- [Interviewer] Tell me your story, as is,
how long you been out here, what are you doing here.
- Okay, been doing this since summer of 1999,
and I want to give her credit for this,
because with Kerry Morrison, the CEO with this
Hollywood Entertainment District, and she's got
a group like a board of directors,
or whatever they call themselves, anyway.
She works with a group that kind of runs
this entertainment district,
in terms of public corporation back in 96, or 97,
somewhere back in there, to take over the
deficiencies of the city.
Example, they take care of the day to day clean up
on this boulevard, and also the security detail.
You see the blue shirt security guards sometimes
patrolling in a white SUV, sometimes in pairs
walking the streets up and down.
LAPD does very little of that so they need more protection
against crime deterrents and stuff,
so they have a private guard service doing that.
They contract out to it,
and the other is the cleaning company.
This is hired, this company, the name you see here,
The Clean Street, as of May or June of 99.
It replaced the HBT, which was good, but then they didn't do
coverage on stuff like this.
They did the general work and they did well, but they
didn't do the detail work on this kind of stuff,
which is particular to the Walk of Fame.
They decided to just change it over.
She convinced the new company to take me on board
to do these.
I was doing it for a dozen or so individual merchants
for a couple of years earlier.
This is where Kerry Morrison got the idea
that the new company could pick me up and this would
be the first time that we've done a large scale all
over the place, sorry
polishing and clean up.
- [Interviewer] So you're just telling me that
tourists aren't given as much as they used to.
Is it a sign of the times?
- It very probably is.
Energy, we initially thought it'd be energy, the high gas,
$4.87 gallon gas, that cuts into a lot of tourists
vacationing plans.
People stay at home, they go to the local amusement parks
and local movie theaters, the local beaches,
back in LA, they're a coastal city
so they can take advantage
of that, rather than fly or drive to go to a place farther,
distant places, because of the energy.
Then this economy is just kind of,
the bottom fell out of it,
stock market and people have been losing everything
from retirement funds to 401Ks to 501s,
this thing and that and the other thing.
Some of them losing their jobs, therefore health care
and other things that they want to try to hold onto.
So that's cutting into it further.
And it's not the volume of tourism has gone down,
of course, seasonably, but anyway.
It's gone down from up below normal,
like you have two tourist seasons,
mid May to the end of September,
the big summer tour, that's your big tourist season,
schools are out, people can travel with kids and babies
and families.
- [Interviewer] You pretty much,
- From about six weeks from about a week before Thanksgiving
to a week after New Year is another shorter,
winter time tourist season.
Again people travel and see places like this.
It's way down low, like last year and the year before,
it's way down compared to last year and the year before.
- [Interviewer] So you pretty much survive off donations.
- No, I get salary from this company.
I did before Kerry Morrison got me hired with that company
when it took over replacing HBT in 99.
Before then I was doing it for donations.
Some of the shops would pay me for keeping theirs up
and the next thing you know the guy next door would want
his done because it looks so damn good what I was doing,
so I had maybe about a dozen of these.
A guy like this would give me maybe free sodas,
maybe another one would give me a pizza
about every two, three times I do theirs.
Others would give me a few dollars in cash,
like the guy who does the windows, glass cleaning
for he has a little few dollars
and that kind of thing there.
I, myself, lost a job when a lot of the TV companies
went out of business in the mid 90s TV repair.
- [Interviewer] Is that what you did before you ended up
on the streets?
- I did that for 25 years, yeah.
- [Interviewer] How did you end up on the streets?
- Well, like I said, I lost my job in 97,
January of 97.
The company didn't go out of business until later,
but I just gave it up because I knew he was going down
the drain.
I could see it going, so I just said okay.
Just got a little bit ahead of it there
and studied this before I hit the streets down here.
I was really kind of like prepared for it and ready to go,
using it kind of temporary, then when a job would come
available I would use it to,
like snakeboard and then go back the other way.
I tried it to be a temporary situation,
not ongoing like these guys that don't plan
their future, they don't know what tomorrow's
going to look like, or get to next year.
I had something ahead, planned out ahead of me,
when I got hired by the company in 99,
so now I've been with them for nine years
and maybe five or six months.
Whatever the deal is.
If I am with them by next say, maybe, June, July, or
whatever, I've got to check the hiring date on that,
make sure, it could be a ten year anniversary,
next summer.
- [Interviewer] Yeah, you've been doing this
for over, almost ten years.
- When I was tinkering with these things and chemicals
and watching like Scientology,
cleaning buildings and brass ornaments and fixtures,
it got to me just to how to get these things into much
better shape than they were.
The time I was fooling around with these things
and good old high school chemistry.
- [Interviewer] So what's the issues of homelessness
out here?
- Terrible.
- [Interviewer] Could you talk about that?
How do people survive?
What's going on, do you see it getting worse?
- Well if the economy's getting worse,
you're going to see more of that.
Rents are about as high as they can possibly be.
When the good times.
That's why everybody that rents an apartment has roommates,
like the college kids did when they live in off campus
apartments instead of in the dormitory,
that can be bound by their campus rules,
lights out now, no partying, no smoking in the buildings,
this, that and the other.
Apartments outside the campus.
They keep the cost down.
Sometimes it'd be three, four, five, six people
living in one apartment and sharing it.
This is what's going on over here because the rent
is so high.
As far as homelessness, the people that,
some of them, because you got the subway,
since the subway began running in 1999,
the eventual subway is bringing more and more of them
from downtown LA up to here.
You know there's a big project that's ...
- [Passerby] Ah, it's good.
- Several years to renovate and revitalize downtown LA,
bring it up to where it's more tourist
and business friendly now.
- [Interviewer] What do you think the solution is?
- It would be forcing some of the homeless guys
to come up this way.
- [Interviewer] What do you think the solution is,
how can people help?
- It isn't easy, that's why it's been around,
the problem has been so chronic, it's been so long,
it's not a new problem, really.
It's been around, but it's just been getting more and more
worse because of the economy's going down the drain
and the jobs are harder to find.
Those are, a lot of those guys have mental problems
and your healthcare system is being cut to the bone,
because if you've got a state economy,
it's much worse than the national economy.
Waivers, what I'm thinking is the state won't delay
the national economic recovery and slow down its recovery.
The state is in very bad shape, fiscally and economically.
The other day, Schwarzenagger had to get the
legislature in a special emergency session
to revisit the budget that was almost three months late
because the cash flow problem reduced sales tax revenues
and lottery sales are way down and people are just cutting
back on everything.
So therefore, they're billions of dollars in the hole
deeper than they thought they were.
So now they're having to revisit.
He said they're having to cut from like education
between two to maybe four billion dollars cuts in education
from the state to the counties and cities
that run the public schools.
- [Interviewer] We only have a few seconds left.
What do you want people to know about you?
- Well, you mean, me personally, or my description
of this.
- [Interviewer] You personally.
Got about ten seconds, what do you want people to know?
- Okay this has the potential for being one of the
world's biggest resorts but we need to get a lot of things
turned around and we need to restore the opening
of these movie theaters and get a lot of hotels and build
hostels and inns in low and medium prices
as well as the high end
and get more thousands of tourists to stay in the area
so they spend their money in the area.
Where they stay, they spend their money.
It's a proven fact.
It's been known for centuries, it's nothing new.
This is what this area needs to get its economic
situation better.