Here’s my stream for @HappsNews on skid row with Franklin Aruburtha 10 years after I did an LA Weekly cover story on him. Franklin made a documentary on houselessness when he was 14 living the nafarous Ford hotel in skid row.
Skid row is 50 square blocks of human misery. It’s also the largest houseless community in the U.S. and a vortex of love. What some people have called the human zoo, is actually a series of neighborhoods, a community of people living in unspeakable conditions. Franklin saw things as a child that no one should ever see.
Franklin Arburtha is skid row famous; it’s a big part of his story. He’s appeared on Tyra, Montel, in the LA Times and Weekly.
My American “Third World Country” – LA’s Skid Row https://t.co/TG4shYi9Xp
— Happs (@HappsNews) October 24, 2018
These days, he’s thriving, reemerging as a DTLA filmmaker. In this stream he walks the streets of his old neighborhood and and comes full circle to the solution when he visits his childhood mentor, Charles Porter from United Coalition East Prevention Project (UCEPP) and checks out thier new “Refresh Spot” a skid row hygiene center and a community business model that employs locals and is conceivably the solution to the devestating effects of poverty on skid row and beyond.
The magic ingredient in UCEPP and Franklin’s success is love. Big love from skid row.
As of 2019 there is a clean up occuring in skid row put in place by California’s government that involves the trash and sanitation teams removing tents and throwing away belongings of the homeless people of L.A. by the masses. This cleanup is being done to clean the sidewalks of downtown L.A. and make room for industrial remodeling of buildings but it is also disturbing the lives of the homeless people who have no where else to go. Will you be doing a follow up of this situation to have it on document of the progress of the history of Skid Row L.A.?