Lloyd Pendeltonon how Utah reduced its chronic homeless population by 91% over ten years

In this TEDMed talk from a few years ago, Lloyd Pendlton explains how Salt Lake City, and the state of Utah, used the Housing First and Harm Reduction models, to reduce its chronic homeless population by 91% over ten years.  He also explains how his understanding of the homeless issue, and homeless people, changed during that time.  Most importantly, he explains the importance of trust in dealing with homeless people.  This is the best video I've seen on dealing with homelessness in today's world.  

Part of the change in thinking about homelessness in the last 25 years or so came from a Malcolm Gladwell article called "Million Dollar Murray."  Here's a quick video explaining that idea.

"Million Dollar Murray" was first an article by Malcolm Gladwell that appeared in the New Yorker (February 13, 2006), and later was repreinted in his book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures.  That's a collection of Gladwell's articles from the New Yorker, that was published in 2009.   I read the story in that book several years ago.  

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What homeless people NEED

This is a meme I made, poking a little fun at today's crazy rent prices, which is part of the whole issue of homelessness.  #steveemigphotos

For well over 20 years now, there's been a repetitive series of P.R. campaigns promoting the idea that homelessness boils down to two main issues, drug addiction and mental illness.  Yes, a huge number of people on the streets have those issues.  But here's the problem with that argument as a fundamental cause of homelessness.  MOST drug addicts (prescription and illegal) have a place to live.  MOST alcoholics have a place to live.  MOST mentally ill people have a place to live.  Ever notice we have never had "supply chain issues" with psych drugs, like Xanax, Zoloft, Celexa, Prozac, and all the rest?  There'd be a revolution in about a week if that happened.  More people in the U.S. are on Xanax than on Food Stamps.  The number on Zoloft is just below the number on Food Stamps.  Over 48 million Americans on Xanax, over 41 million Americans on Food Stamps (EBT-food), and an estimated 552,000 homeless people in the U.S. right now.  That's 95 mentally ill housed people for every homeless person.  Hmmmmm...  

MOST people with some level of mental illness, and MOST people with addiction issues, ARE NOT homeless.  Those are not the primary causes of people winding up on the streets.  They are contributing factors in lots of cases, but not sole causes.  Homelessness is complex, and there are lots of reasons people wind up without a place to live for some period of time.

The single most universal issue I've seen among the homeless people is that most people on the streets do not have the social networks of people to help them through a serious crisis.  Speaking from 15 years of homeless experience myself (over half of that while working full time), it's a lack of a strong family or friends network that lets people fall through the cracks and into some level of homeless living.  That type of living maybe be in "cheap" weekly motels, living in a car or van, living in a shelter, or fully on the streets.

So what do all these people NEED?  Here are some of the most universal, basic, daily needs among the homeless:

-Access to clean, working bathrooms

-A place to plug in and charge phones and other devices 

(you need a smart phone to get government services, which means you need to charge it daily)

-Money- actual income, IN CASH, to buy bus passes, food, medicine co-pays, personal items, to go to restaurants (heat/air conditioning, bathrooms/wifi), do laundry, women's needs, and other everyday expenses

-A safe place to store their personal belongings

-A place to store food items

(So they don't waste so much money buying single servings of food items)

-Access to showers and basic toiletry items

-A safe place to sleep

AND THEN...

Help with housing, counseling, help with addiction issues, help with mental health issues, help with physical health issues, learning 21st century job skills (think Linked-in, computer skills, today's work skills, not working part time for minimum wage as a janitor, while having their rent and food paid for by tax dollars).  

This is the basics of homelessness.  Did you notice that "conforming to someone else's religious beliefs" is nowhere on this list?  Yeah, because that's not necessary to house people.  It may help some people, but also drives tens of thousands of people away from programs.

I wrote a big blog on panhandling and homelessness in 2009-2010, that pulled in over 60,000 page views.  It was actually the #1 blog on homelessness in the world, at that point.  It was one of the blogs I deleted in the Fall of 2012 (which I regret doing).  I have a lot more to say on this subject.  But this is a good starting point.  

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#SEstreetlife photos- Backpack upgrade thanks to a homeless group

So...  The backpack I bought in Palmdale in May of 2019 was getting pretty worn out.  OK, that's the understatement of the year.  It was pretty much obliterated, but still getting me by day to day.  I definitely got my $7 worth out of this pack.  I bought it used in Palmdale at a Goodwill, over three years ago.  By the time Covid hit in early 2020, zippers were beginning to pop, but it was still usable.  This was it today, as I finally retired it.  I seriously wanted to burn it in a little ceremony, but lighting fires on the streets tends to be frowned upon.  

Both straps were hand knotted to keep them working, all zippers were broken, but it was still functioning day to day.  The buckle straps on the outside kept it going.  

It wasn't like I didn't try to get a new one.  But I'm cheap AF, and I usually try to find a good quality backpack at either a swap meet, Goodwill, or Salvation Army.  There are no good swap meets in The Valley that I know of.  Every time I had some money to buy a new pack, I couldn't find a decent one in a thrift store.  So this old pack just kept getting sketchier and sketchier.  I had resigned myself to saving up $70-$80 and buying a good quality one at a camping store when I could.  

While being homeless is a situation where people always think cheap products are fine, in reality, backpacks, coats, and sleeping bags really get a workout.  Having basic items you can rely on means a lot.  I mean, when's the last time you went camping for 1,200 days straight?  Honestly, outdoor equipment companies really should give some product to homeless people for R&D and testing purposes.  We put that stuff through hell.  

 In any case, I started talking to a couple women from one of the homeless organizations, and they told me they had a backpack I could have today.  I told them I'm REAL picky on backpacks, and I blow through backpacks like a NASCAR driver blows through fenders.  I carry a lot of stuff daily, I needed an outside strap for my blanket (strapped to side, in trash bag), and I need lots of pockets to keep different things handy.  A few people have offered me packs, but none that would do what I needed.  So I always politetly declined.  These ladies today had a pack that fit the bill, so I'm stylin' again in the backpack department.  Thanks a ton ladies.   I'm stoked on the new pack, and hope it's up to the challenge.   While my old pack seems like a champ for its durability, it's not my personal record holder.  In 2007, I bought a backpack for $4 at Orange Coast College swap meet, and used that crazy little pack until the summer of 2018.  This old pack above ranks #2 in my backpack durability archives.  

The new pack looks and feels good, so I hope it lasts until I can get a roof over my head, and work on making an actual living again.  Onward!   

Homeless pinball

In the small town of Willard, Ohio, in about 1979, my 8th grade music teacher, Mrs. Essex, introduced us kids to the rock opera "Tommy," by The Who.  I loved it, even though I wasn't really into hard rock then.  That was a brave act by Mrs Essex at the time, in conservative, small town Ohio, and I appluad her for it.  It opened me, and others, up to a lot of great music.  This is the best known single from that 1969 double album, "Pinball Wizard."  "Homeless Pinball" is what I call it when homeless people are forced out of a spot, and bounce around from one place ot another.

Don't you hate it when a complete stranger walks into your house and says, "Hey, we're demolishing this place tomorrow, so you have to get your shit out."  No, you don't hate it, because that doesn't happen to average people.  "This is America!" you shout, "they can't do that here!"  OK, I won't get into eminent domain, that's not the point of this post.  The point is, if you live in a house or apartment, whether you own it or rent it, strangers don't come in a tell you to get out with a few hours, or a day's notice.  

Even if you are behind on rent, or haven't paid your property taxes in years, a government official doesn't just walk in one day and say, "You gotta get out."  There's a process, we have a reasonably functional rule of law in this country, even now.  Yes, there is institutional racism, sexism, and other "isms" at work in our legal system.  But compared to most of the world, we have a functional rule of law, and there is a process for evicting a person, foreclosing on a mortgage, and getting people out of houses they aren't paying for.  That process has many steps, and it can take months or years to get someone out.  That's one of the securities of living in the United States of America.  

But not when you're homeless.  It doesn't matter of you are homeless because your house burned down a month ago, or because you're a lifelong, degenerate crackhead.  When you are homeless, you make your "home" on somebody else's property, either private property, or government property.  That's because every single piece of land is someone else's property.  

At some point, when a homeless person camps out- ANYWHERE- someone in the area, or the property owner, gets sick of you being there.  You could be on a vacant, overgrown lot that no one ever paid attention to, but as soon as homeless people camp there, it's suddenly a national monument in that neighborhood.  It's like George Washington took a leak there in 1783 or something, the land is suddenly sacred, once a bum pitches a tent there.  "They need to leave!" some neighbor shouts, then they try to rally others. 

This is happening, right now, as I type this, at the place I've been sleeping at, for the last six months.  I started sleeping there when I spent 5 days with Covid-19 in January, so I could be close to a restroom and a mini mart, to buy water and Gatorade to get through that illness.  For the record, I got both Pfizer vaccines, and I think it helped me get over Covid quicker.  

There were two of us sleeping along the side of this building then.  Then three.  Then five.  That number has gone up and down since, as a handful of neighbors have pulled every string they could to get us out.  Recently friends of one of the people started hanging out, smoking meth (which I don't do, see my last post).  Someone even hired a regional gangbanger to phyiscally threaten us a couple of weeks ago.  This kind of stuff happens on a regular basis, all over, in cities everywhere.  

Yesterday a guy I'd never seen before walked up to us and said that they would be powerwashing the sidewalk, on both sides of the street, this morning, and that we had to move everything.  I said, "I'll be gone."  I moved to another spot last night.  The others will do the same.  I call this "Homeless Pinball."  Nobody will go very far.  They just wind up in another spot nearby, but out of sight of one group of local renters.  

A couple people might get taken to "housing," which your tax dollars pay for, by the way.  Just for the record, housing, eventually, puts homeless people in long term places, usually ghetto apartments, and your tax dollars go to a bunch of ghetto landlords to pay their rent.  Maybe you're cool with that.  Personally, I'm not.  Almost no one who goes into homeless "housing" gets a good paying job and rents their own apartment again.  Ever.  "Housing" is your tax dollars (and inflation dollars) paying the rent for thousands of homeless people, indefinitely.  Keep that in mind.  

But most of the people moving from my old spot today, and the others getting moved out of other spots, simply move to another piece of land, usually within a few hundred yards.  Sometimes people just move across a city line into the next town, which is what I did.  There is no legal process, we have no recourse about getting forced out of a spot with little or no notice.  We repeatedly lost much or all of what little we own.  No one cares.  Homeless people get "bounced" around areas like pinballs in a pinball game.  That's why I call it Homeless Pinball.  It's a short term solution to a long term problem, which keeps getting bigger.  

As a society, we don't want ot actually house all the down and out people, that's obvious with a trip through any major city.  As this blog goes on, I'll look at some of the ideas for dealing with homeless people, and give my thoughts on what works and doesn't work with the various programs.  I'll even write about my best ideas on how to deal with homelessness, at some point.  Meanwhile, the homeless population will keep growing, because it's not just an addiction or mental health issue, it's a long term demographics issue in the U.S. and Western society, at this point.  

The powerwashing today will move the 7 or 8 people out of that 50 foot stretch of sidewalk.  Within a week, they will start being replaced by even sketchier homeless people, the full blown, hardcore tweeker and crackhead, walking zombie types.  And the people of this neighborhood will be pissed off again.  Bing-bing-bing... us bums just keep bouncing around.  Inflation and this recession we're sliding into will add to the numbers.  Anybody up for actual solutions yet?  No?  I didn't think so.  Maybe someday...

Blogger's note- 8/9/2022- The sidewalk I wrote about above did get a much needed powerwashing, and most of the people moved across the street.  No one went to housing.  Most of the people who have been frequenting this area are still there.  Meanwhile, L.A. city council just passed ordinance 41.18 last week, which outlaws "sitting, sleeping, or camping" in many of the places homeless people traditionally camp to keep out of the way.  The ordinance is incredibly vague in some of its language.  More on that later.  The drama continues.  But, the sidewalk is much cleaner.  If any city people are reading this, the bus stop around the corner could really use a powerwashing. 

The sidewalk I mentioned, right after the powerwashing, much cleaner now.  My photo.

  

The Streets and me over the years- Part 1

Big man rolling.  Me, Steve Emig, riding backwards, with a bit of style, on my Schwinn BMX cruiser, in 2009.  Remember when BMX cruisers weren't cool?  Some readers of my Freestyle BMX Tales blog, from the Midwest, hooked me up with this cruiser, and some T-shirts, when I landed back east.  After years lost riding, and many pounds gained driving a taxi, this was about the only trick left in my trick bag at the time.

Warning: Shameless namedropping ahead 

(like usual in my blogs)

When you say "The Streets" these days, a whole lot of things may pop into people's minds.  But a lot of it will probably revolve around rap, hip hop, jewelry made for maximum bling factor, and people in expensive clothes posing, wearing Supreme gear, or something like that. The other thing many people picture are rows of smelly tents with lots of sketchy looking homeless people milling around.  "The Streets" is a pretty vague term, but it sounds fucking cool.  Tough, urban, gritty, scary, wild.  

That stereotype is why I'm kind of surprised myself that I wound up doing this blog.  I grew up as a kid in rural and small town Ohio.  I was listening to John Denver records and wandering the woods half the time.  Some of my early memories on streets or roads involve herding cows off Route 603, outside of Shiloh, when they got out of the pasture of the farm we lived on.  I was 9, and we rented a farmhouse, but the owner actually did the farming.  But when the cows got out, I helped herd them back into the pasture, a little bit.  

My sister Cheri, My dad, Tom Emig, and me, ready to head to church.  This is about 1972, in Massillon, Ohio, I think.

A year later, shortly after we moved to nearby Willard, a new friend showed me a skateboard for the first time.  His dad, a fabricator, made it out of aluminum plate.  The aluminum was rolled over on the edges, with steel roller skate wheels.  Months later, I had my own board, a green plastic Scamp that I bought at Western Auto for $11.92.  I was learning back wheel 360's and we were tandem sit skating , our feet on each others boards, down the little hill, in front of that house on Laurel Street, where I saw that first skateboard the year before.  

We moved almost every year, around Ohio, sometimes just to a new house, sometimes to a new city.  My first thing to do was explore the new area on my red, white, and blue, three speed, stick shift, banana seat bike.  Soon I would meet a new friend or two.  Usually we were wandering around the woods nearby within hours.  I was pudgy, I sucked at sports, super shy, smart, dorky, and about as far away from living a "street life" as you can imagine,  

Then I got into BMX, in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in 1982, the summer before my sophomore year in high school.  A year later we moved back into town, and I was riding the big New York canal banks, and wandering Boise, looking for little jumps and stuff to ride.  BMX trick riding was just beginning to turn into this thing called BMX freestyle.  There were only three of us freestylers in all of Boise.  Nobody in my school new who Eddie Fiola or Martin Aparijo or R.L. Osborn was.  I was the only freestyler in my high school of 1,200 kids.  Pushead, the artist and skater, lived in Boise around that time, but I never met him, or even heard of him, although I saw the halfpipe he and friends used to skate.  It was a no BMX scene. 

BMX is what led me to really explore "the streets," although there was not much urban in Boise, except the fairly small, downtown area.  But there was a cool tabletop built into the lawn of the office building next to the state capitol building.  We'd hit that in 1984 and 1985, on occasion.  

I graduated high school, worked at a Mexican restaurant, and hung out with my outdoorsy friends, often going fishing, doing some shooting, and trying to meet girls, like any 18-19 year old guys.  I was also beginning to practice freestyle tricks on my bike nearly every day.  Boise freesytler Jay Bickel, and me, did a few shows, and rode in parades in the Boise area for about a year.  

Here I am, on my Skyway T/A, doing a Robert Peterson inspired balance trick.  Uh... yeah, the shorts.  We thought all the guys in California wore OP cord shorts.  We were wrong.  This is at the Boise Fun Spot, a little amusement park, where I was manager, in the summer of 1985.  Photo by Vaughn Kidwell

Then my dad got a job in San Jose, California, and I followed my family down there, right after turning 19.  By publishing a zine, I got to know the riders in the San Francisco Golden Gate Park scene, and the Beach Park ramp jams, held by Skyway pro freestyler, Robert Peterson.  Before long, I was riding up to The City and sessioning with Dave Vanderspek, Bert, Maurice Meyer, Rick Allison, and the other locals, which included John Ficarra, Chris and Karl Rothe and Mark McKee, among other,s at the time.  

On those afternoons, I'd wander down the road in Golden Gate Park and watch the skaters for a while.  Tommy and Tony Guerrero and friends hit the launch ramp, blasting several feet up, and blowing my mind.  I also watched Maurice's brother, Ray Meyer, freestyle skating.  Within a couple of months of landing in San Jose, I was riding with those am riders to the Embarcadero after Golden Gate Park sessions, bombing down the occasional San Francisco hill, and hearing about bike and skate spots like The Dish, China Banks, and Calabassas jumps.  Those guys were my introduction to "the streets" in a real, big, crazy, urban environment.

Being the uptight, complete fucking dork that I was, riding around downtown San Francisco scared the living shit out of me.  But it was a blast as well.  I learned that an ollie over a homeless person was called a vollie, for "vagrant ollie."  I did a poll in my zine, and we settled on the term "bummyhop" for a BMX bunnyhop over a bum.  And yes, I did a handful of bummyhops in the wild, following all those other riders through The City.  

That was on Sundays.  On most other days, I was wandering around San Jose alone, exploring on my bike, like I had done since I was about 7-years-old, in every other new town or area.  But in San Jose I was looking for natural urban jumps and stuff to ride.  I started to run into shady characters now and then, the occasional homeless person, and getting a little more used to the urban world of a large city. 

My zine, much to everyone's surprise, especially mine, landed me a job at Wizard Publications, in Southern California, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  That happened in August of 1986.  Though the job was short lived, I was thrust into the BMX industry, and riding nightly with magazine guys Gork and Lew, and locals Craig Grasso, Chris Day, and sometimes R.L. Osborn.  We sessioned at The Spot, by the Redondo Beach Pier nightly, and wandered off street riding fairly often.  

The South Bay, as the Torrance/Redondo Beach area is known, was a new, huge, urban area to explore.  I met skater Rodney Mullen on my second night in Redondo Beach, and got to know him a bit.  I saw Mark Gonzales for the first time, when he skated up one night to hang with Rodney.  Rodney practiced his freestyle tricks with knee pads and socks pulled up to his knees, and taped fingers, in those days.  He was 19, the same age as me, but already 8 time world champion in freestyle skating.  Mark "Lew" Lewman was my roommate, and he got me checking out skateboard magazines for the first time.  Vert was where the money was then , Pipeline and Del Mar Skateparks were still open then.  Rodney and the other freestyle skaters were the low paid, kind of dorky guys of skateboarding, if you asked vert skaters.  Those guys admired the technical abilities of freestyle skaters, but vert was way cooler to most.  So as I was beginning to hang around the pros and top amateurs that I had been reading about in the BMX magazines, I was also seeing some of the early street skating pioneers.    

What is now called street skating was just beginning to turn into a thing in 1986, led by Gonz, Natas Kaupas, and Tommy Guerrero primarily.  As a dorky BMX freestyler, working at a magazine that also covered some skateboarding, I began to learn about the hardcore skating world, checking out Lew's skate mags, and some we had at work.   Rodney stayed at Steve Rocco's house while in California, and Rocco hated BMX.  One night Lew gave Rodney a stack of "I (heart) BMX" stickers, and Rodney plastered them all over Rocco's place, driving him nuts.  It was months before he found the last couple stickers.  We all got a good laugh out of that one.  Rocco was pretty much a washed up freestyle skater at the time, but within months, he would start World Industries, and dominate the skateboard industry, years later.

We were just young guys riding and skating, at a time when, even in California, you were weird if you spent a lot of time riding or skating as a teen or 20-something.  None of us realized just how big street skating or BMX freestyle would become.  Andy Jenkins, as FREESTYLIN's editor, and a skater, was heavily influenced by skating, punk rock, and the D.I.Y. culture that was a key part of those worlds.  That influenced Gork, Lew, and me, as we started covering early BMX street riding.      

I got laid off at Wizard after a few months, I just didn't click well with those guys.  We got along as friends, but I wasn't the right guy for Wizard.  I landed in Huntington Beach, writing and shooting photos for the American Freestyle Association's newsletter in early 1987.  Some BMXer/skater kid named Spike Jonze filled my spot at the magazine.  He was a good fit for the magazines, and started shooting photos a lot.  That wound up working out really well for him.  

Meanwhile, I found myself in a hub of surfing, skateboarding, punk rock, and BMX culture.  I soon began to spend my weekends sessioning at the Huntington Beach Pier, hanging with Mike Sarrail and a couple other local freestylers.  That was in early 1987.  Also hanging at the pier were some more freestyle skateboarders that I became really good friends with, Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), Don Brown, and Hans Lingren.  Bob Schmelzer was around at times.  There was also this whole crew of young street skaters, Ed Templeton being one of the most notable at the time.  Mark Gonzales lived in the area, and would come by now and then.  The scene was just all day sessions every weekend.  The skaters would get a crowd watching them, then the police would break it up.  Then us BMXers would get a crowd, and the police would break it up.  That happened every Saturday and Sunday if there, if we didn't have a contest to go to somewhere.  I figured out once that I rode in front of over 140,000 people, 100 or 200 at a time, in all those years of weekend sessions at the Huntington Beach pier.  We didn't put out a hat for money, it was just practice, and trying to impress girls, for us.  So I got a bunch of experience as a street performer, of sorts. 

This is me, doing a Shingle shuffle, under the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987.  I don't know what was going on with my hair.  I was cheap, and let it grow for  about 3 months, before getting a haircut.  

 

I wound up spending more time riding with skaters than other BMXers, from 1987 into the early 90's.  I would play SKATE with the skaters at the pier, but on my BMX bike.  SKATE is like playing HORSE in basketball, except doing tricks.  I could do backside bonelesses, no comply's (footplant to 180), wall rides, and I became the first BMXer to really get into doing nollies (nosewheelie at speed into a speed bump or small curb, bouncing up off the ground), in addition to my own, weird brand of BMX freestyle. 

Like skaters, when I traveled to contests back then, groups of us would go street riding late into the night, in some other city, with the locals.  At the same time, I was exploring Huntington Beach and Orange County, looking for cool riding spots.  How many of you reading this know that there are 4 full pipes in Huntington Beach?  Yeah, I didn't think so.   They're small, 8' - 9' diameter, but they do exist.  I found those, and rode them a couple of times.

While living there, Pierre Andre' gave me one of his old freestyle boards, so I started skating some, mostly when my bike was broken.  Mike Sarrail not only became a great riding friend in those days, but he slowly led me into the world of punk rock. That opened me up to a whole new world of music, and he took me to clubs to see bands live.  We even saw Joey Ramone at the lunch truck in front of Scream , in a sketchy-ass part of L.A. one night.  

My job at the AFA led me into producing videos, which led me to a job at Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboards' video company.  My boss was Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline Skatepark.  I met a ton of top skateboarders working for Vison, like Gator, Gonz, Ken Park, Joe Johnson, Johnee Kop, Paul Schmitt, Marty "Jinx" Jiminez, as well as Chuck Hults, Chicken, and the other wood shop guys.  I didn't know any of them well, but I did find out where a lot of backyard pools were, and went to ride my bike in a couple.  When the Huntington Pier bank chain got cut and "disappeared" in 1989, I sessioned there all summer, nearly every night, with dozens of different skaters, and a few BMXers.  

Vision closed down Unreel Productions in 1990, but kept me on.  I started shooting a video of my own.  Along the way, I met Keith Treanor and John Povah, and we all went street riding a lot, sometimes with me shooting video, and sometimes just riding.  That became my first self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend, which came out in October of 1990.  Rider-made videos were still a really new thing back then, and mine was one of the first, along with those by Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and the Alder brothers Back East.  BMX as an industry was dying, but street riding was evolving faster than ever.  Every video that came out had some brand new tricks in it.  

While I drifted away from the BMX industry, I wound up roommates with S&M Bikes owner, and pro racer/jumper Chris Moeller, through much of the early 90's.  I also lived in the P.O.W. (BMX) House a couple of times, where guys like Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, Todd Lyons, Jay Lonergan, Lawan Cunningham, and several others, were living cheap and riding a ton.  Those guys were mostly racer/jumpers, but they were crazy, and groups of us would hit street spots pretty often.  I sucked compared to the jumping skills of those guys.  We had a lot of fun riding dirt and also street spots, and made trips to random ditches, and schools with banks, like Kenter and San Pedro.  As BMX street riding was evolving, I was around some really great riders, watching it happen, and doing a little bit myself.

 
 

This is me, doing a double peg grind on a ledge in Huntington Beach in 1990.  It's a video still from The Ultimate Weekend.  What's really crazy about this shot is that this is either the 2nd or 3rd double peg street grind, in any BMX video.  I wasn't a great rider, but managed to be ahead of the curve on this trick.

In 1995, I headed off on my own, away from the BMX industry and most other riders.  But I rode solo, nearly every day, until I became a taxi driver in 1999.  I still rode a lot until 2003, when I started working 7 days a week as a taxi driver, and began to gain a ton of weight.  I also first became homeless, living in my taxi, in 1999.  That led to a whole different side of getting to know "the streets."  Riding around jumping curbs and doing wall rides is one thing.  Sleeping alone in a taxi, in different parking lots, is a whole different thing.  

My driver's license got suspended in 2000, due to a clerical error at the DMV, it seemed.  And I became fully homeless, on the streets, for the first time in 2001.  I finally got back into a taxi in late summer of 2003, and spent 2  1/2 more years, working 7 days a week, drivng drunk people home every night, and living in my cab.  My long run of going in and out of homelessness had begun.    

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SEstreetlife photos: funny panhandling signs- 6/27/2022

Maybe I should have dressed as a minion for this one.  Back in 2007 or so, funny signs worked a lot better than they do now.  After the "Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness" in 2002-2014 or so, there are several times more visible homeless people, and people are sick of seeing us everywhere.  I get that.  Some people still give to panhandlers, just a smaller percentage of people.  When you think about it, panhandling is really just crowdfunding survival, whatever survival entails at the time.  #SEstreetlife

I had this idea in my head, but never bothered making the sign.  Then I walked up to a ramp last year, and this four foot long piece of cardboard, with handholds built in, was sitting there.  I had to try it.  I held it for two or three groups of cars, and didn't get any money.  I just wanted to say I flew this sign.  A buck or two every 3-6 groups of cars is about normal these days.  I memorized how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism in 6th grade, to intimidate other kids before the city spelling bee.  

Just for the record, I won, 6th grade city champ for Willard, Ohio, 1977?  But I cheated.  It was actually a 50 word written test, held in the Willard Junior High library.  I got 49  of the 50 words right.  One of the words was "ancient," and it was on a sign nearby, touting the Dewey Decimal System.  I would have missed it, and there would have been a three way tie for first, if the sign hadn't been there.  Lesson:  Winning a contest doesn't mean that much, there's usually cheating somewhere in the system, in pretty much everything.  

I flew this sign back East, where we had to sign up and get a permit, and then could panhandle "legally."  Panhandling is constitutionally protected free speech (as long as the Constitution holds up), but the location you stand can be trespassing, at times.  The permits back east pretty much just kept black guys from flying signs, due to excessive criminal records.  But few of them ever flew signs, anyhow.  

Just think about it...

This one is good more for crazy looks than money.  Sometimes you just have to entertain yourself while flying a sign.  

This is what most people think, no matter what your situation really is.  I've actually met two homeless guys in SoCal whose homes were flooded and destroyed in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  They came to Cali looking for work, and couldn't find any right away (2007-8).  It doesn't matter, you walk out on a ramp with a sign, and most people just think, "lazy bum."  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
 

#SEstreetlife photos- A few of the animals I've seen while homeless- 6/21/2022

I was walking along the trails on the Manchester district (south) side of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, when I saw this great blue heron in a tiny stream on the other side of the trail.  Spring of 2019.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos

This is one of the two best coyote photos I've managed to get with the old iPhone 5.  Coyotes are hard to get pics of, without a really good zoom lense.  I've seen them a few dozen times while homeless, starting in 2002 in Huntington Beach.  This one was a weird looking coyote, it looked like it may have had some shepherd in it.  It returned around dawn, after coming by in the wee hours of the morning.  L.A. county, not far from Universal Studios area, 2021.  

Because of past flooding issues, there are some gigantic flood walls next to the James River in Richmond, VA.  For a while, I walked to a bus stop every morning, right by the Manchester Bridge.  There's a cool lookout place on top of the wall there, and vultures sometimes congregate there in the mornings.  Black vulture atop the retianing wall early one morning, spring 2019.  

There are pigeons all over cities in the U.S.  This one had a missing foot, so I nicknamed him Ahab.  He (or she?) used to show up nearly every morning, at a bus bench, where I ate breakfast a lot.  Studio City, CA,  2021.  

A different coyote from the one above, but in the same area.  Roaming and scavenging late at night, just over the hill from Hollywood.  It may be hard ot believe, but there are at least a couple of mountain lions, bobcats, deer, and coyotes in the Santa Monica mountains, the big hills where the Hollywood sign, Beverly Hills, and many other upscale areas are located.  The small mountain range is completely surrounded by urban areas, but some large mammals call it home.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos

 If you look close, there's a fence lizard, half on the concrete strip, below the bush.  I saw this lizard while wandering around the Newport Beach art park, along Avocado Street, in Newport Beach.  When I first landed back in Orange County, in the summer of 2019, I stayed in this area for a while.  The art park, which included Bunnyhenge, is a cool place to wander around, and to take photos.  

In addition to these creatures, I've see raccoons, opossums, skunks, mule deer, whitetail deer, a wild turkey, many coyotes, a bobcat, 3 mountain lions (maybe same one, three times), eastern box turtles, whiptail lizards, a nutria, a 7 to 8 foot python (released pet, most likely), gopher snakes, ospreys, bald eagles, a sphinx moth, great horned owls, a barn owl, burrowing owls, green herons, night herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, a southern pacific rattlesnake, a California thrasher (it's a bird, not Duane Peters, though I have seen him while I've been homeless, too), and many kinds of ducks and shorebirds.  

Under Pressure- Why I've been homeless for 15 of the last 23 years

Under Pressure.  We've all been there, at some level.  Classic song created when Queen and David Bowie worked together.

Why have I  been homeless, in some form, for about 15 of the last 23 years?  At first it was a few months, while I was learning to be a taxi driver.  I got myself out of it when I had some good weeks in the taxi.  

In 2001, about three weeks after the attacks of 9/11, my bank account was shut down, for no apparent reason.  I went into the bank to deposit some money, thinkng I was about $4 overdrawn.  I'd had the account at that bank for about 12 or 13 years at the time.  I walked into the branch at Bolsa and Heil in Huntington Beach, and they wouldn't accept my deposit.  Ultimately, the manager came out, and gave me a check for $18, and said I could no longer have an account at that bank.  She seemed physically afraid of me, like someone had told her something bad about me.  It was right after 9/11, and people were still pretty freaked out, in general.  But I'd been in there dozens of times, there were never any issues.  No reason for shutting down my account was given.  I walked out of the bank confused.  

Similar things have been going on, on a regular basis, for 20 1/2 years now.  I have been under tremendous pressure, from some still unknown source, for over 20 years.  I've been turned down for jobs I should have easily qualified for.  When I tried some different small business ideas, I've had a guy in a suit (different guys, 3 or 4 different times) walk up and tell me that I was NOT going to be able to get that business idea going.  That's a part of why I kept driving a taxi in 2003-2007, even though the industry was dying, even before Uber and Lyft came along.  

I've had hundreds of encounters with uniformed law officers from 2002-2008, but only got one minor traffic ticket.  I've had a lot of people, who appeared to be undercover officer or agents o fsome sort, ask me typical law enforcement type questions.  That has happened hundreds of times.  It was obvious that it wasn't local SoCal law enforcement calling the shots, but a much higher level  of power, somewhere else, getting police to apply pressure.   

In 2008, while panhandling in and obscure place in south Orange County, CA, an officer with over 20 years experience walked up to me on the off ramp.  "Who are you?" he asked.  "I've never seen them come down on anyone the way they're coming down on you."  My reply was, "So there IS a THEM."  He just nodded.  We talked for a few minutes.  No ticket, he just told me to leave the offramp that day.  He walked off, and I grabbed my bags and walked to a bus stop.  When I walked by where his patrol car had been parked, there was a$5 bill in the gutter.  Police, as a rule, don't give money to panhandlers.  Neither of us understood what was going on.  But he confirmed something weird was happening in my life.

This type of intense, indirect pressure was used to force me out of Southern California, finally in 2008.  My family flew me to North Carolina, where my parents and sister's family were living then.  We were from Ohio, and moved west as my sister and I grew up, eventually living in San Jose, California when I moved out on my own.  I had no connection to North Carolina, other than my family had moved there after I left their house.  I moved into the spare bedroom of my parents' tiny apartment in the small town of Kernersville, NC.  

I went into a near suicidal depression as soon as I got there.  I couldn't get hired for even a simple cashier or menail job.  I started blogging a couple of weeks later, and interacting with my old BMX freestyle friends online really helped me during that time.  I worked one year as a taxi driver in Winston-Salem, living in my taxi the whole time.  I quit when my dad was dying, after a stroke in 2012.  

I was financially stuck in NC for about ten years.  I finally escaped, landing in Richmond, Virginia in late 2018.  A friend from California helped me get back to California in 2019, hoping I could help his new online business with my blogging and social media skills.  That work didn't pan out, and I left and headed back out on the streets of SoCal.  I've been scraping by with my Sharpie art, and then getting EBT when Covid hit.  

A couple of posible reasons all this happened have come up.  But no one has confirmed those to me directly, they're just rumors, as far as I'm concerned.  Those don't really matter.  The point is, this pressure is still happening, though not to the overt level it once was.  But, I have no work history now, since I couldn't find work for so many years.  I literally have nothing to put on a resume', to even try to get a job, except taxi driving 10-20 years ago, at companies that are now out of business.  There is no job I could get now that would pay enough to simply rent a place to live here (or anywhere).  My Sharpie art has kept my alive for six years, but is not enough to make a decent living at this point.  

Somebody with some high level of political or social power, or some group, wanted me to live my life in a completely different way than I was living it.  I don't know who, or what they really wanted me to do.  This power structure, whomever it is, seems to be centered on the East Coast.  It appears they thought I'd get to North Carolina, and then think, "Oh, my whole life has been shit, I need ot go to college."  Instead, college didn't enter my mind.  After not being able to make a decent living from 2001-2008, going into debt for a degree I didn't want in the first place was not even an option.  Not going to college, and getting saddled with a ton of debt, is one of the smartest decisions I ever made.  College is great for lots of people, but I always wanted to start my own business, and I don't need a degree to hire myself.  Nothing I was interested in was degree dependent.  Coming out of high school, I was thinking of going to college to become a wildlife biologist, but that was more of a default plan.  I didn't have anywhere near enough money to go to college, and when BMX took off for me, college was out the window.

For over 20 years now, simply surviving was the best I could manage.  No level of material or financial success was ever going to happen, that became apparent by late 2003 or 2004.  We live in a world where things like this happen.  A powerful group of people, can target someone for reasons only they know, and use their influence to destroy that person's life, if the person doesn't conform to their wishes.  There's a ridiculous amount of douchebaggery going on in this world, particularly back East.  

I'm smart, and hard working.  But now my only hope of making a decent living again is creating my own job, my own small business, around my writing, artwork, and online skills.  So that's what I continue to keep working towards, no matter what happens.  

Its a miracle I'm still alive, actually several small miracles.  I should not have survived the last 20 years, including a serious suicide attempt in 2015, in North Carolina.  Coming back from that, I devited myself to doing my own creative work.  At this point, it's all or nothing.  Either I make a living doing my own creative work, or a die as a homeless guy doing my own creative work.  I've lost way too much of my life dealing with other people's bullshit.  

I'll keep trying to live my own life, and create a legitimate business around my art and writing, as long as I live.  I'll never know all of my own story, that's how weird things have been.  I don't care.  I'm just trying to move on now, and forge a good life in today's weird, fast changing world.  "Let's go create some shit!" is my personal motto now.  That's what I do every day.  I wake up on the streets, and then create something.  A blog post.  A drawing.  A funny meme.  A collection of photos online.  Something.  I may be fat and have no bike these days, but I'm still a BMXer at heart.  Get knocked down, cuss a little, get back up, and keep trying.  That's what BMX taught me.  

Onward.

So now you can look at my memes,  my Sharpie drawings online, my 1,500+ blog posts, and decide if I'm dellusional, or maybe there is actually some shady stuff going on in this world.  Your call.  

Blogger's note- 6/21/2022- According to my analytics, only two people have looked at this post.  Yet I wound up getting questioned by a psychologist at McDonald's yesterday, for two hours or so.  After commenting to people nearby about subjects I might respond to, he eventually walked up and commented on the Sharpie drawing I was working on.  Nice enough guy, but just wanted to know all kinds of personal stuff about me.  This happened in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, where I live.  Even crazier, he claimed to have gone to the same, not very well known university as my sister, brother-in-law, and niece.  A college 2,479 miles away.  Wow, now there's an amazing coincidence.  It's a weird world.  Like I said above, a lot of weird shit happens in my life.

Also, just ot clarify, uniformed police have had almost no verbal contact with me since I left California in November 2008.  But hundreds of people have come into my life and asked that types of questions police and other forms of law enforcement, usually ask, from asking about potential criminal activity, to just wanting to know my thoughts on a specific subject.  I'm talking about conversations that seem intentionally planned and directed, not just random conversations with people I meet.  I probably had 15,000 or so conversations as a taxi driver, a tiny fraction of those, are the ones I'm talking about, as well as many since then.  OK, I've said my piece about this, I'll try to move on with my life...

#SEstreetlife photos- Random pics from the streets- 6/19/2022

Above, someone doesn't like art, or at least street art.  Obey poster in The Valley, 2021.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.  Below, a job offer?  Hmmmmm.  Sticker on a highly stickered taco stand in Costa Mesa in 2019.  

Above, this so reminds me of high school in Boise in the 80's.  Her name is Becky (seen on another sticker of her), and she's drinking out of the paper bag, Generation X style.  On a sign in the Universal City area, 2020.  Below, wider shot of that sign.  

mAbove, homeless amputee veteran on his power chair, charging his cell phone at one of the Red Line train platforms during the Covid shutdowns.  I was there charging my devices as well.  At that particular spot, we often had to hang out while people smoked meth or crack on the bench, while we were charging.  Most or all of these charging outlets have since been plated over, making it much harder for homeless people to charge their phones.  This particular spot, in Hollywood, was used by dozens of people every day.  

Heroin addict sleeping standing up at a bus stop.  I was sitting there eating my breakfast, as I often did at the time.  This guy wavered back and forth, mostly asleep, without falling over, for at least 20 minutes.  I had to ask other homeless people how tis happened, later on.  They told me that heroin addicts sometimes can literally fall asleep standing up, and somehow not fall over.  2021.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
 

#SEstreetlife photos- Beauty on the streets

 

As we all know, there's a lot of ugliness on the streets of any city.  But that's not all there is.  There's beauty out there as well.  We see what we look at.  As humans we get into habits of avoidance, we look past the things that don't seem to matter to us, or the unfamiliar, and focus on the same things, over and over.  Part of my job as a writer, artist, and photographer, like every creative person, is to take time see the things most other people miss, and point those things out.  These are a few of the beautiful photos I've taken while homeless, over the last four years.  Above, spring buds of a tree, backlit by the sun, and juxtaposed against a shaded hillside.  On the side of a shopping center, Studio City, CA, 2021.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos

Stop and smell the cow pies.  Seriously, stop and smell the piles of cow shit, horse shit, and dog shit you wander by in daily life.  Why?  Because then you'll appreciate the roses.  No one will have to remind you to stop and smell them.  Or take a photo.  Backlit white rose at the Universal City bus station in Studio City, CA, Spring 2021.  

In the Spring of 2019, while homeless in Richmond, Virginia, I was walking to a bus stop in the Shockhoe Bottom district, an area downtown, on the banks of the mighty James River.  This area has huge concrete walls to keep out major floods, and the highways and railroads there are built high off the ground.  This gives the area below a really industrial, old fashioned, almost steampunk feel to it.  As I walked to the Pulse bus stop there, with the roads and train tracks above, I saw this small tree budding.  The pink buds, backlit by the sun at dawn, with this crazy urban landscape around it, stopped me in my tracks.  I decided to take a photo, and pulled my little iPhone 5 out.  After snapping 3 or 4 pics, I looked around, and just began wandering around, shooting photos of anything that looked cool in that area.  I wound up doing that for over an hour, as the sun rose up form the eastern horizon.  I got 20 or 30 cool photos out of that morning's wandering.  This beautiful image led to many others, which I'll publish on this blog, in time.   

This photo was also shot in the Spring of 2019 in Richmond.  While living under a huge bridge, on the edge of the James River, I walked up by the Manchester Bridge every morning, and caught a bus to a McDonald's most every morning.  There's a Mickey D's in that area, but it's swamped with other bums, which meant getting to use the bathroom was always a dice roll.  So I took a bus to the sketchy Midlothian District, a few miles away.  After breakfast there, and some morning blogging or drawing, I'd go back across the street, and up a bit, to a bus stop by a big empty lot.  Across the street from the lot, was a strip club, nearby were two or three of the sketchiest motels around, all with hot and cold running crackheads.  It's not a part of town most people want to spend much time in.  Standing at the bus stop, in one of shadiest parts of the city, I saw another small tree budding.  I snapped four photos of these buds, at different focus points, from wide to tight.  Beauty in one of the ugliest parts of the city.  It's there, somewhere.  Sometimes you have to go looking for it, sometimes you just turn your head, and there it is.  

This one is a shot of dusk on Ventura Boulevard, in Studio City, looking west from the Laurel Canyon road area.  The palm trees stretch to the sky, moments after the sun dropped behind the Santa Monica mountains.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.

#SEstreetlife photos- passed out people- 6/10/2022

Just for the record, I don't go around shooting photos of where homeless people sleep.  I still sleep outside myself, and I wouldn't want people snapping pics of me at night.  These are all daytime photos of people passed out in weird places, for whatever reason, not their sleeping places.  This top photo I shot in March or April of 2020, really early in the Covid-19 era.  I saw this woman sleeping in a very empty downtown L.A., when "normal" people were in lockdown.  The juxtaposition of the homeless person and the sign in the background was why I shot this photo.  

Us homeless people were literally left outside to die when Covid hit, and most of the places we relied on daily, for bathrooms, to escape the weather, to buy food, closed down.  March, April, and May of 2020 were real tough.  But most of us bums survived.  Not sorry.  It turned out that the virus didn't like the outdoors.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos

This is another photo from the Spring of 2020.  This guy is passed out on an outside bar table, outside a trendy bar, on Pine street in Long Beach.  During lockdown, this bar was shut down, so nobody woke him up.  

This is probably a drug induced sleep.  This young guy was out cold, dead to the world, by a panhandling off ramp spot, in the bright sun, in this awkward position.  This one is in The Valley.  Don't do hard drugs kids.  Seriously.  Smoke some weed and watch Netflix or something.  Or go ride a bike or skateboard.  Or go to college.  You shouldn't be this fucked up in your 20's.   

This is someone passed out midday, at a bus stop in Santa Ana, down in Orange County, 2021, I believe.  There's a lot of money in this world.  I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to give down-and-out people a reasonable place to live without taking all their human rights away.  I hope so, anyhow.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.  

 

#SEstreetlife photos- 6/9/2022

White trash?  No, it's 2022, we only have multi-cultural trash here.  Dumpster at a homeless encampment I called Park n' Live, since it was in a park n' ride parking lot. 2021.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos

Mercedes Bent.  Jacked up Benz in a homeless encampment, being used either as a bedroom or for storage, 2021.  Park n' Live, Studio City.  

Stolen Nikes with the security tag still attached, on the bus, Spring 2022.  The tag is black, at the top of the Swoosh. 

Yeah, I made that call a few times as a kid.  Pinz bowling alley sign, Studio City.  It must be really hard to walk,

Food from heaven?  Not quite.  On the right we have a big chunk of chicken that fell from the sky, and landed right in front of me one day.  This landed right in front of me while I was sitting on a sidewalk a month or so ago.  It freaked me out, then I remembered seeing a couple of seagulls fighting over some food in the parking lot, around the corner, a few minutes before.  One of them apparently had this big piece of chicken in its beak, and dropped it.  I put the Slurpee cup there to show the size of it.  The gulls wouldn't come after it as long as I sat there.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos. 

 

#SEstreetlife: Street art, The Fence, and a roach

You see a lot of weird things when you're living on the streets, but a lot of it is not stuff most people imagine.  In the media, when people talk about homelessness, there's a ton of talk about needles and poop everywhere.  Yeah, I see where people have taken a dump on a regular basis, since there are not enough public restrooms.  And once in a while, I see needles somewhere from an addict, but not very often.  But I see a lot more day to day, than those things.  Like the dead roach above, that somehow got stuck on a piece of bubble gum, and died.  This was on a sidewalk in a nice area of The Valley.  I just looked down and said, "What the fuck?  How did that happen?"  All the things humans do to kill roaches, and no one has tried bubble gum.  Crazy.

When the work that brought me back to California didn't work out, I headed down to Orange County, where I spent the summer of 2019.  I lived in the Huntington Beach area for most of the 20 years from 1987-2008.  But I just kept getting pushed from one area to another that summer.  So I headed up to L.A. county, and landed in Hollywood with 85 cents in my pocket, in early September of 2019.  I was looking for a place to try and sell my Sharpie art on the street, and figure out what to do next.  The guy in gray above, a break dancer, was one of the local street artists at Hollywood and Highland daily, pre-Covid.  He would stand there motionless, until someone put a dollar in his jar, then start dancing, and try to draw a crowd.  

But he's not why I took this photo, I shot him for an interesting foreground.  See that little fenced off area in the background, which has something light colored in it.  It looks like there's some construction going on, right?  Nope?  Inside that fenced area, under a piece of plywood, with a sandbag on top of it, is Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  While not much happened on the Mexico border that he was always drumming on about, Trump got a fence built... around his star.  For much of Trump's presidency, this is how his star in Hollywood looked, hidden from all the people who might want to damage it, disguised as a bit of construction.  So he did get a fence built, a little bitty one.  I always found that funny.  Fuckin' douchebag.

While selling little pieces of art in Hollywood to survive, I spent the nights over the hill in The Valley, where things were less crazy at night.  There were still a lot of homeless people in the area, but it wasn't as nutty, or as dangerous, as Hollywood a night.  This area, a corner of Studio City by Universal Studios, called Universal City, had some good street art appear from time to time.  You know that guy who does the Obey stuff?  Yeah, this is one of his pieces, that popped up around the time of the 2020 election.  "Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere."  It's more true now than when this poster showed up.  

This was an actual mural, on a boarded over building.  There's a small business in the building, but they just put plywood over the old windows, and got a couple murals painted on the wood, by a local artist.  This was actually up before Covid showed up on U.S. shores, and became more timely.  On Ventura, near the bottom of the hill.  It's been tagged over since.  

Possibly the most iconic street art image of our times.  The late Andre' the Giant, stylized, reminding you to blindly Obey.  Or not.  Universal City area in 2022.  #streetart, #steveemigphotos

Stay up!  One of the lesser known pieces from that Obey guy.  This one stayed up for many months. Right above the "ey," someone wrote, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."  Rage.  #steveemigphotos, #obey, #streetart