 Hello? Hello? Hello? This is my first public speaking, not a burning man, so it's weird that none of you are wearing leather underwear. No, no, it is weird. Craction, it's weird, none of you are wearing visible leather underwear. And before starting, I wanted to thank everyone for being here, all the people who are organizing the event, but also, you know, just everybody for listening and participating. I think it's awesome. I want to think this tree, I find its energy to be fantastic, and I think it kind of serves as a nexus of all of us to speak and to listen. So, I'm a social worker. I work for the County of Los Angeles. I work in the busiest mental health clinic. So I work for the Department of Mental Health. It's called Downtown Mental Health. It's in Skid Row on Maple and Fifth. I've been there almost a year before that. I was in what's called an FSP. It's people who are solo functioning. They don't, that is my friendly face. You were mine. It's for people who are solo functioning that, you know, they don't just really go to a clinic. So the social worker goes out to them and, you know, you take them to the bank or the library or you just hang out with them. Before that, I worked in a mental health jail, Twin Towers. It was the best experience. I highly recommend working in mental health jails. There's a lot of God there. So I wanted to start, I'm going to try this without my notes, which means I'll probably leave out some good stuff. I wanted to start with Skid Row and how it got to be the way it is. History of Los Angeles and Skid Row. So first of all, what is Skid Row? It's a shitty neighborhood. It's downed very specifically, actually exactly, 3rd Street, 7th Street on the north and south parameters in Downtown LA. To the west, it used to be Los Angeles. Now it's main one block over. And to the east, Alameda. I don't know exactly how big that is, but it's, I feel like it's about a mile by maybe a mile and a half or two. Population is, you know, it's very hard to sense this any area, but that's the hardest of all. Roughly 10,000. 5,000 live in very tiny rooms. Another 2,500 are sleeping in shelters. So they're homeless, but with shelter, another 2,500 on the streets. So how did Skid Row get to be this way? When the railroad got to Los Angeles, it terminated pretty close to where Skid Row is. There was a lot of agriculture in what is now East Los Angeles, so you had a lot of single males coming in for seasonal work, which meant that you had a lot of single resident occupancy hotel rooms that were maybe about as big as the dusty patch here, you know, in between me and the front row. And they were coming in, making a little bit of money and leaving. And that created a lot of prostitution, drugs, drinking, unemployment. Hindsight is 2020, but if you were going back to the 1870s and you kind of wondered where the Skid Row of Los Angeles would show up, it would show up near where the railroad tracks end. It's a little bit like how a lot of docks in port cities end up having lousy neighborhoods. I've lived in LA, Frisco, New York, and Chicago. There's nothing like Skid Row and any of the others. So the rooms get built, and about 100 years ago, industrial revolution only exacerbated everything I talked about, because now you have full-time industry in East LA, which is still largely like that, a lot of factories and whatnot. And you have even more people coming in through the railroads, more goods, and more lack of stability. By the 50s, you have a lot of buildings that are about 80 years old, and the city realizes you have this whole huge area generating very little income. A lot of crime and the buildings are all bad, so they demolished a bunch of them, so homelessness went up. And then in the 60s, you have the Vietnam War and the drug culture, and homelessness really skyrocketed. You have the 70s in Nixon. Things got worse with housing. And then with Reagan in the 80s, you had two things going on. One, huge cuts in social spending, and the other is this thing called the institutionalization, when they started cutting funding to what you would call mental hospitals, and people were put on the streets, thus creating the clusterfuck that is Skid Row. And I'm not cursing to be informal. I'm cursing to emphasize what I really think of the situation, not the people, but the policies that have created it. So one thing I want to stress, and this is my opinion, but Skid Row is not a malfunction, it's a function. It's not a policy failure, it's a policy success. I think Skid Row has been created and maintained extremely well. And I think the policies that have put it in place have been very effective and they spend a lot of money to keep it just the way it is. So I just want to make sure. Ah, yes. So I wanted to talk to you about just a few statistics, just to keep things a little bit clear. I did the history. LA County is pretty big, as we all know. Three percent of the county's homelessness is in Skid Row, which doesn't sound like that much. But Skid Row only has one 10,000th of a percent of the land of the county. So, proportionally speaking, Skid Row has 30,000 times as much poverty concentrated and chronic homelessness concentrated as any comparable area. And there's nothing like it. It's the most policed neighborhood in the country. And based on some research that I got to do with some other shelters, it's the most policed neighborhood in the world outside of Iraq. And Iraq is only policed at heavily because of other American tax dollars. Half the people there that are homeless are what's called chronically homeless, meaning they've been homeless for over a year. And or they carry a mental illness. And or they carry a drug addiction, which I will be talking about. Recent increase in the last 10 or 15 years in Skid Row, you see women and children. There are families there. Lots of theories about why that is. The best theory I've heard on that is that in 30 years ago, when women were getting beaten at home, they got beaten at home. Nowadays, some of the women who are suffering domestic violence say enough's enough and they leave, which is good. The kids tend to go with them, which is probably good. And now you have a lot of women and children who are homeless in Skid Row, which is not good. Is there anything else I needed to say that I didn't memorize? Yes, there is. I wanted to just throw out just a few more stats, just to put in perspective where some money is going, which I'll be touching on later. So recently, not that recently, even a couple of years ago, V.I. Rygosa did this SCI, the Safer City Initiative, which meant I'm going to put a lot of money into a lot of cops into Skid Row. And this will prove I'm good. So even just recently, they added another 50 cops to Skid Row because God knows they need more cops there. And that costs about $6 million a year, not from the county, but the city budget. So proportionally, that's a lot higher. This is an interesting statistic because the city is spending on low income housing for homeless people, $5.7 million. And a lot of people are pissed off about that. And in Mayday and Skid Row and Purging Square and everywhere, I was seeing all kinds of signs about this. That's about the gist for that. One thing I wanted to consider is a little social theory. I was a philosophy major in college. I read Max Weber, the father of sociology. Max Weber says in the politics of vocation, and it's one of the deepest statements I've ever heard. He says power, happiness, all these things that people are trying for, they're conserved quantities. And what that means is if you're in a society, there's only so much happiness to go around, just like there's so many dollars or pineapples or avocado trees to go around. So if there are some people who have lots and lots and lots of power and lots and lots of happiness, there's someone else who has very little. So it's not just about dollars, right? It's not just about if there's somebody rich in Beverly Hills, there's going to be 100 poor people in Skid Row or wherever. If there's someone very happy who has all their dreams fulfilled in a zero sum society, there's going to be a lot of people without. This floored me when I read this, I think when I was 18, and it continues to form me to this day. Skid Row, how do you get there? Nobody knows, because almost no one is born there. Most common demographic for Skid Row is an African American male, probably from South LA. There are three primary paths, and they overlap significantly, so I'm not speaking of them as discrete entities, but kind of like a, kind of like a Venn diagram, but with three circles. Back to the microphone. The three circles are poverty, which you can interpret not just as lack of money, but lack of lots of things, mental health issues, and drug addiction. My clinic is technically speaking for the mentally ill, but if you're doing this in Skid Row, there's no way you separate, there's no way you separate mental health from poverty and from drug addiction. They're called co-occurring disorders. If your diagnosis is, you know, for example, maybe you're bipolar, so maybe you're self-medicating, you're drinking when you're manic, you're smoking cracker, snorting crystal meth when you're depressed. It's called a co-occurring disorder, dual diagnosis, comorbidity. Another path, as we said, is poverty, and what we're seeing now that there's research is there's multi-generational poverty. Something to consider is a lot of people think, you know, ah, well, you know, I chose to go to college. Ah, he must have chosen to be a bum. And one thing that I, correct, he's shaking is that's the right answer. One thing that I used to say a lot, particularly when I was working in Twin Towers in the mental health jail is if I would say to a certain patient of mine, you know, if you switched us at birth, I'd probably, you know, I'd grown up in your neighborhood, I would be the inmate and you would be my social worker. So you think, you know, I chose to go to college, I chose to go to social work school, I chose this, I chose that. I mean, I didn't choose the freckles on my arms. And I think it's not as separate as one would think. I mean, for me, me going to college was probably guaranteed around the time I was in the womb. Not really. I mean, you know, not a wealthy white kid, but lots of books in the home, I was not abused. One of my parents had a college education, grew up in a first world nation, relatively low crime rate, I'm going to college, you know, and if I instead of growing up in North Hollywood, they grew up in Compton. And I'm not trying to stereotype, I'm trying to declare a kind of sociological pattern, you know, a lack of a two family household. And I'm not saying that's the only way I'm saying these are things that facilitate, you know, the clear and easy road. Perhaps you don't know many adults who have health insurance or college degrees, violence, crime, and so on. Your high school rate is, graduation rate is pretty low. It's going to be a lot harder to go to college, a lot harder. So that's another factor to consider. It's not that people sort of grow up and say, I want to be poor, I want to be rich, as much as society kind of nudges you along to the point when you're 18, all of a sudden society is conspiring to get you to be poorer rich. I have a case load of about 200 patients. Can I do this without? Would this be okay? All right. I would feel a little better. If you can't hear, please let me know. I'm feeling a little Pink Floyd-y up here. That's better. You have great voice, by the way. Why, thank you. So a couple of patients. So just to give a perspective of what people are dealing with and how they end up in Skid Row, one of my most interesting patients, woman, mother, former drug addict. She had a father. The father was sexually, physically, and emotionally abusing herself. Several siblings and the mom. When she was young and still prepubescent, one day she picked up a golf club and beat the shit out of her father to defend her family. And when the father came to and became conscious, she kicked him out of the house. And this was the way that she stopped the kind of abuse that had to go on. Now this is probably the most optimistic story I can say to begin with, but of course she ended up having some severe drug addictions in her life that didn't end until she almost died in a car accident. And it was the car accident that got her to kind of see what was going on in her life because she was in a coma, had to learn to walk and talk again, and so on. It's sometimes these extremes of what I would call karma and what I talk a lot about with my patients. Because some of my job is psychotherapy and some of it is case management. So psychotherapy is not just telling me about Cio Faso, but actually trying to work out, you know, what's going on with your life, what are you heading towards? Why do you think you go back to drugs? Why do you think you're not going back to drugs? Now that you're not doing drugs, you get to deal with all the reasons you went into drugs to begin with, which is sort of the most interesting part of therapy in that neighborhood for me. Case management is more like trying to help people get housing, linking them up to alcoholics anonymous, getting them a bus pass, getting them a free phone so they can make calls, and whatever else. So there's that. I would say that for the most part, it's people who are struggling on an existential level. I think that Skid Row has really, really created not just a sense of what it is to be poor, but what it is to sort of face your reality. One of my patients went from being, I'm not saying this like the therapist who cured people. I did not cure him by any standards, but I'm saying over the course of his treatment he started out being pretty suicidal. Now he describes himself as having some level of serenity. When I asked him how he feels he achieved this, he said, well, me ending up here was what I needed to face the things I needed to face in myself. So like I said, there's a lot of karma involved here. But I'm going to try and at least stick a little bit more at this Skid Row and not my patients because I know for a fact it's kind of like kids, like you can talk about your children forever. So I know I could talk about my patients for a long time. I think people get the idea that if you're mentally ill, if you're schizophrenic, for example, you're either going to be taking legitimate medications like your spheridone or circle, or you're going to have some illegitimate drug addiction or both. There's something like an 80 to 85% or whatever the rate is of co-occurring disorders with severe mental illnesses and drugs or alcohol. That's just reality. If you're schizophrenic, you also have higher possibilities for things like diabetes, severe depression and so on. If you're schizophrenic, your life expectancy is about 25 years less than it would be otherwise. And a lot of this has to do with how we treat people who are schizophrenic. So it's not just I hear voices, it's not just my reality is different than yours, it's I'm dying. It's the reason that I can't have a relationship. It's the reason I don't have a house. It's the reason that I don't relate to people. This is a severe issue. Another severe issue if you think about it is if you're born into poverty, you're more likely to experience severe trauma, more likely to be sexually molested, which is everywhere in my job. And that's going to help create psychosis. Psychosis does not mean you're psychotic and you're an axe murderer. Psychosis means auditory or visual or tactile hallucinations. Something very interesting that floored me that I learned in school. Every single soldier that was caught in No Man's Land in World War I, because back then that was the trench warfare. They'd have a trench here and a trench here and then for a mile or so there was what was called No Man's Land. So some people got caught in the middle and they would dive into a pit that was created by a shell and they would just stay there and wait for the artillery to stop for, you know, and that would take about eight hours. So they're sitting there and stuff is blown up around them and they can't move and you can't do anything. It creates the most severe anxiety you can imagine. Every single soldier who dealt with this for several hours and survived and came back reported hallucinations. So what I want to emphasize is that a lot of my schizophrenic patients have mental illness and it's genetic, but it's really epigenetic, which is to say the interaction between your genetics and your environment. So everybody here is capable of being schizophrenic and I don't just mean for that moment. When you have that kind of severe PTSD you're going to carry on your psychosis, not forever and not no matter what, but it's something that you'll carry with you. So another thing is schizophrenia and skid row. It's not for the dem to those, it's for us. And if you switch birth with people there, they're going to be sitting under the avocado tree listening about skid row and you're going to be over there living skid row. And that's the great equalizer, you know, like Hamlet, he's holding that skull, old Yorick, I knew him, right, he was funny, now he's dead, death is the great equalizer. I think humanity is the great equalizer and one of the reasons that I love my job and one of the reasons, not good in the sense that I'm better than another social worker, but better, I think than at least some of the kind of burnout county workers that fulfills a kind of stereotype that I know that one of the reasons I'm better connecting with the people I work with is I'm not better than them. You know, I mean, I have more money, I have better health insurance if they have any at all, my posture is better because I've never slept on a sidewalk and so on and so on and so on, but I'm not better than them. My soul is not cut from a different cloth. Some of my patients are molesters. I'm sure that, I mean, I'm not saying that it's okay to molest. I'm saying that every single one of my patients who have molested were molested as children. Not everybody who was molested became a molester, but what I'm saying is, no matter what people are bringing to the plate, whether it's drug addiction, suicide attempt, psychosis, sexual abuse as a victim, sexual abuse as a perpetrator or both, we're all cut from the same cloth and if you go through a severe enough trauma in life, you're capable of being pushed in certain directions. Now people can choose. A lot of people, we have a few, not many, but over the last 10 years, I think two or three people have gotten, who have been patients at my clinic, not my patients but others, ended up like getting out of skid row, going on to get like a PhD. One is, I think, out of PhD in literature from University of Arizona. Another one is getting a PhD out in Yale, but that's certainly the exception to the rule. For most, what we're trying to do is create a better quality of life and a more humane sense of connection with others and a sense of compassion. I think I went off my topic a bit, but I think I said some important things. So I think I talked a little bit about how you end up in skid row. You're either poor, you're mentally ill or you have a drug addiction and these will overlap and this is what I would call epigenetics. How do you get out of skid row? Well, social services, housing helps. Low-income housing is a big deal. Getting meds helps if that is what is necessary for you. Not everybody needs them, but some do. Fiscal help, you know, whether you're on general relief or some kind of social security and therapy. The fact is, if you're mentally ill, you're going to end up with better chances for getting housing, for getting services, and I have mixed feelings about that because a lot of people, if you're living in skid row, you're going to deal with a lot of severe depression, but are you mentally ill? You need to be termed mentally ill. So a lot of people end up coming in and getting on meds or coming to my clinic because that's what they require to have their landlords put them in and saying, yes, I'm receiving treatment, so therefore I'm getting housing, therefore I'm getting whatever it is I'm supposed to be getting. So on the one hand, we believe in recovery. That's one of the three prime values of the Department of Mental Health. And on the other hand, there is the sense of enabling. When I get, I mean, I'm careful about who I write reports for to try to get them on social security. If I think they really cannot work and cannot take care of themselves, I do it and I do it well and wholeheartedly. There's a lot I'm hesitant about because I don't want to create the sense that no, you can. That's how I, that's how on an individual level, a lot of people are trying to get out. But what does society do? Meaning the county, the city and the federal cops, like I talked about Twin Towers. And I think a lot of it is about maintaining real estate value and containing Skid Row so that it is tiny and you can keep your little Tokyo posh hotels and sushi restaurants. You can keep your industry to the east. You can keep downtown to the west and keep the nice pretty smelly flower district, good smelly flower district to the south. Just a little perspective. If you walk around Hollywood with a cigarette and tap your cigarette in front of a cop, are you going to get a ticket? No, no, no. If you're a black male in Skid Row and all you're doing is smoking a cigarette and you tap your cigarette, the cop might give you a citation for what's called ashing. The ticket is $159. Now you live off of $221 a month. So just to put them, and you haven't eaten yet. So just to put that in perspective, if you're living off of $1,000 a month, you know, that ticket is like $700 and you're broke. So now you can't pay your ticket. So now, hopefully Homeless Court can help you out, but they're not going to adjudicate all these tickets. So now you didn't pay your ticket. So now there's a warrant for your arrest. Now you have to go to Twin Towers. A year of sending somebody to Twin Towers is about $70,000. You're probably going to get a 90 day sentence. So that's about $17-$18,000 of your tax dollars. $17-$18,000 could have put this guy in housing for four years, like easily. Where is our money going? It's going to futility. It's much easier for a mayor to say, I'm really tough on crime and fuck poor people, and that's great. And you can vote for me, and at least I've done $6 million to get police to harass these poor people. God forbid you say I put $6 million into housing. Dollar for dollar, the cheapest, most effective way to help people. And I'm not talking about compassion here. I'm talking about heartless republicanism. How do I save money policy-wise? Cheapest ways therapy. Cheapest way. Low income housing is better than having people be homeless. Average chronically homeless person in Skid Row, keeping in mind that's half of the roughly 10,000 people there, costs something like $70,000 a year due to frequent emergency room visits. Some of it's drugs, but a lot of it is just diabetes, appendicitis, what have you. If you can give these people some preventative care, it's a lot cheaper. Everything, you know, it's like what Ben Franklin said, right? What is it, a penny? No, no, there's another thing, like like if you put a penny in, you save a lot of pennies. Yes, yes, yes. And Allison prevention is worth a pound of cure. Thank you. But we don't really have that with poor people because poor people don't deserve this. I mean, we have lots of money for, you know, like moms, right? We spend, we have more people in our prisons within the United States than in the whole world combined. We have more money spent on our military than the whole world combined. Yeah, but we don't have money for this. So one of the points of emphasis I wanted to take out from here as a policy level is it's a lot cheaper to care and it's a lot cheaper to help than it is to disengage and say that's what poor, smelly people do. They're fucked up, they're crazy, their neighborhoods smell like shit and I don't want to deal with them and I don't want to spend on them. If this is just about saving money, you're going to invest in low-income housing, you're going to have therapists. How much do I cost an hour for the county? Not that much. And therapists, meds, group therapy, socialization, a little bit of compassion would help. The other day, you know, I mean at least once a week someone comes to my clinic suicidal and that's the good news because that these deeds he came to the clinic and sent up suicidal as opposed to somebody just killed himself and they get strapped into the gurney and a lot of times the case manager or therapist who works with them just kind of ignores them because they're so depressed they don't speak so they'll get out their paperwork and just, you know, catch up. I'm wondering why we don't things like give them a flower when they're going off to be mentally hospitalized or a smile or something, you know, relatively inexpensive that demonstrates compassion. I think Skid Row is a big deal. Probably because it's, for me, it's the most real humane place that I found in my life as far as the cities go. And I often think, I mean, I'm not Christian per se, so when I say Jesus, you don't have to take on the New Testament belief system. But I'm thinking if Jesus came back nowadays to LA, I mean, I don't think he would open up a beautiful healing center in West LA where, you know, white people could say, oh my God, it was like the best and my aura was like totally... No, he would be in Skid Row. You know, he'd be barefoot and he'd be preaching the word there. So I would, if you want, you can consider, is my time up, Shane? Five? Nice. I would urge you to go there during the daytime. It's very safe. It's very, very safe. At night time, it's not safe. I was late for one of my interview there and I got the wrong address. I remember wearing like a 3D suit and like sprinting through Skid Row with a panic lift on my face. And several people there tried to stop me because they felt bad for me going, you okay, man? You know, it's a community. It's a community and it's real. Other things that are helpful, not everybody uses these, but for example, this is Black Termaline cost I think a dollar or two. It's a good grounding stone. It helps people center. I give a lot of my patients rose quartz. A piece this big is about a dollar. You can get it at the farmers market in the valley or any rock shops. This diminishes anxiety, diminishes depression. My patients who have severe anger issues, I give them carnelian or agate. Patients who have very low self-esteem will get rose quartz for self-love. Patients who have such severe anxiety, they're physically shaking. I give them hematide or tourmaline. It's very, very cheap and it reduces symptoms. By comparison, a bottle of a Bill of Fire Syrup will can be about $500 a month and they're going to be on that the rest of their lives. So you do the math. Caring about people, treating people like they're normal, engaging with people. That's the most important thing there. There's a tremendous amount of compassion to be found going into and out of skid row and I feel that it's kind of like the dirty little secret that everyone knows about and no one really wants to deal with in Los Angeles. I also think it's amazing that there's so much good that can be done there. I also wanted to know maybe if there's just one or two questions because I probably have one or two minutes left. I have a very hard time getting the time seeing this first man or feeling like they're walking in a person shoes. How would you recommend people get across that kind of, you know, that these are people to do it, just as these would be due to it? I think that the question is, if I can summarize, the question is how can someone get the Republican family to see that people in skid row or human beings deserve meriting the same kind of care and compassion that other Republicans give to each other all the time? That's a process. I mean, one thing I would say is, I guess for me, the question is, you know, at some point, everyone here is going to die and we're going to look back on our lives. So I pretend like I'm 80 and I'm dying and I'm looking back on my life and I just say, well, what is he wish I did? And that's kind of how I live, whether it's being nervous about asking a group of girl out on a date or whether it's do I want to take this trip or not or what career choice will I do? What is the old man and me wish I did? So, you know, ask them when they're old and George Bush, the third is president. Oh no, he was the third. No, he was the second. When George Bush, the third is president. We talked about skid row for like 30 minutes, but one George Bush reference. So I guess I would say just ask them to kind of look into themselves. And I wanted to thank everyone again. And if you want to talk more about skid row or whatever else, you know, I'll be around at lunch. So thank you very much, everyone.