be so many like regulations and catch 22s put in place you know like need California need proof of work need vehicle plates or like you know need registration you know vehicle registration need smog test and it was like so many of these little things and it's like I didn't find that out until after I got here and it's like I was looking all the sublets and they were all asking California ID you know proof of work and it's like and yet you can't some jobs you can't get without California AP so it's like how am I supposed to do that this is the basketball team right oh yeah but that's part of the local sharing it but interfering with the neighborhood in fact we're we're in it we're part of the neighborhood people in general will think that it's something that I don't want it in my neighborhood so what we don't want to do is have people say not in my backyard well most of my writing stuff is right in my uh right in my old briefcase here I got my my computer I got my notebook I have my journal the community that comes through here they all come from like different walks of life and they're all really really nice people just in a point in their life where they're just kind of down on their luck but we're all just trying to survive a temporary point in our lives we're just trying to get through this and all we have left is our cars so I mean this is giving us an opportunity to sleep at night and not worry about needing a duck cops or get evade parking tickets or trying to sneak into some place to sleep and not get caught you know we have peace of mind here while we're trying to just get our lives back on track just my you know uh some of them stories based on the experiences so I went to the Arleta DMV completely getting my California plates for my truck I am so damn close to being a full Resident I just need the driver's ID I attempted to pass the written test but failed three times so I applied again it must be noted from my anxiety that the entirety of the time I spent that it felt that some onlooker in a black sedan was staring at my efforts with the front plate perhaps they thought I was some Ruffian and a polo ripping off some poor Soul's plates mind your own business I could hear them in my head begging the question don't you have a driveway in the expensive home to do that shut up I'm a hobo at the end of the world a camping tourist I'm still one of your despite appearances now I just need that license then you can get work for Postmates till I hear back from USC for that Union steward position Napoleon Hill don't fail me now so um yeah [Music] big wow that's my favorite Style do you think there's a place for these sort of like informal housing and making you know American Favela is what you're asking for yeah right so I I noticed this in Maui in Hawaii the smallest Shack on Maui in Hawaii is eight hundred thousand dollars and yet there's cleaning ladies and gardeners and the hotel where do they live right like how do they make those numbers work and then you discover well there's in every town in every County there's a landfill there's a power plant there's a sewage treatment plant and it's rich people you don't like living there it's like the ordinary homes you just pack a lot of people into them so they're technically single family homes but they actually are de facto multi-family homes every room is the bedroom you put bunk beds in the garage is the studio apartment that's the de facto that's sub Rose that's the ad hoc but if the authorities really crack down on them there'd be a problem because then all those businesses couldn't function without them I mean everywhere we've gone this summer we've seen Vans and Tents and tons of just informal settlements it's happening yeah here's the hopeful version we have the same exact problem in the 1930s they were the Hoovervilles who revealed you know Hoover was the president during the Great Depression the early part of the depression before Roosevelt he was there when the crash happened in 29 and people were living in tents large numbers of people and there was this huge gap between how much you could earn as a job and what it costs to find a place to live we solve those problems it took 20 years it took Roosevelt's programs it took the war took all these new programs to come in and the programs that we have now 30-year mortgages backed by the federal government uh you know zero interest loans or all that they were the solutions to the last set of problems that have now become the new problems so it's time for new institutions I don't know what they'll be but there will come all right [Applause]

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 521,306

Keywords: homelessness, homeless, communitecture, place maker, mark blakeman, encampments, los angeles, dignity village, portland, safe parking, ira and pat cohen, safe parking la, hope of the valley, chandler homeless village, san francisco, vanlife, van dweller, rv dweller, homeless encampment, car home, johnny sanphillippo, legal vanlife parking, property values, housing shortgage, former homeless

Id: 0I-1NXEpCc4

Length: 34min 38sec (2078 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2023