Okay, so a question that I get asked a lot when I talk to people who come to visit LA for the first time is why are there so many homeless people? Or do they say something like the homeless problem in LA is out of control? So I figured out making a video to talk people through the history of homelessness in LA. For starters, the way we frame this topic is important for understanding. Los Angeles doesn't have a homeless problem. The largest city in SoCal has people who can't afford homes, which is an issue. The issue being that they can't afford to live in homes, the people themselves are not the issue. A lot of factors contribute to Los Angeles having become the homeless capital of the United States as dubbed by HUD in 1984. One of the most popular reasons is Skid Row. So why don't we talk about it? So how did Skid Row come to be? In one of America's largest cities, you have a homeless encampment that comprises the majority of the downtown area. Oh my God, we're driving past homeless people and we are not seeing them! In the 1800s, Skid Row was an area of Los Angeles where poor white men who came to the city looking for seasonal work went to find affordable housing. This meant living in cheap apartments, flop houses, were building your own shanty accommodation. This was not well received by the government at the time who saw Skid Row as a threat to the values of home ownership and kind of a nuisance. Skid Row residents were commonly arrested and put in jail. By 1905, 98% of Los Angeles' inmates were white males arrested for vacancy-related crimes, the majority of which in connection to living on the streets. There was a concerted effort to turn away new suspected low-class migrants in addition to the jailing of the city's current population of unhoused individuals. This early 20th century cracking down on Skid Row led poor white males to move into lower-class minority communities where cheap barely livable accommodations was the norm at the time. This of course allowed city administrators to pass the buck on taking any responsibility for the economic woes of the time, blaming ignorance and dirty migrants who officials claimed were not accustomed to American standards of living for unsanitary and crowded conditions in the city. By 1970, Skid Row became the center of homeless policy in Los Angeles, with it being the home to cheap places to live, social services and organizations directed at helping the unhoused. However, a decade long ongoing effort to quote-unquote clean up Skid Row threatened the existence of the safe haven for many in need. The plan was of course rooted in the desire of the city to create an economically thriving business district in downtown Los Angeles that they called the CBD or the Central Business District. However, a plan by activist to save Skid Row and preserve it as the hub for help for low-income unhoused individuals succeeded and by 1976, the plan for essential business district in Los Angeles was altered. The Skid Row Blue Book argued that if Skid Row was destroyed, Los Angeles would have many smaller Skid Row's to contend with all over the city, hurting investor confidence. This argument worked and the city established a physical boundary around the neighborhood which officially established the Skid Row territory for the first time. Physical barriers were also put up by LAPD to deter Skid Row residents from wandering outside of the safe zone. Rising housing costs in the late 70s and 1980s led to massive growth in the amount of unhoused individuals living on Skid Row. State programs like GR became mired in corruption as policies to help homeless that required them to provide a home address and government identification meant that most unhoused people weren't even eligible to receive the assistance created by the California government for them. By 1990, the unhoused population in the city had doubled twice over while also shifting from being primarily white male to being mostly black and Hispanic. When I was born in July 1987, a lawsuit was filed challenging Los Angeles County's handling of its obligations to provide assistance to low income residents in need. The lawyers claimed that county officials established an annual quota of GR recipients and implemented administrative procedures to keep the caseload within that limit. The case was settled in 1991 and LA County agreed to increase GR and ease unfair restrictions. At the end of 1993, the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority was established to help better integrate these programs. As we moved into the 21st century, Los Angeles County reverted to their initial strategy for policing the unhoused from over 100 years prior. Incarceration and homeless sweeps became the norm. Very little was being effectively done to actually keep people from becoming unhoused in the first place. As property values and the cost of rents soared, the amount of homeless people in Los Angeles grows accordingly. There was once again a renewed effort in the early 2000s to clean up Skid Row. This effort was brought on in large part by the gentrification of downtown due to new zoning laws that allowed for an influx of new, less than affordable housing to be developed in the area. The city brought in the controversial police chief William Brenton of New York and Boston fame. He came to LA with his broken windows policy, which is information for addition out tough punishments for minor crimes. Broken windows is the belief that visible minor crimes creates an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. So by stamping out minor crimes, you're also preventing serious crimes from occurring. It's unclear if Brenton's policy was successful in Los Angeles because there are still a lot of issues with crime in the city, and the homeless population has continued to skyrocket. We need to refund police, not defund, that we're going to need a lot more money to retrain, to deal with bias, to deal with the homeless, to deal with the emotionally disturbed. As the city of Los Angeles continues to search for new strategies to help his unhoused residents rise up out of poverty, the only thing that is for sure is that the strategies implemented in the past have all failed spectacularly, and thus, Skid Row remains essential hub in Southern California for the unhoused to get the help that they need. Housing is a basic human right, and until we have policies that reflect that, we will continue to require policies that support a growing unhoused population in the city. Thank you, much respects, and I'll see y'all next time.