Emma Pettit
speaker
173 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 5d ago
Emma Pettit’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Let's start by having you introduce yourself.
Can you tell me who you are, what you do, where you do it?
So I spoke with a woman named Estella Lopez.
She's in her 70s now, and she's lived her whole life in Los Angeles.
And she spent a lot of time in what we often think of as like the Skid Row.
And while today Skid Row is probably what you think of when you hear the word homelessness, back when Estella was a kid, it was a very different place.
It sounds really interesting because, you know, not only did she grow up going to Skid Row pretty regularly, but for 20 years, she's worked day in and day out in Skid Row as it's gone through all these different changes.
Well, she's not someone who's employed to work directly with homeless people.
She works on behalf of the like 600 or so businesses in that area.
And as she said, she's the executive director of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District.
And basically at this point, most cities have one or like in some cases, dozens of these kinds of directors.
And usually in a city, people like Estella, they do things like street cleaning or they get trees trimmed.
Maybe they remove graffiti all on behalf of the local businesses that are in that area.
Right, which, just for those who don't know, is considered the most densely populated stretch of homeless people living unsheltered in America.
Yeah.
And so that means for Estella, she just has a very different and far more intense job on her hands.
And she's also just had this intimate view of what we as a society often ignore.
So when you leave your office, you and your staff leave your office, and you start walking around the neighborhood, what do you see?
So Estella and her team, instead of just pulling weeds and cleaning up graffiti, because of certain changes that we're going to get to in just a moment, they've also become these like de facto first responders, literally checking to see if the people out on the street are still breathing.
Now, as Estella said earlier, Skid Row hasn't always been this horrific.
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