Street Fight Part II: Cruel & Unusual
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Who is Estela Lopez and what does her role on Skid Row involve?
Morning, sir.
So, Ms. Lopez, what are we walking through right now?
We're walking through a failure, through a failure of man-made proportions, I suppose. This is what the city allows to happen here. You know, they often say people are living on the sidewalk. I prefer to say that they're dying on the sidewalk.
Welcome back, I'm Andy Mills, and this is our mini-series, Street Fight. In the last episode, we traced the origins of what we today call homelessness and how a woman in New York City, back in 1987, fought and won for her right to live on the streets. Today, we see just how far those rights have extended and how they've inspired a backlash And here again is reporter Emma Pettit.
Let's start by having you introduce yourself. Can you tell me who you are, what you do, where you do it?
My name is Estella Lopez. I am the executive director of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District in downtown Los Angeles.
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.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was thriving businesses, center of commerce, and it was just part of the greater downtown. Now, yes, you did have the single men who were alcoholics, but they stood out because you would see one or two over here or one or two over there. But it was extremely odd. and rare to see one of them passed out on the sidewalk and just left there. The police would respond to that.
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.
And what is she doing in Skid Row every day? Like, what's her actual job?
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.
And her area, you're saying just so happens to include Skid Row.
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?
What we see is something that... Unless you've seen it for yourself. And I don't mean seeing it through your windshield or seeing it on a screen. Because a lot of folks know about Skid Row in Los Angeles. But it's one thing to see it on a screen. And it's another to actually walk it and see it and smell it and feel it. I can walk out of my office right now. And I can see people, lately it's a lot more young people, sitting on the curb and injecting themselves or looking for a vein to inject themselves. And they're caked with dirt. Their clothes are dirty. Their hair is mangled. They're talking to themselves, and they've got a syringe, and they're just poking themselves. And then they, if they're successful, then they just fall over, and they're comatose.
Okay. Sometimes you will see, especially with fentanyl, that people bent over, like... With paralysis, they call it the fentanyl fold, so you'll see that. A lot of times, this is really the most difficult for me still today.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Who is Estela Lopez and what does her role on Skid Row involve?
0:01–5:44
2
How did the Jones v. City of Los Angeles settlement change sidewalk sleeping rules?
5:44–11:20
3
Why did tent encampments become the new symbol of homelessness in Los Angeles?
11:20–16:15
4
What legal arguments did plaintiffs use in Martin v. City of Boise?
16:15–20:58
5
How does the Eighth Amendment relate to criminalizing homelessness?
20:58–26:12
6
What impact did the Ninth Circuit’s ruling have on encampments nationwide?
26:12–32:17
7
Why are shelters often rejected in favor of tents by people experiencing homelessness?
32:17–36:23