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Nov. 10, 2023 - Epoch Times
28:02
Are Homeless Encampments Destroying Neighborhoods in Los Angeles? | Chie Lunn
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This is like where we bring our kids to eat lunch and there's a syringe needle on the bench.
You can't go to the water fountain there because there's leeches in the water fountain.
They fixed it so many times they've given up.
Homelessness is spreading into different neighborhoods of LA where our children are beginning to witness its harsh realities.
The kids can't have sprinkler systems across Los Angeles, by the way, because of the showering and because of the defecating in the shower areas.
My guest today is Kai Lun, teacher, parent and community member.
Today she'll discuss how the homelessness lifestyle is affecting the children of Santa Monica and the adults' responsibility to bring normalcy back to the streets.
Some people try to say, oh, you know, not everyone's on drugs and not this or that.
I agree, not everyone on the street is on drugs.
But with that being said, because you cannot tell the difference these days as far as people's interactions and their immediate response and what they may or may not do to you, you know, we can't be as friendly, we can't be as safe as we want to be, and we can't be as compassionate in the way that we were before.
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I'm Siamai Korami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Thank you for having me today.
We want to talk to you about homelessness and raising kids.
You actually teach at the school, right?
Can you tell us what you do and what you see in the streets?
I teach at a school in Santa Monica called Realm Creative Academy.
So we're not like a traditional school where you have desks and you have, you know, one teacher in the classroom.
It's exposure to everything and getting out, getting dirty, learning directly from people who are passionate about what they do as a career.
Los Angeles has so much to offer, and it's just been such a great thing.
Yet, in the last five years, we've slowly seen a shift.
And a shift has become very apparent with the open drug scenes.
It's nothing more than that.
The homeless has grown, but it wasn't the homeless really that changed things.
It's been the drugs that have changed the Energy of the streets.
So things like us being able to use the public transportation.
We had a train put into Santa Monica that took us directly, for example, to the Science Center, one of the only free museums in all of Los Angeles for kids to go to.
Well, that train was great in the beginning because it took kids from the inner city also to the beach.
But slowly, once you start seeing needles on the train, you start seeing people defecating on the train, People doing the open drugs on the train.
It becomes a danger for the students.
It becomes a danger for seniors.
And that's really why I'm here.
I just want to bring more awareness to the people who are most vulnerable in our community, and that's our seniors and our children.
So can you give us more examples?
There's a lot of homeless people in LA, but they are doing drugs as well, right?
Yeah.
So we've had a number of moments of situations where I've questioned, are we doing the right thing?
You know, and the way that we're teaching, is this the best way to teach?
Because we're trying to give them this world experience, but yet when they have direct attacks on our kids, it's traumatizing.
I have a moment where I'm walking with our kids in one of Santa Monica's most beautiful parks.
We have this park that they built called Tongva Park.
And it's to represent all the native plants of Southern California.
And it actually has one of the oldest trees in all of Santa Monica, a fig tree.
And it's beautiful.
And when the park opened ten years, about eight years ago, it was magical to be able to take kids there and all these little cubbies.
To see different beautiful plants and things of that nature.
Being there now, you can't walk the kids through the park.
We try to walk through the park just because it's like the breakthrough to Third Street Promenade, another street that many people come to.
And this woman starts yelling at me that one of our children that's walking with me is her child.
And profanity of course and everything else and trying to attack the child and take the child from us.
And these are just normal everyday lives.
So we go to the benches and there's a needle in the bench.
This is like where we bring our kids to eat lunch and there's a syringe needle on the bench.
You can't go to the water fountain there because there's leeches.
In the water fountain.
They've fixed it so many times, they've given up.
The kids can't have sprinkler systems across Los Angeles, by the way, because of the showering and because of the defecating in the shower areas.
So it's a constant struggle, whereas these are things that are supposed to be childhood memories and spaces that are designed for kids to be that we can no longer utilize.
We used to be able to take the bus from Santa Monica to Topanga Park And let the kids walk up the hill.
We can't do these things anymore.
Buses, people are being attacked on buses.
Children are being attacked everywhere.
And just the level of just filth.
Honestly, like we walk by so much human fecal on our sidewalks.
It's unbelievable.
And in Santa Monica, there's not encampments because people are not allowed to build tents in Santa Monica.
People are allowed to sleep on the street.
So that's where it becomes this question of which one's worse and which one's better.
When you have tents, people are dying and struggling inside these tents and these RVs.
But when you have them on the ground, laid out, strung out, we question it daily.
Is this person alive or dead?
So we're questioning it as adults and our students are asking us, we actually stop.
Every single time we call the non-emergency police in Santa Monica, every time we see a broken window, because kids hold you to the truth.
That's another thing.
Kids don't walk by anything without asking questions, without questioning life and why.
And so with that happening, and we're trying to set the right examples, of course, too, we call.
And they come out, they yell at the person, oh, he's alive, and they drive up.
And the kid says, but what about what's still happening?
He's still here.
He's still on the ground.
What can we do?
It's dangerous.
Is it people on drugs that you can't predict what they would do?
It's people on drugs, and we cannot predict what they're going to do.
We can see the difference.
You can always tell the difference between someone who is homeless, and there's certain levels of all of these tiers.
Some people try to say, oh, you know, not everyone's on drugs and not this or that.
I agree.
Not everyone on the street is on drugs.
But with that being said, because you cannot tell the difference these days as far as people's interactions and their immediate response and what they may or may not do to you, we can't be as friendly, we can't be as safe as we want to be, and we can't be as compassionate in the way that we were before.
Now, tell us about trauma.
You mentioned your kids could go through trauma.
What is it like having kids in your neighborhood?
When the encampment was right across from my home, it wasn't outside.
It was in our home, in that sense.
You heard every single thing that happened outdoors, you heard it in the house, because you're just that close to these encampments.
So these kids, they're not getting a break from it ever inside their home when it's right there.
These children at the park and at the school that they go to every single day, these public schools and private schools where RVs are outside and drug deals and things of that nature and violence is happening and trauma is happening, these kids are not getting any breaks from it.
You know, when you think about places like libraries, public libraries, these are places where kids are supposed to go and feel safe.
And it's not just my neighborhood.
Like I mentioned, I take children all over Los Angeles.
So it's not just Venice.
And that's the thing.
I want more people to understand that this is not a Venice issue.
This is an issue for children across the board.
Anyone, you know, across the world who comes to Los Angeles wants to see Hollywood.
Where are the stars on the ground?
If we've had anyone come visit us, it's like one of the things that they want to see.
To have trauma to children who can't understand these things, to have children every single day look at people on the street and say, is that person dead or alive, is heartbreaking.
To have to walk and stand between children when someone is smoking meth right on the sidewalk.
It's devastating.
And what happens is that it becomes normal.
And how do you teach children to continue to have compassion when this becomes normalized?
Even in the neighborhoods, people are fighting with each other about, oh, you've moved this encampment to my neighborhood.
It's like a struggle to survive.
And that comes from trauma.
Well, there was a recent survey on homelessness in LA, and one out of each five people that answered, they have thought about leaving, seriously considered leaving.
So it shows that a lot of people are fed up with the situation.
Why isn't anything getting done about this?
First of all, I believe that those numbers are higher.
I think that it's more like two out of five people think about leaving and have a desire to leave.
Even our kids, they express it to us.
You know, when we go to certain places, it's like, why can't we just live here?
Why can't we just live in a forest?
Because it's so much stress and so much of a struggle.
My son, especially, because I think that in our personal household, he's been the most impacted by this because having that encampment outside of our home Seeing people, you know, using my neighbor's water hose to shower outside of his bedroom window, screaming, watching me walk out the door.
And how old is he?
He's 11 now.
And so at the beginning of COVID, he was like nine, nine years old.
I feel like the years are flying by.
And so for him, it was a very different perspective.
My daughter, she couldn't sleep in her own bed.
She's just now getting back to being able to sleep alone.
And she just turned eight.
It was fear.
It's complete anxiety.
My son, the same thing.
Why can't we leave?
Why did we move here?
Why are we here?
The fear is of people attacking them.
Attacking them.
Attacking our home.
Two men told us that he was watching our daughter.
This is right outside of our house.
And then came in our gate minutes later.
And my husband's like, you know, if you come in our gate, I'm going to shoot you.
And it's so that fear is very real.
And it's very valid.
Why do you think nothing is happening about it?
Why do you think your neighbors, your government leaders, the community, probably everybody is feeling this, right?
I think a big reason why things are not getting done is because a lot of people are afraid to speak up.
So when I moved into our block and how I said, this is my first house.
Like, I'm living, I'm owning this house.
And I'm like, nothing's going to take this away from me and my sense of safety for my kids.
And my neighbors, I noticed right away, a lot of them moved out of their homes and rented out their homes.
And then others who did not do that started using the back door.
So they would not go out the front.
They wouldn't bring their groceries into their front door.
They wouldn't walk in and out of the front of their house.
They wouldn't jog.
They wouldn't walk their babies in strollers.
It became a ghost town.
In front of all of our homes, which we all bought for a beautiful view of a golf course, honestly, and a kid's park on the corner.
And I feel that way even about the schools where these RVs are next to the schools.
The fact that we've had RVs blow, we had three right next to a school public park where kids are supposed to feel safe.
That was even deemed during the encampment where children could go for Wi-Fi.
So if kids can go there for Wi-Fi, but we've had three RVs blow up.
Prior to all of this, we've even had a child abducted from that park into an RV. This was many years ago, but a child was abducted from the Penmar Park and put into an RV and taken across America.
She wasn't found until years later.
Her family lived in the apartments right behind my house.
So it's kind of strange that we're allowing for RVs to be near schools.
When they put up a tarp over the gate, and I don't know, it's like, do you think that that's going to protect kids if this RV blows up?
We've seen it over and over and over again.
It's not safe.
You mentioned that people were afraid of coming from their front doors.
Yes.
Why?
Why were they afraid?
A big part of why people were afraid to walk out the front of their houses at this point was because of the confrontation.
We would have different moments of confrontation daily, whereas in front of our home, where we have the golf course, in between there's this easement of grassy land, this kind of soft dirt area where people would run for many years.
That was their trail of running.
And when people were continuing to try to run on this trail, They would be attacked.
We have one moment where this gentleman is running by and one of the guys from the encampment is like, this is my property.
You don't run here.
You have to have permission to walk here.
And this is a sidewalk.
And, you know, don't ever come by here again.
I'll F you up.
And just the...
The level of attacks are just insane.
And the same thing with children in strollers.
When you have people spray painting on the sidewalks, our cars were being vandalized.
So you didn't want any point of contact.
If you look, what are you staring at?
Everything was just this moment of attack.
And you cowered.
And we have a lot of seniors living on our street, and they can't protect themselves.
I had a woman, one of my neighbors, who was verbally attacked so badly So just ruthlessly, like things that no one should ever say to a woman.
And this is an older senior woman, whereas my husband and I had to come to her defense.
And so this is the types of things that were happening where people, they could not go out their front door.
It wasn't safe, and it would not be safe.
So you had to hide in your car from the garage?
You had to go from the garage, and if you don't have a garage parking space, because a lot of houses, people use their garages for storage and things of that nature, I would see my neighbors walking all the way around from the back street.
To go up the alleyway to enter their home from the back, but not through the front door.
You don't want to be confronted.
You don't want people to know when you're coming home and when you're leaving.
I had a sense of that fear that, oh my God, like by doing this, by me walking up my front door every day, when I leave, they know when I'm leaving my children at home alone because it's COVID and I have to get groceries or, you know, whatever the case may be.
Or when you buy groceries, The strangest things start to happen to you when you have someone watching you every day.
They don't have, they're not in the house, they're like right there.
And so you bringing in your groceries, you're like, okay, I'm bringing in like two cases of water.
I've I've got to give one away because they're staring at me walking with this water.
And so you're like, here you go, you know, or a bag of oranges.
It's like, well, here you go.
And it's okay to give and it's okay to be this way.
But yet another part of it is that these are the same people who you're arguing with all the time, you know.
And it just becomes very toxic.
And if you don't have a personality where you're willing to, like, stand up for yourself, or you're physically not able to...
I mean, if you're older and you're just physically not able to be, you know, confrontational with these people who are attacking you, and not everyone was confrontational, but those who were, you can't do that.
And you hear guns going off all the time, you know?
So when you have things like that, you tend to be a little bit more careful with eye contact and just with...
All sorts of things like that.
It's a lot of this going on.
And it makes people afraid to speak.
So how did you go about it?
So you started talking to the homeless, this encampment, to the homeless people.
And what did you find out?
I started learning for the first time about larger agencies, their volunteering work, like LASA and St.
Joseph's coming out, and understanding just how that works, you know, and when they come out, what kind of contact are they making?
Who are they really trying to help?
And what can they do as the people who are just walking the streets?
And I quickly realized that most of the people who work for those agencies are kind of like, they don't have as much power as you would think that they should have.
And they weren't able to talk to people about their caseworkers.
They weren't able to give them updates on what's going on with their situation and get them mental health, you know, resources and women who are being raped and being violated day in and day out.
A lot of people We only see during the day what's happening.
And so they'll drive by and they, oh my gosh, what a shame.
You know, those people are out there on the street.
They don't understand that nighttime is when things really happen.
And I used to tell the advocates that would come to our street, come back at night.
We even volunteered.
We offered up our homes to our city councilmen to come and stay a night at our homes.
We offered for him to just come with his family and spend one night in any of our homes, multiple of us neighbors, so he can experience what it really is like at nighttime.
They are suffering, and we were too.
So why do you think LASA can't do this work?
It seems like they're having challenges.
So what's interesting and what I learned from our cleanup on our block, we were one of the first Project Room Key situations with Mike Bonin.
And I learned that they come out every week, and then it becomes a big...
Basically a big check.
It becomes a big project where they get a certain amount of money and they get a large amount of money to do this serious cleanup.
And then at that point, different people come out from their agency.
So it's the whole idea.
It's like when you go to the DMV, no one likes going to the DMV. Everyone dreads it.
Because it's this government sort of like routine of nonsense.
The workers are not really into it.
It's not that they love what they're doing.
It's not that they feel like they have any power.
It's a higher level of power and a higher level of things not being revised.
And just money just keeps flowing through these systems.
And so when it comes to like Lassa, St.
Joseph's, I realize that that's the same thing.
So the day-to-day people who come out there They're not in it to help people on the level that they can.
Their power is equal to us as neighbors, ultimately.
They bring out water bottles, which we can do.
They bring out, you know, they tell you, you know, have you signed a paper, you know, put your name on this paper.
We can do that, you know.
They don't have the true power to pull the strings to get housing, to get mental health, to contact the families.
When we talk about these big government agencies, they all need a serious revamp.
Now what about other groups?
Are there other groups in the community that want people to be in the streets and they're okay with it?
We have a group of advocates that really don't support my perspective for whatever reason and don't support the idea of getting people mental health care and getting them off the street, getting them job training.
They believe that people should be free to live wherever they want on our public sidewalks.
And this group is very active and very vocal, and they videotape us all the time.
And it's funny because I have yet to understand why they feel this way.
I can say I don't know of any of them having children, especially young children, or a relationship with anyone personally.
and I ask all of them these same questions, if they know anyone who have had any drug, substance issues in the past, or mental health issues in the past, who has led them to being on the street, I don't understand, I think it's a popularity thing.
I think that it keeps them feeling fresh or something.
But they haven't accepted that this problem is greater than them.
And their advocacy for keeping people on the streets and not talking to social workers.
In fact, they also block LASA. They block St.
Joseph's.
They block these people.
Two, from talking to people.
They block the cleanups.
They don't understand the rat infestation.
They don't understand when they leave, because they only come, these activists come when Lhasa comes.
They only come when St.
Joseph's show up.
They don't come on the off-hour times, you know.
So they come when they have protection, basically.
So who are these activists?
Are they college students?
Are they So a great deal of the activists are college kids.
And I think that because the dorm rooms were closed and campus was closed, what else are they doing with their time?
And what about the politicians?
And when they come and video the residents, do they put them online?
Do they make you guys look bad?
Yes.
Are people afraid of these activists?
Yes.
Yes.
People are very much afraid of the activists.
And I want to be clear about some.
So there's different categories of even activists.
And some activists I support.
Like we have always film the police.
This is a guy who goes around and he is an activist on filming the police and police brutality and things of that nature and how it impacts encampments.
I support a lot of what he says, especially with him talking about people who have been in the military in the past not living on the street and how they should be able to live on...
The veterans.
Yeah, the veterans should be able to live, you know, on the veterans...
And the VA. And the VA, exactly.
And he's been very vocal and very visual about showing that.
And I 100% agree with that message, for example.
So I don't, just like I don't lump all the homeless together, I don't lump all the activists together.
I think that all of these categories become very, you know, it's different tiers to them.
But in this particular case, during COVID, the college kids really had a big voice on freedom and people should be able to smoke pot on the streets and live in these camps and do whatever they want.
And they would come and they would meet up and they would drive here from all over the place with their stickers on their cars from All the great schools all up and down the coast, not just in LA, but all up and down.
You saw brown stickers even on some of the cars.
And they were all young kids.
And a couple of them I would ask, who pays for your lifestyle?
My parents do.
And they would say it with such confidence.
And I was like, wow.
So do your parents know that you're out here doing this?
Well, why?
What does that matter to you?
And they would get very hostile towards me asking these questions.
And a big part of me was like, wow, to have that freedom and that bliss of naive thought.
I have 25-year-old boys and I think about some of the things that they come to me and talk to my husband and I about or the newest tattoo that they get.
I'm like, to live in bliss...
It's such a magical place.
But as leaders of a community and of a state and of a city, I don't think that there's any room for them to think that this is a positive thing or a positive group of people to feel popular with.
Do you think the leaders are following what the activists want?
Because they're loud and they're online and they're...
I think the leaders know that these young guys know social media better than they do.
And that with social media, you reach a lot of people.
And these young activists are quick to Twitter.
They're quick to tweet.
They're just faster on the pulse of things.
And so you have to be careful if you're a leader and you're not popular right now.
And I think that that's something that's just shifted recently, just with our state and our country, where popularity has become a huge desire.
And I think that these young college kids mainly They give this level of popularity.
They come out and they go, we're charging phones today.
You know, it is a big part of the coverage of the popularity thing.
And this was with Echo Park.
You know, so you had a lot of these same people who go from one city to another where the cleanups were happening and, you know, doing their popularity outreach.
But now that schools are back in, that group has dropped because it was something to do during that time.
Now, what do you recommend to people in your community?
What do you think people should do?
I think that people in my community need to have cameras on their home.
I think that you need to be able to be willing to speak up and show what's happening.
We have only one public library in all of Venice, which is insane just to start with.
But even more insane is that there's an encampment of 60, I believe it was the last count, was 60 tents, and half of those were put there by our city councilman.
I think that people need to speak up about these things.
This is a place where kids are supposed to be able to get a book and go sit on the grass and read a book.
We can't do that.
We should not have situations like Hollywood or like the girl who was just murdered in the store.
And then just today, I see two girls were almost raped.
They were...
I just followed and someone caught it on the camera of their home camera.
I witnessed a woman, this man was trying to burn her in a tent alive and her screams, her shouts, her fear.
Another gentleman from the encampment tried to help her and then they got into an altercation and to the point where it scared him off.
He walked away.
He left this violator there.
Attacking this woman.
And it's not okay.
You have to speak up.
You have to call the police.
Even if you don't believe that they're coming in time.
You have to call because it keeps a record.
So no matter what, call the police.
Call, call, call.
And the idea of people thinking, oh, but we shouldn't have police coming to these issues.
I would love to have a conversation with some of those people, too.
I do believe that we should have people who have mental health training.
But I also think that we have to have police.
And that's only from a personal level because, again, I've grown up in a situation where I had environmental trauma.
I had a stepfather who was highly abusive.
And I could not imagine calling for some college kid to come and talk him down from a drug binge when he was trying to kill my mother, for example.
Like, it just wouldn't have worked.
And sometimes your only comfort at night as a child, and that's who I mainly focus on protecting, Is someone being locked up for the night?
I've spoken with mothers and I know personally mothers who beg the police to come and take their child to jail because they know that that's the only way that they can get them sober for 24 hours or 48 hours to get them back on their mental health medication.
It has to sometimes be forced.
And for these advocates who are very against these types of measures, I would love for them to speak to parents who are going through this stuff personally.
I would love for them to speak to people who have been addicted to drugs, who have gone through the process of getting clean and sober, and ask them, do they like what they see?
Because when I speak to the people who have been on the street and who have lived this life and who are now clean and sober, They can't even go into that world comfortably.
It's almost like being prepared for battle.
And we're now normalizing this, and it's not okay.
It's not safe.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much for watching.
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