President Trump has pledged $1 trillion to rebuild America’s systems, but the proposed infrastructure bill relies heavily on private financing to fund sorely needed waterworks and transit projects. This poses a problem because private companies “only work on projects that create revenues,” saysRep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “The vast majority of the national highway system, and our bridge problems and all our transit problems, do not generate revenues. It will not help them.”
A BETTER FINANCIAL MODEL
Sustainable infrastructure is often understood to be a bridge built from recycled materials or an electric plant powered by wind, for instance, but it’s also infrastructure whose upkeep expenses are included in its building costs so that there aren’t social or environmental costs later on.
The ability to fund maintenance prevents massive failures, like the Flint water crisis or the year-long shutdown of certain lines of the Washington, D.C., metro, from ever happening. “For years, there’s been this separation of costs for building a bridge versus actually making sure that bridge stays up, and over time, it’s created a really weird recipe for a lack of consideration for operational costs in state budgets,” says Anthony O. Kane, managing director for the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. “If you build a road one way and it has to be built again in 20 years. Why not build a road in another way and give it a longer lifespan?” For the close to 30,000 rural local bridges that are deficient across the U.S., sustainable infrastructure is a solution with longevity. The Kansas City street car is a new example of sustainable infrastructure.
SUSTAINABLE CITIES
Leading the way in sustainable infrastructure projects are New York City, Chicago and Kansas City, Mo. The use of recycled materials, a reduction of carbon emissions and sound pollution are often key elements of building plans. In Los Angeles (another city at the forefront of the environmental movement), the Metro system is being revitalized by utilizing solar panels for alternative energy and adding 6.6 miles of new train tracks using recycled materials.
“It’s not the classic 1950s definition of infrastructure anymore,” says Rick Bell, executive director of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction. “Transportation isn’t just highways and bridges. It is just as important to create a bike lane for people to get around the city without a car.”
“BRANCHING” OUT
Some of the most successful sustainable projects are ones that citizens might not even view as infrastructure. In Chicago, trees are used as infrastructure to help reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage. A 2014 Friends of the Park report found the 70,000 trees that were planted over a 20-year period have reduced carbon emissions in the Windy City by 25,000 tons each year — the equivalent of 15,100 automobiles. The tree canopy also reduced air temperature, saving $360,000 annually on residential utility costs.
CATCH UP ON THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE WITH THESE DEEP READS:
At NationSwell, our mission is to highlight solutions driving America forward. From rural Appalachia to South Central Los Angeles, we’ve covered the work of dedicated individuals fighting to improve people’s lives. Here are a few updates on how President Trump’s proposed federal budget cuts to social programs could gradually rollback the positive impact made by these initiatives.
[ph][ph][ph]
The sneaker business has never been bigger than it is today. Since 2004, sales of high-end athletic shoes increased by 40 percent to nearly $55 billion, and the resale market generates more than $1 billion. Now, one former sneakerhead hopes to put a little soul back in the soles of homeless people and disadvantaged youth by gifting them a brand new or gently worn pair.
Watch the video above to see how Rikki Mendias, founder of the grassroots nonprofit Hav a Sole, uses his background in fashion photography and social media marketing to solicit sneaker donations to stock pop-up shops for his unique patrons. MORE:Ever Wondered What to Say to a Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say and 5 Things Not to Say
Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
[ph]
Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
[ph]
Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning. This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward. Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
Kasey Saeturn, a 20-year-old journalist, got the idea for her most recent reporting project while attempting to grab take-out in Oakland’s Chinatown. That summer afternoon, she and other reporters left the Youth Radio headquarters to find cheap eats. Most returned empty-handed, unable to find anything affordable in the gentrified neighborhood. The situation prompted Saeturn, a first-generation Mien-American whose family came from Laos, to think about urban renewal, wondering: Was a lack of affordable cuisine unique to the Easy Bay or did kids across the country choose between an empty stomach and an empty wallet?
To answer her question, Saeturn built a map and used Facebook and Twitter to collect responses from across the country to fill it. Last month, her story (which was produced by Youth Radio) appeared before a national audience on NPR’s website. “I wouldn’t have even found out if I liked [storytelling] if I didn’t join Youth Radio. I never saw myself as a journalist,” Saeturn, a college student with a second job at a ramen shop, says.
With kids manning the mics, Youth Radio, a public radio station, launched from Berkeley, Calif., in the 1990s. As shootings ravaged low-income neighborhoods, its founder, Ellin O’Leary, hoped to end the prevailing news narrative that all teens were violent gangbangers or victims by giving minority, low-income youths the opportunity to explain their lives for themselves. That mission continues today at bureaus in L.A., Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as Millennials — burdened with college debt and unemployment — create stories about living in a hashtag-centric world. Keeping up with the times, Youth Radio now also streams its content online and in 2009, started its Innovation Lab, a digital storytelling platform, where young people design interactive mobile apps that give a fresh take on the news in a format that’s relevant to their peers.
[ph]
“There’s multiple ways to tell a story,” says Asha Richardson, a Youth Radio alum who now manages the Innovation Lab. Richardson, the station’s former tech journalist, wanted her reporting to go beyond the reels and was intrigued how technology — video, music, graphic design, coding — and new platforms that appealed to her peers enhanced reach and storytelling impact. Students in the program (80 percent come from low-income homes) receive real-world tech skills, learning not only how to use a recording device, set levels and mix their audio, but also how to design and code, says Lissa Soep, a senior producer who cooked up the Innovation Lab with Richardson. APPLY:Youth Radio is an NBCUniversal 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program here.
Youth Radio’s apps transform the century-old two-minute radio story and make it better by allowing a reader to spend as much time with a story as she desires (the same way a listener could binge on Serial). A series of interviews about gentrification in five Oakland neighborhoods, for example, allows a visitor to turn about the city through an online map, visiting schools and playgrounds, a Disneyesque theme park, grand old hotels and new high-rise condos. Richardson’s Bucket Hustle app combines trivia questions about California’s drought with an arcade-style game of collecting falling water drops in a bucket. And another online interactive, Double Charged, lets a viewer follow three people through the juvenile justice system and watch as thousands of dollars in fees pile up throughout the process.
Youth Radio’s multi-platform approach extends young people’s voices far beyond their Twitter feeds and Tumblr accounts. So far, its stories have reached more than 28 million users and the digital tools created in its Innovation Lab have an active user base of more than 3 million people worldwide.
That ability to reach a diverse audience changed the way Saeturn thinks about her own life and how much she’s willing to share on the radio. When she sits down to brainstorm, she asks herself, “What’s going on in my life that other people can relate to?” Knowing her words will be shared justifies “putting all the thought and feeling and heart” into each story, hoping her experience helps another young person listening on the web.
[ph]
More than any hackathon or a media studies class, Youth Radio allows young people to express themselves and connect with listeners. By telling stories, Saeturn feels like she’s finally found her voice. Not in the sense that it gave her thoughts and opinions she didn’t hold before, but that it gives her a platform to stand on.
“A lot of adults, they don’t really care for what children have to say. To them, it’s whatever we say goes. They forget that the youth is our next generation. They forget that we have the same thoughts and opinions as you do. We have worries as well,” Saeturn says. “That’s the biggest thing: we’ve been silent for so long, forced to believe that nobody cares.” With Youth Radio as their outlet, they’re finding people that are willing to listen. Online, they’re able to reach more of them than ever before. Youth Radio is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.” What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers. The Bag Bill, The New Yorker A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs? Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags. MORE:The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War
In Its Quest to Decrease Water Use, Levi’s Is Open Sourcing Production Methods, FastCo.Exist 3,781: The number of liters of water required to produce a pair of jeans and grow the cotton they’re made with. To reduce its H2O usage, Levi’s developed a process that consumes 96 percent less water (think: transitioning from roomy boyfriend to super skinny cut). Even better? Instead of sequestering its eco-friendly methods in a top-secret lab, the producer of the classic 501 is sharing its techniques with industry competitors. A Federal Judge’s New Model for Forgiveness, New York Times Checking the conviction history question on a job application can make it next to impossible for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. When issuing a 15-month-long prison sentence to a woman for faking an auto accident in order to collect insurance money, New York judge John Gleeson didn’t mean to issue the lifelong punishment of unemployment. Which is why, 13 years later, he handed her something unusual: a federal certificate for rehabilitation. The Powerful, Young Gallery Owner Shaping L.A.’s Art Scene, OZY The Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which boasts the city’s second highest property crime rate, is also the unlikely home of Michelle Papillion’s art gallery. Showcasing the works of emerging African-American artists, Papillion is out to do more than just bring awareness to creatives that aren’t widely recognized and celebrated; she’s working to beautify the community around her. MORE:To Reduce Drug Abuse, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
As soon as he wrapped up his studies in film and literature at Boston University, Henry Hughes followed family tradition and signed up for the Army. For the next five years, he took fire, dodged IEDs and grappled internally with the meaning of military service while on two tours of duty in Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. After Hughes returned home and earned another degree from the American Film Institute, he began making movies, including his short film,“Day One,” which tells the story of a female Army interpreter facing a moral quandary during her first day on the job: saving the newborn child of a known enemy. The film was nominated for this year’s Academy Award for best live-action short.
NationSwell spoke to Hughes, a Got Your 6 Storyteller, by phone from Los Angeles about the lingering questions from war and their portrayal on film. What inspired you to serve your country? For me, it was a long family tradition. We basically had someone in the Army since the [American] Revolution. I wanted to be part of that tradition. Is there one question that you continually ask yourself about your experience? It’s probably, “why is it not so simple?” It’s a very complex part of my life, not something that is full of simply good memories or simply bad memories: it’s a mixture of all types of life. So I always wonder why it’s not like anything else. At this point, why can’t it be simpler? Why is it so difficult for everyone to understand it? I’m guessing that’s why did you decided to make the film “Day One?” For sure, it’s about those questions. There’s not a reducible answer like the one I just tried to give you. So that’s why I thought I could make a movie about it instead, to kind of show the way it felt. So the movie is not a true-to-life of what exactly happened to me that one day. But the feeling when I’m watching the movie, it’s that sublime space of things that are horrible and beautiful in the same breath. What’s the most important lesson civilians can take away from art that’s made about war? I would say that everyone’s wartime experience is subjective. I don’t know if there’s some sort of universal experience. What’s your favorite movie about war? For me, it’s “The Thin Red Line.” I think it touches me because there’s no other war movie like it, that accepts the soulfulness of the warrior experience. A lot of movies don’t go that way, they kind of go along the more visceral, more experiential route. What is the quality you most admire in a comrade? What I actually admire most is hard to come by in our community: vulnerability. When it’s a vulnerability to look at your military experience, I really love meeting those people. Who was the most inspirational person you encountered while serving? I would say my interpreter on my second tour. She’s the one I based the movie on, or it’s inspired by her. She’s an Afghan-American woman, naturalized as an American citizen, but born over there. The deck was stacked against her, and she looked inside herself to find out what she thought was right and wrong. It wasn’t something that someone told her to do. She just had incredible integrity. If you could change one thing about your service, what would it be? I wouldn’t want one of my guys to be wounded or for any of my guys to die. What do you consider your greatest achievement? I would probably say chasing down my wife. It was a long shot, and it worked out. In 2010, after my first tour, I flew to New York without knowing she was there. We hadn’t spoken in a long time. We knew each other as children, when we were 13, and I hadn’t seen her in a number of years. I thought I could track her down, and so on Facebook messenger, I basically said, “Hey, I just landed in New York. Let’s hang out. We haven’t seen each other in a decade.” We went on one date and then a few more dates. She started me writing me a lot of letters when I was in Afghanistan again for my second tour, and we decided to be together. How can the rest of us, as civilians, do more to support veterans? Just look at them as people first. I feel like there’s a big divide on some level, but a lot of it is imagined. The fact of the matter is that all of those veterans are just people. I would look at them that way first and then look at their experience. To you, what does it mean these days to be a veteran? Well, it’s inescapable, I suppose. The definition of being a veteran is you can never not be a veteran one once you are one. And that speaks to, I think, how profound that experience is. There’s no way you can stop being a veteran.
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation. Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair. Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics. MORE:Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
General Jeff Page walked under the crooked backboard and onto the dusty concrete floor. The basketball court, one of two in downtown Los Angeles’s Gladys Park, seemed like it had once been painted green, now dulled to gray, marred by dirt and grime. General Jeff couldn’t find any basketballs, only deflated rubber kickballs that plopped onto the ground when he tried to dribble. Nearby, cardboard boxes and tents surrounded 40 single-room occupancy hotels and a couple of nonprofit missions. None of the squalor came as any surprise to General Jeff, who, in August 2006, was a brand-new arrival to Skid Row, an area that consists of 50 blocks and is home to a sizable chunk of the county’s 44,000 homeless residents, many of whom are black males struggling with substance abuse, mental illness and trauma. Compacted into one district that borders a resurgent downtown, Skid Row contains the largest concentration of unsheltered people in America.
Skid Row, in downtown Los Angeles, has the city’s largest concentration of homeless people who regularly live on the sidewalks in tents and cardboard boxes.
As General Jeff, an experienced basketball player, nailed jump shots (and retrieved bounceless rebounds under the basket), homeless guys sprawled under the shady queen palms and California sycamores, dodging the heat. When he took a break, a squat, elderly man waved him over. General Jeff thought he knew the guy — an old-timer, Manuel Benito Compito, known as “O.G. Man” on the streets. From beneath O.G.’s graying mustache came a gravelly voice: “Hey, man, I want you to help me start this basketball league.” General Jeff swiveled, looking for eager players. But the vagrant men on the sidelines were mostly gabbing or shuffling through their stuff. “I’ve only been on Skid Row a few months,” he explained. “I’m not sure I want to be involved,” he said and left.
After more pestering, General Jeff (whose name, he says, refers to his willingness to tackle any problem, like high-ranking military commanders do)gave into O.G.’s request. Over the course of a decade, he’d take on many more projects in the community: fixing streetlights, cleaning up trash, painting murals, setting up chess clubs and art collectives and fighting for a seat on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. People started calling him the unofficial mayor of Skid Row. Jeff on the basketball court at Gladys Park.
From that shoddy basketball court, he and O.G. launched the Positive Movement, a paradigm shift asking Skid Row residents to reclaim their section of the city as a functioning neighborhood, rather than a containment zone. By offering more activities, the Positive Movement provides alternatives to drugs and other undesirable activities. In the process, as residents help themselves, the movement undoes the negative images of substance abuse that have tainted the area. As part of the initiative, next spring, Skid Row residents will ask their fellow downtown citizens to recognize the neighborhood as its own space. With this change in status, citizens would be able to make planning and land use decisions (such as preserving low-income housing from developers, advising city leaders on public transportation and policing and distributing a small coffer of funds for community projects). If downtown residents approve the change, the vote would mark the first time the city has recognized Skid Row as a unique neighborhood, rather than its unofficial status as a dumping ground for lost souls that don’t belong elsewhere in the City of Angels.
“As human beings, we adapt to our environment. And if the environment is completely negative, we’re going to adapt to that…When we talk about Skid Row, when we hear about it on paper, we think of it as a place of rehabilitation, just like a hospital where a human body can heal. But when you think of Skid Row and a hospital, you get two different visuals,” Gen. Jeff says. “As soon as you go into a hospital, the human subconscious, the mind will allow itself to heal. There’s a different smell, a sense of energy, sanitized rooms and walls. You go to Skid Row, and you say, ‘Oh no.’ This is dirty, this isn’t healthy, this isn’t good. It’s hard to heal and truly, naturally rehabilitate on Skid Row.”
Which is why General Jeff set out to change that feeling from the inside out. This memorial tree was planted in memory of Barbara Brown, a homeless woman who died at the site.
General Jeff came to Skid Row from another notorious L.A. neighborhood: South Central, a place known for its race riots and gang violence. A rap producer who once worked with Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, “writing, producing, mixing, rapping, deejaying, pop, lock and dancing,” General Jeff says. “You name it, I’ve done it.” After traveling the world, he returned to South Central to organize community members to end gun violence, but ran into difficulties getting them to the table and gave up hope. When the bills started to mount, he gave up his place, stuffed a wad of cash in his sock and started sleeping on the street, finding shelter in warehouses and cooking food with heat lamps. When he moved to Skid Row, he carried two suitcases: one full of clothes, the other containing a drum set — his last tie to his former life. “I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t know why I am here. There’s no blueprint or degree or beacon of light,” he recalls. “The drum machine, that was reality.” He spent a few nights in the park, then at a mission (where men sleep in gigantic dorms with no privacy), before ending up in a single occupancy room (a type of housing for low-income individuals, where, to save on rent, they live alone in a tiny residence, often with a shared kitchen or bathroom)in one of the district’s many hotels, and meeting O.G. in Gladys Park. General Jeff believes that the negativity of Skid Row can make it hard for residents to rehabilitate themselves, which is why he created the Positive Movement.
After the Vietnam War, servicemen flooded downtown, taking up residence in Skid Row’s dilapidated hotels and using cheap liquor and drugs to obliterate the memories of battle. From that point on, through the crack epidemic in the 1990s, chronic homelessness on Skid Row has been associated with substance abuse and recovery. A 1970 book, “Stations of the Lost: The Treatment of Skid Row Alcoholics,” found that most of the neighborhood’s homeless only spent one-third of the year without a roof over their heads; the rest of the time, they shuffled through jails, mental hospitals, rehab and the missions, before landing back on the streets. Forty-five years later, not much has changed, says O.G. “You go to Union Rescue Mission and spend some nights there. You relapse, then you go to the L.A. Mission. You relapse, then the Midnight Mission. You keep going next door,” he explains. That cycle reveals itself in L.A.’s extremely high percentage of chronically homeless individuals. About 15 percent of all the city’s unsheltered have been on the streets for more than a year or several times over three years. While there’s no data available on why this population remains homeless, it can be assumed that drugs and alcohol continue to play a role.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” one homeless woman from Las Vegas tells the L.A. Times in 2005, when three people died of an overdose on the same day. “People getting high on the streets like it was legal.”
In Skid Row especially, temptation is always around the corner. Most of the shelters let men out of the large dorms at 5 a.m., and some prevent them from reentering until the evening intake. With few constructive activities in the area, grabbing a beer might suddenly sound like an attractive way to pass the time during non-work hours. Add to that the armies of drug dealers and liquor store owners who profit at users’ expense. (One infamous profiteer, Recondal “Ricky” Wesco, is said to set up his beer cart outside rehab centers and hawk tall boys for just $2, undeterred by more than 50 arrests.) General Jeff feels that the infrastructure of Skid Row itself is designed for people to fail — making the Positive Movement’s “outlets” like basketball, chess, visual and dramatic arts so crucial to the neighborhood; they provide a better way for residents to occupy their time. General Jeff helped get the mural in the background installed on Skid Row’s San Julian Street.
But as soon as these groups got off the ground, the basketball players asked for whistles, scoreboards and uniforms, and the photography club wondered if they could afford an extra camera. General Jeff realized he would need sustained funding to keep them around. Across Los Angeles, 96 elected neighborhood councils, which can range from seven to 30 members per board, are each allocated $42,000 by EmpowerLA, a city-funded umbrella organization, for discretionary use. General Jeff heard that the education committee of the council that oversees Skid Row — the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC, pronounced “dee-link”) — would be willing to help fund the Positive Movement’s operations, so he simply added an educational component to the basketball league. (The team would discuss various concepts, like teamwork, family, and punctuality before tip-off.) Pretty soon, the team sported jerseys emblazoned with “Skid Row Streetball League,” and the camera club had 10 new digital cameras and an exhibition timed with the Downtown Art Walk.
When General Jeff returned to DLANC a few weeks later to thank the council for the funds, a board member asked why the name “Skid Row” was printed on the jerseys. The elected official was ashamed of the name, painting it as a blight on downtown, General Jeff recalls of the tense meeting. Stating that players were proud to wear their community’s name on their chests, General Jeff argued that if Skid Row didn’t own up to its reputation, it would be easy for the rest of the city to forget about the homeless. After all, he’d seen it happen before. In 2003, “South Central” was renamed “South Los Angeles.” The rebranding effort scrubbed away the images of gang violence associated with the name — a boon to developers hoping for growth but a blow to activists wanting to launch a public relations campaign highlighting old issues that persisted onto the new map. After the meeting ended, General Jeff found out the angry board member was, in fact, his representative for “Central City East,” the preferred name for Skid Row among developers and bureaucrats. General Jeff had never considered a career in politics before, but wanting the person off DLANC, General Jeff ran against him and won in a landslide in 2008, capturing more than half the votes in a four-way race.
From his new position, General Jeff highlighted his neighbors’ concerns. Unlike elsewhere, city maintenance rarely happened in Skid Row. Streetlights burnt out (or were shattered by drug dealers seeking a cover of darkness) and weren’t replaced. Garbage and feces littered the gutters because trash cans and public restrooms in the area were limited out of concern they would become sites for drug use or trafficking. Along with O.G., General Jeff started a cleaning force to pick up trash and made a map of broken streetlights. His most significant battle on DLANC erupted in 2014, when a nonprofit developer wanted to bring in a restaurant with a liquor license on the ground floor of a permanent supportive housing unit that hosts recovery programs and addict support groups. DLANC board members, worried about the impact of pouring drinks around residents with histories of substance abuse and the steady encroachment of gentrification into the area’s borders, fought back. The Skid Row community largely won the fight, but General Jeff lost any goodwill with downtown business owners in the process.
All of General Jeff’s work of the past 10 years started to unravel last spring. He lost his post on DLANC to a newcomer, and he seemed disillusioned with the system. After homeless counts of Skid Row residents hovering roughly around 39,000 for several years, the numbers suddenly spiked to 44,359 people. Charities and public services strained to meet the need, but with no new housing lined up, a long-term solution wasn’t readily available.
Meanwhile, police relations, historically turbulent, frayed even further as law enforcement continued to crack down on residents. Since the launch of the Safer Cities Initiative in September 2006 (the program piloted in 2005), cops had begun to break up sidewalk encampments and issue tickets for minor infractions. Based on former police chief Bill Bratton’s theory of “broken windows,” (combating minor quality-of-life crimes like vandalism or public drinking as a way to keep order in urban areas and deter more serious crimes) law enforcement wrote 1,000 citations for jaywalking and loitering every month during the program’s first year, according to an independent UCLA study. (General Jeff has been arrested for loitering in 2013, but successfully fought the case at trial and avoided a conviction. A related charge of resisting arrest, however, resulted in a sentence of 20 days of community service.) Tensions came to a head in March 2015 when police approached Charly Leundeu Keunang, a 43-year-old Cameroonian national living on Skid Row, known to his friends as “Africa,” and tried to take him into custody for a suspected robbery. Keunang, mentally ill and high on methat the time, reached for the gun in an officer’s holster. After a brief scuffle, six shots were fired, hitting Keunang in the chest, torso and left arm. Bystanders captured his death on camera, and it was viewed millions of times on Facebook. Skid Row might have looked safer to outsiders, but it didn’t feel that way to its residents. A memorial in the spot where Charly Leundeu Keunang was shot and killed.
Skid Row citizens have a different set of priorities for day-to-day life, where staying sober or getting to work is an accomplishment, says John Malpede, an artist who started “the other LAPD,” the Los Angeles Poverty Department, an arts group for those who live or work in Skid Row, 30 years ago. “We’re the biggest recovery community anywhere. Skid Row is a resource for not only all of Los Angeles, but also for all of Southern California. It’s a place where there are services and an understanding and a long-term community that suits the needs of people who are suffering from all kinds of disabilities and traumas, whether it be domestic abuse or wars or addiction,” says Malpede, who came to Skid Row to work at a free legal clinic and began offering art workshops when the lawyers weren’t around. “We’re tarred and feathered on a daily basis. They always say there’s drugs and alcohol on Skid Row. Well, there is everywhere, and it’s also true that there are 80 recovery meetings run by community members every week. It’s a very sophisticated recovery culture.”
General Jeff decided to solidify that ethos by creating Skid Row’s own neighborhood council. Through it, Skid Row residents could fight developers to preserve the $365 median rents in the area and other low-income housing, prevent businesses from acquiring liquor licenses and fund community programs. In formation meetings chaired by General Jeff, residents have been discussing the board’s ideal structure. They’ll submit a formal application to break away from DLANC in October, and then start campaigning for the special election that could happen as early as spring 2017. There’s one main issue standing in the neighborhood’s way: a previous requirement that each council must oversee a minimum of 20,000 residents; the Skid Row zip code, according to city data, was just 8,096. Stephen Box, a spokesperson for EmpowerLA, confirmed that the average neighborhood council serves 40,000 residents. But he also pointed out that councils represent communities that greatly differ in size, from the massive 103,364 people served by Wilshire Center-Koreatown’s group to the tiny 7,323 residents in Elysian Valley Riverside. “We’re getting up and doing something positive for ourselves. We’re not waiting for a handout or even a hand up,” says General Jeff.
“Historically, going back to stereotypes, they’re all drunks bums and addicts. They’re all panhandlers. They don’t contribute anything productive to society. ‘Why don’t you get up and do a job? Why don’t you do something?’” General Jeff squeaks in a high-pitched voice, imitating his critics talk about Skid Row community members. “Let me tell you, that’s what we’re doing,” he says. “We’re getting up and doing something positive for ourselves. We’re not waiting for a handout or even a hand up. We feel that we have something to contribute. We want to add our voice to the conversation that dictates our future.”
Come election season, General Jeff and his neighbors will see whether the rest of downtown is willing to let them assume decision-making power — or whether the poor of Los Angeles will continue to be voiceless.
