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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
All activists would rather have people in housing.
But from their perspective, a tent is certainly better than nothing.
And a lot of homeless people will say that they prefer living on the street in a tent to a shelter because shelters can have rules.
Like you can't bring your partner, you can't bring your pet.
As one advocate put it to me quite memorably, they smell like butts and feet.
And so given the choice between two truly terrible options, people will often select the privacy of the tent.
But I ran a version of that argument by Estella, who said... Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I don't buy that for a second.
From her point of view, there is no privacy on the sidewalk.
There is no dignity to living on the street.
There are people on Skid Row who are losing their vision.
There are people on Skid Row who have these infections.
There are
Well, she also described other problems that crop up or get worse when you have a bunch of tents clustered together.
Gangs are everywhere.
These encampments, they attract bad actors who often go there to take advantage of vulnerable people.
And she says that, you know, drug dealers are a constant presence in these encampments and overdoses are just part of daily life there, as is disease.
There was actually a major typhus outbreak in Skid Row years back.
And of course, the privacy that a person could get from a tent, you know, in comparison to like a cardboard box or something like that,
Showing 361–380 of 457 · page 19 of 23
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