Emma Pettit

speaker

457 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 2d ago

Emma Pettit’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Last Invention · Street Fight Part II: Cruel & Unusual · 17 Sep 2026 podcast

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.

And when we talked about what she thinks led to this current situation, she gave me a few answers.

So she said, you know, first, pretty obviously, drugs play a big role here.

Alcohol was one kind of beast, and it was tough, you know, for the hobos and for the bums that we've talked about.

But with crack cocaine entering the picture in the 80s and meth and that's followed by fentanyl, it's just a different ballgame altogether.

I mean, these drugs, like they can sometimes induce psychosis to a degree that whiskey just won't.

So addiction has definitely been a source of a lot of this disorder.

But Estella also points to what I guess we would call like the Joyce Brown factor that over the course of the past couple of decades, the people who are living out on the street have gotten more and more freedoms, more and more legal and social permissions to do exactly what they're doing.

All right, so she says that if you go back to the 2000s, she first took this job in 2003, Skid Row had lots of homeless people.

But a lot of them at the time were working like day labor jobs around the neighborhood and would earn enough to get by on food, liquor, cigarettes.

And at night, they'd duck into alleys or doorways or they'd string up these little cardboard lean-tos, maybe with a few blankets.

And according to Estella, that was pretty much it.

Like, blocking the entire sidewalk was rare.

And legally, you weren't allowed to sleep there.

Like, there was a law against it, and according to her, it was enforced back then.

the ACLU actually sued the city on behalf of homeless people on Skid Row, arguing that because there weren't nearly enough shelter beds to go around, it was just unfair to arrest or fine someone for sleeping on the sidewalk.

This case is called Jones v. The City of Los Angeles, and ultimately, by 2007, the city agreed to a compromise.

Showing 301–320 of 457 · page 16 of 23