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
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.
With a couple of exceptions, they said, like, basically, "'Okay, if you don't have a place to go and we don't have enough places for you to stay, then, yes, you can sleep overnight on the public sidewalk.
The police won't arrest you.'"
However, and this is important, you've got to be up and out of there by 6 a.m.
Like, that sidewalk still has to be used by everybody, not just you.
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