Shawn Pleasants Lived On The Street For Ten Years. Can He Help Solve the Homeless Crisis?

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2021

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Approximately 554,000 Americans experienced homelessness last year, and over half of were in California. In Los Angeles County alone, 66,000 people were unhoused in 2020, a 16 percent increase from the previous year. Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for the homeless in Los Angeles who often speaks about policy issues and ideas for addressing the crisis. He was also homeless himself for ten years, living for most of that time in an encampment in Koreatown, where he and his longtime husband dealt with medical problems, addiction issues, street violence and tried several times to find jobs and housing. Shawn also happens to be a Yale graduate who once worked on Wall Street and later owned his own business. The stories of how he entered and finally escaped homelessness are remarkable. But even more remarkable is his perspective on the bigger crisis. Shawn spoke with Meghan about not just the day to day life of someone living on the street but also what city and state officials are getting wrong about when they talk about how to fix the problem.

Guest Bio:

Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for unhoused people in Los Angeles. A former banker and business owner, he lived on the street for ten years. He has been housed since late 2019.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I apply for a job.
0:05.0	I set up my what online through LinkedIn with, oh, I don't have an address.
0:12.0	Oh wait a minute, I have nowhere to use the internet.
0:14.0	Oh wait a man, I have no way to use the computer.
0:16.0	I have my resume.
0:18.0	Oh, I can't keep it clean because I have nowhere to keep it at all. And, oh, I have an
0:22.2	interview, but I don't have any clothes to wear to the interview. Oh, I finally got some clothes
0:26.2	to wear in their interview, but they're not clean. And I don't have any more to iron them or
0:31.1	suppress them. My clothes are clean, but now I'm not clean on this day when we have the two things together and they lined up. And I fill out the application and the employer goes, well, you know, you don't have an address or, you know, where can we send?
0:44.3	We just send you something by mail. There's nowhere to send it to.
0:47.3	Or in other cases where you get a job and they find out that you're homeless and they fire you because you're homeless. That's kind of how
0:56.3	that one goes. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dowm. Before I introduce my
1:06.7	guest, I want to say that I have spent the last several months looking for someone who could talk
1:11.8	about the homelessness crisis in a way that most people, or at least I, had not heard before.
1:18.2	Just some quick numbers. Data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that
1:23.2	last year, more than half a million Americans experienced homelessness at some point.
1:28.9	More than half of all homeless people in the country are in California, a state that had the
1:33.7	biggest increase of all states in homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic.
1:38.8	The Los Angeles Homelessness Service Authority, or Lhasa, reported more than 66,000 people living without homes in
1:47.0	L.A. County in 2020, and that's a 16% increase from the previous year. Now, there's endless finger
1:53.9	pointing about why the situation has become so catastrophic and no end of propositions about how to
2:00.1	address it, but coherent plans or even
	...

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