Gentrification in Skid Row, Los Angeles:
Progressive architects of urban repression vs. Creative resistance against all odds.
A filmed metanarrative.
If you are homeless and mentally ill, living through what a UCLA professor called the largest police assault and occupation outside of Bagdad, and you’ve tried everything to find housing, sometimes your only friend is a camera.
All of Us, Or None of Us! chronicles the epic journey of a homeless couple, Sam, a Caucasian, and Amber a First Nations person, struggling with mental illness while trying to find housing in Skid Row Los Angeles, and of General Dogon, an African American activist, just off parole, attempting to defend Skid Row from gentrification.
For six years our crew filmed the lives of these individuals and gave them cameras to record their own lives, as well as the struggle unfolding on the streets of Skid Row. They captured brutally honest portrayals of survival, love and separation, overcoming substance abuse, living with physical and mental disabilities, making amends to society, death of loved ones, and of birth.
Real estate developers, city officials, and the police publicly ascended the moral high ground while attempting to displace a community. Their rhetoric of “saving the homeless from criminal predators” exposes a sinister process when juxtaposed against bulldozers crushing tents, mentally ill addicts sent off to prison, and folks like Sam arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk. Dogon’s under cover investigation of historic Skid Row institutions reveals their almost criminal complicity. With virtually no available shelter, the LAPD made over 27,000 arrests, and wrote over 36,000 citations in Skid Row, which has a population of about 15,000 people, in the first three years of what they called the Safer Cities Initiative.
The quest for justice and a safe place to live is not simply a matter of going back to your childhood home, or struggling for a night on a shelter cot. Finding a home is as complex a psychological journey as landing on the streets. All of Us, Or None of Us! grapples with the central question: Who has the right to live in Skid Row Los Angeles?
Our project will reveal the structural factors that continue to create poverty, the inadequacies of our responses to poverty, the impact of mainstream media's framing of these issues, the dominance of elites in determining how we live, work, and play, and most importantly, the historic use of the police in controlling protest, and removing the physical evidence of our broken system, the poor.
As funding becomes available to purchase archival footage, we will showing the cycle of development and it’s relationship to policing, how slums are actually created by market forces, not poor people, and the seemingly endless moral justifications for one group replacing another.
www.facebook.com/aSavagecityproduction
https://www.youtube.com/...
aSavageCity.com
All of Us, or None of Us!
Gentrification in Skid Row, Los Angeles:
Progressive architects of urban repression vs. Creative resistance against all odds.
A filmed metanarrative.
A bitter conflict is raging across Downtown Los Angeles and the adjacent Skid Row. On one side, developers, elected officials, and upwardly mobile "pioneers" are attempting to settle the "urban frontier," and on the other side, indigenous low-income tenants, homeless individuals, and a handful of community organizations are making their last stand to preserve their community, the only community in Los Angeles where homeless individuals were legally allowed to exist.
Background
Businesses and middle class residents abandoned much of downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s. Corporations moved out because transportation changed, and antiquated buildings no longer serviced their needs—relocating 50,000 jobs. Simultaneously, developers and big business sold the dream of suburban living and freeways. Official public policies, like the policy of containment, encouraged low-income and homeless individuals to move into the decaying city center, while structural changes to our economy, housing, and social services chased in an army of dispossessed. Property values plummeted to a nickel a foot, and hundreds of buildings became worthless. One developer claimed, “You couldn’t give those buildings away.” With traffic, shifting lifestyles, less tolerance for sprawl, and most importantly, a large enough rent gap, developers and wealthier individuals are attempting to use those once abandoned buildings to create a new “urban oasis” on the edge of Skid Row. But what do they do with the people who already living in those abandoned buildings, cheap tenements, on the streets, and in shelters?
Importing William Bratton, and his broken windows policing model from New York, the city of Los Angeles launched the Safer Cities Initiative in 2006. In the first 3 years alone, LAPD made over 27,000 arrests, and wrote 36,000 citations in Skid Row, a 50 square block area, with a population of about 15,000 people. Beefing up LAPD’s presence in skid row to over 150 full time LAPD officers, routinely augmented with hundreds of officers from almost a dozen other enforcement agencies, Skid Row became the most heavily policed area outside the green zone in Bagdad at the height of the Iraq war. Giant tractors clawed and scraped homeless individuals’ last possession—tents, medication, I.D.s, and photos of lost lives—into dump trucks, as a phalanx of cops arrested people for sitting, sleeping, eating, urinating—basically living on public sidewalks. Several minor characters went to jail for possession of a milk crate. Ultimately the city, with Bratton’s lead, crafted a “final solution” that subverted proposition 36 (treatment for addicts instead of jail time), and sent thousands of mentally ill addicts to state prison. They cleared the streets, for a minute, but little has changed in the structural factors that continue to create homelessness, so it didn’t take long for the streets to refill.
We thought this film was going to be depressing, but against a backdrop of Kafka on crack, evicted tenants fought back, and homeless individuals adopted cats, made communal dinners, made love, and made a life. Thanks to the efforts of community groups like the Los Angeles Community Action Network, community residents not only held the line, but they won an expansion of social services and housing.
The Film
This epic struggle enfolds through close first-person narratives of indigenous residents, journalistic coverage of the current political battle, historic footage that reveals how Los Angeles real estate investment patterns affect low-income communities, and how the police have always been instrumental in urban development. A captivating intimacy radiates when communities help capture their own struggles. We gave cameras and training to people living on the streets, and people living in cheap tenement buildings known as single room occupancy hotels. Nearly 20 people contributed footage to the final product. We selected main characters based on who captured the most complete narrative. While our participants recorded their stories, and helped capture the struggle unfolding on the street, professional camera crews covered the "Urban Renaissance,” swinging parties, modern art openings, Romanesque loft creations, and revanchist political efforts to gentrify Skid Row, at city hall, in the media, and other public and private venues.
The Characters
Sam and Amber met on Skid Row, and married. Struggling with mental illness, and desperately trying to get off the street, their story is the stuff of soap operas. Sam's estranged and terminally ill mother comes to live with them and attempts to bury the hatched just before she dies. Amber, who got sober on the street, struggles to get into an apartment just before she gives birth. With a camera in hand, Sam and Amber become radical agitators demanding their civil and human rights. As they struggle for housing, the extraordinary inadequacy of LA's social services becomes vividly apparent. Unfortunately their relationship does not last. Sam eventually dies, perhaps from a broken heart. Sam and Amber show the audience that people living on the street are anything but inert, they manage crisis, act, dream, and plan for the future the way we all do.
General Dogon is a reformed gang-banger who, after ten years in prison, overcame a crack addiction. After turning his life and will over to a higher power—politics—he joined the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an advocacy group on Skid Row. This film could not have been made without his determined effort to visually document daily human rights abuses on Skid Row. With an unmatched empathy, he quickly became a director, able to know, more than any of our crew, when to turn the camera on. His on the spot, live narration, carries critical sections of the film. Politicians spun intricate lies that Dogon visually debunks. In one infuriating sequence, his city council person, Jan Perry, defended mass arrests and fought for tougher laws claiming, “there are plenty of shelter beds available” for these service resistant people. The sequence ends with General Dogon being turned away from filled to capacity shelters, along with hundreds of other people, the last shelter, is actually referenced in Perry’s speech.
The Historic Context
Scouring the archives of Southern California, we bring to life the structural forces that ravaged whole Southern California communities, and continue to repopulate Skid Row, like de-industrialization, the abandonment of mental health services and public housing, and residential segregation. Historic footage compares and contrasts the evictions of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine residents during earlier waves of urban renewal. By revealing identical rhetoric and false promises of relocation assistance, the audience begins to see the patterns of history. Over the last 100 years, the Los Angeles Police Department has been an instrumental tool in the process of urban development—a startling history that must be revealed.
Visually we created two distinct worlds that eventually collide, the gritty super 8 and mini-DV life of current skid row residents against hyper-real high definition video of the gentry. Some of our visual choices were dictated by our budget. We handed out 12 cameras, which were routinely damaged or confiscated. As for the Gentry, there was something so slick about their propaganda, it seemed to lend itself to a hyper real visual presentation. Narratively we seek to blur the boundaries between subject and directors to meld multiple narratives on the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles and to minimize the social distance between the audience, the filmmakers, and the homeless people portrayed in the film.
Why a metanarrative?
In no way are we suggesting we have the THE METANARRATIVE of gentrification in Skid Row Los Angeles. What we are saying, is that after years of filming, and a zealous search for the reasons behind urban poverty, and the constant cycle of displacing one indigenous group for “pioneers,” we feel we can’t simply make a 90 minute film, while leaving on the cutting room floor, all of the essential history, and details that could help our viewers understand this issue in as much complexity as possible. While there are real solutions that could be implemented now, like permanent supportive housing, which would go a long way toward solving homelessness, some issues run deep within our political economy, which don’t have simple answers. What do we do about an economy that keeps repopulating the street? Why does every generation confront similar policing issues? We also don’t want to just list what we have found. Our compelling narrative allowing viewers to see as we see, to learn as we learn. Unfortunately, this takes time, but how many working families have time to watch a 6-hour film? And unless you’re famous, it’s tough to get a miniseries on TV.
Distribution:
Social media has provided an exciting distribution solution. We are breaking the film into individual sections that can be posted to social media sites, and aggregators like hash tags, dealing with issues similar to the sections we post, such as housing, policing, economic empowerment zones, transportation, etc. Those posts will have links that can bring the viewer back to our website, which reassembles those pieces into a metanarrative. This way our work can become immediately available for folks working on these issues, while allowing folks with more time to have access to the larger picture.