My first blog entry on the homeless and economy in Los Angeles

I have been taking photographs since I was just a child.  I felt I needed to try to understand what was going on there or perhaps I felt that was going on there should not be forgotten. Maybe I am feeling the same about what is going on with people who have lost everything and invisible to most of the world.

Only a few blocks from the heart of Skid Row there are luxury lofts for sale with hardcore sales people who are busy doing their best to sell these places in the current economy. I don’t know how many of them are worried,  if they cannot sell these condos and lofts which is their current job they may be the future residents of this part of the city without a home.

Los Angeles is no different from countless cities in the country when it comes to the current economy and how this impacts people.  Los Angeles does have something of a unique place as the city with the highest number of homeless residents of any city in the USA. 

The Vietnam era vet is still in the group that holds the highest percentage of homeless but the percentage is dropping as people from all walks of life enter the ranks of the homeless.

I started spending time in the Skid Row of Los Angeles in December of 2009. I do not know where I will go with all this. I have always had a desire to try to discover why things happen, trying to find the hidden story, standing up for the rights of others (tossed out of military school for that one and there are a number of other examples), and trying to help some of the people that were in the same place at the same time in the sixties in a land far far away.

Monday night is not the same for a lot of folks. My question here was, how many of these people have no home to go home to?




I have some photos on flickr as well as some videos.  The photos and videos on December 9th were taken via cell phone (and not a good one at that). The videos are somewhat useless so I tend to use them more for the audio aspect of the video. There were some shots that just killed me because I did not have one of my better cameras but in this area you don't want to carry an expensive camera that will draw attention.

A few of the dark night videos were taken the night before on 12/8. I was using the video function on my cell phone to record audio as facebook does not support mobile / remote uploads of audio files. The order of these photos and videos is somewhat random but I did try to group the night videos from 12/8 and put them ahead of the 12/9 material.

One interesting part of the day was a large film crew which shut down access to some of the SRO Hotels. We learned they were filming a Stay-Free Maxi Pad commercial in the heart of skid row on the street where the police station has an entrance. Of all the places they could have chosen to film? The residents told the film crew that this was skid row and the film crew said nobody would know that in the competed commercial. Something of a disagreement started and I was able to video/audio the last part but missed the more heated action. I suggested to the film crew that they change the script ... have a stabbing where somebody runs into the police station and asks a female officer for a maxi-pad to subdue the bleeding while waiting for paramedics to arrive. Both sides ... film crew and local residents found my commentary humorous.  There is also a poor quality video taken with my cell phone which is posted in another blog entry on this blog site.