Hi, Chrissy. So I'm about to see what I can do about making a recording like you asked me to.

A few weeks after the coronavirus began washing over the country, I started talking to a woman who I can't stop thinking about.

She asked me not to use her real name for this story. Instead, she wants to use the name Pebble. It was her grandma's name.

I am just walked through the entrance of the wine guard and the security guard there told me to spend my arms and legs right now.

Pebble is living in a place called the Wine Guards Center on Skid Row in Los Angeles. Skid Row is a neighborhood with an astonishing concentration of unhoused people living on the streets,

intense, in emergency shelters and in big transitional housing facilities like the Wine Guard. This huge 11 story building.

So I'm walking into the space where we have to wait for the elevator. We're down to one elevator for a thousand people. It's going to be like at least a 40 minute wait and the elevator is about four and a half by five.

Six adults are squishing into that space. It's hard to socially distance at the Wine Guard. The shared spaces are crowded. On any given night, the Wine Guard provides interim housing to about 600 people. Plus, there's all the support staff.

There are elderly people living here, disabled people, people just coming out of prison, people like Pebble fleeing domestic violence. Some people stay for just a night. Others for weeks or months.

Pebble has been staying at the Wine Guard since last fall.

Some of the restaurants now, there's approximately 70-80 people. On this floor, we were down to one bathroom for three days, three toilets and three sinks.

But the women use those to... as restrooms because there's not enough toilets. They brush their teeth, they wash their private parts.

I asked Pebble to make some recordings of her life because I'd been wondering, as most of the country was being asked to stay at home, what it feels like when you don't have a stable home.

Welcome to the uncertain hour.

I'm Chrissy Clark and we're bringing you a sort of emergency pop-up season to help make sense of this most uncertain hour we're in,

where inequalities that have always been in our country are put in high relief. We're calling it a history of now.

And today, we're going to talk about shelters, transitional housing and other big facilities where unhoused people are living in institutional congregate settings.

In the middle of a global pandemic where close quarters mean high risks, these places have become some of the nation's coronavirus hot spots.

The coronavirus is spreading in Baltimore homeless shelters.

New York City is moving 6,000 homeless adults from shelters into hotels.

The LA mission is now sanitizing its building three times a day.

Those working to end homelessness say if the city doesn't do more, COVID-19 will continue to spread rapidly and lead to even more death.

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