- [Announcer] Documentary for the Cecil Hotel.
- [Man] Is there something evil going on here?
- There's a neighborhood in Los Angeles
that we need to talk about,
it's called Skid Row.
Last month, there was this really popular
true crime documentary on Netflix.
It was like the number one most watched show
here in the United States and maybe around the world.
And it was about this hotel
that was right here in Skid Row,
it's about a 21 year old Canadian woman
who disappeared after exhibiting
some very strange behavior in an elevator.
And yes, there's gonna be plenty of spoilers here.
- [Woman] The Hotel Cecil is content
and it's got some sort of uncanny force.
- The show is haunting, and confusing,
and thrilling, and an appalling and insensitive abuse
of the power of documentary filmmaking.
The whole series feels like a true crime documentary
but there ends up being no crime at all.
And the whole energy of this series
is founded on the idea that this hotel
is haunted with dark energy.
- [Man] I think that we're hoping for a ghost
because it's what we've come to expect.
- I'm here to tell you that the Cecil Hotel
in Los Angeles doesn't have dark energy,
that's a tantalizing, but very lazy explanation.
And it exonerates the people and policies
that built modern day LA.
Instead, there's a much bigger story here.
One that the documentary decides
to largely ignore or mischaracterize.
The story worth telling here about this hotel
and the neighborhood in which it resides
is the story of how cities draw boundaries.
These subtle borders that are meant to
contain the city's least wanted people.
Once you understand what this looks like
and how it happened in LA,
you can understand how it happens in a lot of cities
and it helps you understand
what's really going on with the Cecil Hotel.
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] It's the story of a city
in the microcosm of the "American Dream."
- Okay, first, let's establish
what and where the Cecil Hotel is in LA.
Here's Downtown LA,
and you have this Financial District here
with all these big buildings.
A few streets over it, you have the Cecil Hotel,
right on the border of this
50 city block neighborhood called Skid Row,
right in the heart of Downtown LA.
Go to Skid Row today and you are quickly
brought into the plight of basic survival
for nearly 5,000 homeless people.
- The reason why I come to so many tents out of here
is because people can't afford to live in a house.
- Nearly half of them are considered to have
serious mental illness
and life expectancy here is 48 years old,
30 years less than the US average.
This small block of streets is surrounded
by highly developed districts
that every year become more shiny and more expensive.
So how did Skid Row,
this one small block of Downtown
become where so many of the city's sick
and marginalized gathered?
(upbeat music)
Way back when California
was first taken from Mexico
to become part of the United States,
loads of Americans were moving West,
moving to California.
Some of them were looking for gold
and some were just looking for a new start.
The US used to be really good at railroads,
and they built a railroad across the entire country.
That railroad ended right here in LA,
right in the location of modern day Skid Row.
- [Reporter] There is probably no single area
holding so much of charm and beauty
and the good things of life as Southern California.
- [Johnny] We see a lot of people arriving
around this train station, looking for work.
This area developed a reputation as being
full of transient people coming to the West
with dreams of gold and a new start,
and instead ending up with neither, no jobs, no homes.
It was a part of town that no one wanted to go.
- [Reporter] Los Angeles County
has a gregarious fun zone
where everybody has a good time.
- As LA grew, so did the bad reputation of Skid Row
and so did the homeless population.
The neighborhood was sort of for the untouchables
and when anyone considered helping them
or figuring out a policy to solve this, people resisted.
One columnist of the day wrote, quote,
don't help this class,
it is a crime against the community to do so.
The Cecil Hotel was eventually constructed in the 1920s
right here on the outskirts
of what was becoming this undesirable part of town.
At the time, it was a Grand Hotel
built for business travelers.
What turned the Cecil Hotel from this to this
wasn't dark energy or mysterious forces,
nor was it the fact that
YouTube played a concert on the roof
right next to the Cecil Hotel in the late '80s.
(rock music playing)
No, no, no, no, no, no.
What happened to the Cecil Hotel
is something that happened
to this whole neighborhood, starting in the 1970s.
When city planners and politicians
started reinvisioning Downtown LA,
drawing lines on maps to contain
the growing population of mentally ill and homeless.
The goal here was to bulldoze
all the decaying buildings in Downtown
and to make way for a new business district,
full of tall shiny buildings.
The original demolition plan included Skid Row,
but the community leaders fought back
saying, listen city of LA,
if you demolish Skid Row
without solving the underlying issues,
you're just gonna have a bunch of smaller Skid Rows
pop up scattered throughout the city.
Homelessness isn't gonna go away
if you just bulldoze the neighborhood,
the city was like, yeah, you have a point.
So they agreed upon setting firm borders,
that would be the quote, containment zone
where the homeless and mentally ill
could stay so that the surrounding neighborhoods
could build nice big office buildings
without the presence of these undesirable populations.
Within Skid Row, they constructed public bathrooms
and benches and public spaces
so that as the city officials said,
those amenities could quote,
act as a magnet to hold
the undesirable population elements in Skid Row.
Undesirable population elements, wow,
that is just a fantastic way
to take human beings and turn them into units.
(bells chiming)
So weird.
Even though the borders of Skid Row
based on the city plan were not like walls,
they were just city streets
but the city planners made sure
that they would have quote,
'strong edges' that will act as a buffer
between Skid Row and the rest of the central city.
They promised that when Skid Row residents
enter the buffer, the psychological comfort
of the familiar Skid Row environment will be lost.
So how did they do this?
One way they did this is with harsh lighting.
Back in the old days,
they had these historic lights on main street
which is one of the borders of Skid Row.
They replaced those with like harsh prison lights
to make it very, just unpleasant to walk across the street.
They put locks on the trash cans
in the surrounding districts
so people wouldn't leave Skid Row
to come scavenge for food.
Residents of Skid Row also reported that
police officers would be patrolling these borders
and anytime someone would cross
they would be approached,
yet, they would be left alone for a time
if they stayed peaceful within the containment zone.
All of this happened throughout
the '70s, '80s and '90s
as rent prices started to go up
all throughout this area.
So rent is getting more expensive,
at the same time, funding for mental health institutions
was drying up and the war on drugs
propagated by the Reagan Administration was also heating up.
Skid Row literally became a dumping grounds
for mental health institutions
who would drop off patients right here
knowing that they would be contained.
The idea of saving Skid Row
by drawing borders around it
came from the community leaders of Skid Row itself.
It was a solution to keep affordable housing,
keep the community intact,
but soon this solution was used as an excuse
to neglect the people within these lines.
Street cleaners and trash collectors
came less frequently than in the rest of LA.
City maintenance for streets
sort of stopped showing up,
but the one city resource
that did show up in abundance was the police,
whose job it was to keep these quote,
undesirable population elements within this zone,
criminalizing the poverty inside these lines,
and yes, here's the Cecil Hotel
right within these firm containment borders.
So if you look at the Cecil Hotel under this lens,
you now see the danger, the drugs, the violence,
not being caused by some creepy dark energy
that lured in this woman from Canada.
Instead, this was the result of a policy
intentionally creating borders within the city
to keep the city's problems contained into one area.
A spot that had real culture
and community values and history,
and yet because of these dehumanizing policies,
Skid Row became defined
as a series of statistics and social problems.
What I've found by looking into these policies
is that this wasn't an inevitable course of action,
the city could've put its money
and effort behind the harder thing to do,
which is addressing the underlying issues
of unemployment, mental illness, drug addiction,
and unaffordable housing stock.
And yet the policy they pursued
was fixing this problem with a band-aid,
using policing and the power of redevelopment.
The real problems were swept under the rug
to be dealt with another day,
keeping the city's problems contained
neatly in this border and hiding them from view.
(bright upbeat music)
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thank you all for watching,
lots more to come.
I have been all over the place
when it comes to topics.
I feel like it's been Russia,
not in Russia, I'm fascinated with Russia lately.
It's been Janet Jackson,
it's been the US Military,
Skid Row, I just, I'm all over the place.
I've got a really big story
coming out early next month
that I'm excited to share with you.
So stay tuned, subscribe to my channel
if you are not subscribed,
and I'll talk to you later, bye-bye.