Documentary: On the Streets

This documentary follows journalist and filmmaker, Lisa Biagiotti from the L.A. Times, as she sheds light on the homeless crisis in Los Angeles, California. When this film was created in 2015, there were 44,000 homeless people in L.A county. According to npr.org, in 2020 there were 66,433 people who live on the streets, in shelters and in vehicles within the county, which is a 12.7% increase from 2019. Also, within LA city limits, the number of people experiencing homelessness was 41,290, a 14.2% increase since 2019.

As a SoCal local myself, I took a drive this week through downtown L.A. for the first time since before the pandemic, and the increase in homeless people was obvious on every corner of the streets. "Tent cities" can be spotted everywhere. It was an overwhelming sight that almost seems impossible to overcome when it comes to eradicating homelessness from L.A. Even in 2015, homelessness was becoming so vast that it was spreading outside the city as encampments were constantly being torn down and forced to move elsewhere.

According to the doc, 13,000 people a month become homeless in L.A. county alone.. Some of the people that Biagiotti interviewed surprisingly had full time jobs, but still couldn’t afford the high price rent of living in L.A., so they ended up not making ends meet and becoming homeless. It's not just a matter of housing people who need to be sheltered, it's also a matter of how to keep them staying housed, which is the difficult part with cost of living continuously rising. One woman, who was interviewed in the film, was sleeping on the sidewalk outside the prison because she was waiting for her husband to be released from jail and had nowhere else to go. She was also autistic and epileptic and couldn't stay in the shelters due to her night seizures and need for her service dog to be with her to get through them. Another interviewee was a 24-year-old transgender girl who has been in and out of juvenile hall and living on the streets since age 14. A young homeless man with a severe limp and difficulty walking told Biagiotti that he was shot twice at 11 years old and suffers from constant pain.

The film also followed around a police officer doing his rounds in Skid Row. This man knew the people living there intimately and had a positive relationship with them. According to him, the unfortunate reason of why people end up living on the streets of Skid Row is due to drug addiction, which is something that no one can easily climb their way out of. You can see the empathy he had as he spoke of those he knew by name that had died on the streets, as “human beings dying in garbage” surrounded by drugs, violence, and rape. These are just a few of the thousands of homeless people suffering from poverty and lack of shelter in L.A. because they don't have anyone in their lives to help them. This film made me realize my connection with homeless people as a privileged woman all my life, because not only are we all human beings trying to survive in the same world, but I understand that becoming homeless can happen to anyone, even me, and it's all a matter of circumstances and not just whether you worked hard enough in life. As a young college student living out of his car in order to afford tuition put it in the film, "becoming homeless is a rational decision made under extreme duress." I was so inspired by Lisa Biagiotti and how she interacted with the homeless people featured throughout the doc. She looked them in the eye, saw them, and treated them with dignity and respect. Her kindness, smile, and demeanor went a long way when it came to them feeling comfortable enough to open up intimate details of their lives to her. My favorite line from the film was when she said that the homelessness around her has "become so visible, that it turned invisible."

Go to youtube.com/watch?v=WUsJcPc8g0A to watch On the Streets for free on YouTube.