HomeLandLab Podcast

Designers Sara Zewde and Sloan Dawson were startled by the differences in how homelessness was manifest in West Coast cities, including their new home in Seattle, compared to cities in the east. Surprised and disquieted by how desensitized so many residents seemed to be and how commonplace visible homelessness had become, they sought to find a creative outlet to respond to the people they saw struggling to survive. In speaking with Sara and Sloan, I started our conversation by asking, as East Coast transplants, the what did you notice about homelessness that was different on the West Coast.

John Malpede, the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, has been working with the housed and unhoused community members of Skid Row since the mid 1980’s. Through his work, he helps empower community members through art performances and exhibitions. By creating programs that tell the story of this unique community, the LAPD has not only strengthened community bonds, but have also helped to acknowledge the hardships overcome and celebrate the recognition received by people who, in so many ways, have been told their lives are less than.

I caught up with John during the 8th Annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists at Gladys Park in Los Angeles last fall. Amongst bands, visual artists and a warm southern California sun, we discussed the work of the LAPD and the importance of arts in recrafting the narrative of the Skid Row community. I hope you enjoy the conversation with John, with the background of performers from the community singing and celebrating with one another.

When I began this project, I wanted to speak with as many people as possible , from as many as many perspectives as possible, about the overlap of homelessness and public space. I assumed I would speak to City Council members, representatives from non-profit organizations and people who had experienced homelessness, but I’m not sure that I ever thought that I’d be speaking with an Assesssor. Then I met John Wilson. With a career in public service, John has thought about how the housing affordability crisis has led to an increase in homelessness. When he was elected to his position in King County, WA, John decided he could help change the conversation about the role that public lands could play in solving homelessness. To learn more, I recently sat down with John to learn more about what he’s doing.

I first met Tamika Butler when she was the director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Brilliant, funny, and not prone to pulling punches, she is simultaneously personally magnetic and politically unapologetic, holding those of us who have a hand in shaping the built environment to account. Now serving as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, she brings the lens of a civil rights attorney to her work, helping to reveal and correct the inherent built environment inequities for people of color, people who are poor, and/or who may be experiencing homelessness. Given her diverse background, I wanted to hear Tamika’s perspectives on how homelessness intersects with transportation and open space in the City with the highest unsheltered population in America: Los Angeles. Her insights did not disappoint, and I hope that you will enjoy this conversation with Tamika.

One of her previous speeches, the keynote address at Transportation Alternatives' Vision Zero Cities conference in 2017, is referenced in the recording. You can watch it here.

On today’s podcast I interview Allen Compton, Principal and Founder of SALT Landscape Architects and Rachel Allen of Rachel Allen Architecture, who, among other projects, are helping to reimagine one of the more contested public spaces in America: Pershing Square. Our conversation in their studio space in Downtown LA’s Fashion District, was discursive and exploratory, probing the themes of homelessness, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design and exploring how those design disciplines are poised to respond to the challenges of homelessness in a city where the phenomenon is most prevalent and widespread. We explore the deliberate design of Skid Row, Allen’s work for the Skid Row Housing Trust and the future of downtown LA’s open spaces, but we started the conversation with their reflections not as designers, but as Angelinos.

One of the ways that housing insecurity is arriving in cities is through the growth of people who are turning to vehicular living as an affordable housing arrangement in the urban context. Whether sleeping in recreational vehicles or simply in their own cars, people who have been priced out of traditional housing stock are now turning to the public space of the right of way to find a safe space to sleep. Yet with the growth of this type of housing, municipalities are finding the need to develop new policy tools to address the safety, security and concerns about how people are using this public resource. To discuss this phenomenon, I sat down with Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s tenure has seen the issue of vehicular housing or vehicular living grow, and, recognizing the limitations of current policies, Councilmember O’Brien has proposed draft legislation to try a new approach in Seattle.

Sometimes an interview comes together through serendipity. While in Los Angeles for a concert, a friend shared an in-depth article about the history of LA’s housing stock called Forbidden City: How Los Angeles Banned Some of its Most Popular Buildings by Mark Vallianatos, one of the co- founders and planning director for of Abundant Housing LA and a member of the urban change think tank LA Plus. Quickly I reached out to Mark to see if he would be able to get together on short notice, which is how I found myself sitting on a bench in one of Los Angeles’ Union Station’s courtyard, talking with Mark while the business of the station played out in the background. While the story that Mark lays out here is about Los Angeles, its broad strokes have played out in cities across the united states. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

There is a level of opacity surrounding so much related to homelessness, and perhaps no area is more shrouded and misunderstood than the laws that guide where and when unhoused people can eat, sleep, and live in public spaces. To get one perspective about where the law and homelessness intersect, I recently sat down with Breanne Schuster of the ACLU of Washington to speak about what laws guide municipal responses to homelessness and how the ACLU works with cities to ensure those laws are adhered to.

One of the most insightful and eye-opening books I’ve read this year has been Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and in his authoritative account of this chapter of our history, he tracks laws, policies and regulations from the early 1900s through to contemporary America to show how specific government actions either created or fortified existing patterns of residential segregation throughout the country. In laying bare this history, Rothstein shows how these governmental actions have continuing ripple effects that we, as a country, are still confronting today and he invites us to confront this legacy for the betterment of our democracy. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Richard, and I invite you to read his book.

Toward the end of our conversation, Richard mentions a speech by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. The text of that speech can be found here.

In every community, one of the city agencies most impacted by homelessness are parks departments. For people who don’t have anywhere else to go, parks become refuges of safety within the city, but the impacts of homelessness can also erode the public’s perception of parks as a public place that is safe and welcoming to everyone in the community. To understand how the City of Denver balances these competing perspectives on homelessness, I sat down with Scott Gilmore, Denver’s Deputy Executive Director of Parks and Planning to hear how his agency is addressing the homelessness crisis, and to begin, I started by asking Scott to introduce me to Denver’s park system.