http://www.lavoice.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1176
Now that it's clear that LA is not a big enough town for the both of us - it's time for one of us to get out of Dodge. My challenge to Steve Lopez is posted at the above link. For more details also see my below post.
I know that survey very well.
ReplyDeleteBut the reason why this figure is impossible is that depending on what you call the boundaries of Skid Row, to have 10,000 people sleeping on the streets every night would mean that anywhere from 200 to 800 people would have to be sleeping on every single block of Skid Row every single night.
And since I live one block from Skid Row I can tell you - this is not only not even remotely true, it is not even physiclaly possible.
Brady, have you made any effort to find out where Steve Lopez got the number?
ReplyDeleteMr. Wonderland, No, I am not the person who gave Mike Davis a hard time. I am the person who proved that Mike Davis is, essentially, a fiction writer.
ReplyDeleteAnd I am willing to accept 50 blocks as the size of Skid Row for purposaes of argument - even though that has not been the lcoal definition - but that would still mean that 200 homeless would have to be sleeping every night on each of those blocks for the 10,000 figure to be true.
The figure is just total and complete... fiction. And there are many, many other oft quoted figures floating out there that are equally fictional.
And as I said somewhere - Lopez likely got it from... the LA Times... a paper that not that long ago stated that the majority of the people on Skid Row... were women and minor children. And the same paper that said last spring that housing prices have collapsed in San Francisco. Not will collapse - but they they have already collapsed, even though prices were still rising at record prices and they then continued to rise after the still uncorrected article was published.
And the author of that article was... drum roll please... Mike Davis.
No offense wonderland , but that article by your own words says it was 1981.
ReplyDeleteIn those days - this was the summer of ’81 – I was only a few steps away from being homeless myself. I was barely able to pay the rent on my large one-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive in North Hollywood, right around the corner from Randy Quaid’s ranch house off Whitsett. Dennis Quaid and his then-wife P.J. Soles lived in a small redwood cottage on a piece of property adjoining Randy’s.
NOw the boundaries have shrunk , from 3rd to 7th , over from LOs ANgeles to central.
Now of course if you count those in the misions you go from maybe 1000 sleeping on the street to 3000 because of the missions , maybe.
10,000 homless sleeping on the streets in Central City East at night is nota right number.
NOw , if you count those who would not dare sleep on the streets in cnetral City East, the numbers go up dramatically.
NOw whetehr or not Brady
is speculating , this of course I don't think has anything to do with this. The facts are the facts.
Nope, completely 100% wrong on all counts.
ReplyDeleteBrady Westwater (a pen name I took which became my only name within a few years) is the only name I have used since UCLA in the 1960's, much less when I wrote about Mike Davis in... 1998/1999 - over thirty years later.
And the only reason anyone knew my birth name was that I gave it to a reporter in case they wanted to verify if I was born in LA.
That reporter then - for her own reasons - lied about what I had said to her about my bith name. But every job I have had, everything I have ever written or done after the age of 21 was done as Brady Westwater and even my own family only called me by that time by the time I was in my early 20's.
As for the lies about me 'protecting' my real estate career, when I wrote my Mike Davis essays 1998/1999 - not one word of which has ever been shown to be in error - I had already left real estate but had to remain in Malibu to hospice my Mom during her final year before I moved downtown full time in the late 1990's.
Otherwise, I would have been long gone from real estate even before that. And I was a strong proponent of buying park land when I lived Malibu - and single-handedly wrote the entire aplication for park funds for the City of Malibu in the big green bond issue that did not pass in the late 1990's.
I was also an advocate for stricter fire safety regulations, mandatory replacement of wood shake roofs (which I am going to work for in the city of LA now)and protecting sensitive areas.
As for what I wrote about Mike Davis and Malibu fires - there may have been a few paragraphs, tops, to clear up some of his lies - but that had nothing to do with my interest in correcting his ten record about Los Angeles. And if you want to take my Bunker Hill tour - you can see with your own eyes how Mike Davis is and was a writer of fiction.
Lastly, I gave up my real estate license when I came downtown and even though I try to recruit art galleries, book stores, etc., I neither own any property nor do I accept even one dollar for any leases I do. It's all 100% pro bono.
No problem, and as I said, even with those boundaries, there are not 200 people sleeping on even one of those 50 blocks every night - much less on ALL 50 blocks, which it would take to get 10,000 people sleeping on those blocks.
ReplyDeleteAnd I see you did the research on... THE LONG RIDERS. Are you a Western history buff? My novel I am doing the final edit on is a literary Western, THE LONG RIDER.
And I am ... of course... correcting... a lot of misinformation on the West.