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04/07/06
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
Hollywood is home to thousands of runaway teens, but does homeless have to mean hopeless?
Devlin Murphy>> A lot of us want to work. Most of want to work. Most of us want to go to school. Most of us want to do something with their lives.
Fran Reichenbach>> You can just call this Hollywood Skid Row from then on because people will be attracted to this place, lining up to avail themselves of social services.
Val Zavala>> And then, how many planets orbit the sun? Hold on before you answer. A new discovery is changing our view of the solar system.
These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> There are enough homeless people in Los Angeles County to fill up the Rose Bowl and, yes, many of them do end up on Skid Row. But many others like young runaways end up in Hollywood and, as Sam Louie tells us, that makes for a very different kind of homeless problem.
Sam Louie>> When you think of the homeless, the first place that comes to mind is Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and it's true that about four thousand homeless scratch for survival amid crime and squalor, but our homeless problem doesn't stop there. Los Angeles's most famous neighborhood is also a magnet for the homeless. Behind all the big new projects, the glitz and glamour of theaters, shops and tourist attractions lies a bleaker reality that has not gone away.
Fran Reichenbach>> I've seen a growing population of homeless people in this area and it seems that it's not going to stop any time soon.
Sam Louie>> Fran Reichenbach has lived in Hollywood for twenty years. She's the founder of the Beechwood Canyon Neighborhood Association.
Fran Reichenbach>> From the tourist point of view, this is a wonderful place. I saw everything. I really saw everything. What I didn't want to see was that I had to watch my purse. I didn't want to see that I couldn't walk safely in the evening time.
Sam Louie>> Hollywood's homeless are different from those on Skid Row. Skid Row draws an older population, many with mental illness and addictions. But in Hollywood, it's a different crowd. Many are young and most are runaways.
David Brinkman>> They're victims of physical or sexual abuse that cannot go home. Their lives on the streets are horrific. If they could go home, they would. None of them want to be here.
Sam Louie>> David Brinkman is the Executive Director of "My Friend's Place".
David Brinkman>> We provide the whole gamut of human services that a young person would need. Everything from food and clothing and the basic needs of showers and beds and it becomes more sophisticated as we treat them for health care, mental health issues, vocational training and job placement.
Sam Louie>> Brinkman says some of these young people have jobs or could get one with a little help, but even a paycheck doesn't put a roof over their heads.
David Brinkman>> We work with plenty of young people each year and that's their lives. They work at the movie theaters or the grocery stores in this neighborhood and they sleep out on the boulevard at night because minimum wage is not enough to end homelessness.
Sam Louie>> And with all the millions going into Hollywood's revitalization, isn't there a way to help the estimated two thousand homeless youth? There is. Los Angeles's Community Redevelopment Agency, or CRA, has plans for this land on Gower Street. It's currently a parking lot, apartment building and teen center, but if plans stay on track, this will be the site of forty to sixty units of permanent housing for the homeless.
Helmi Hisserich>> It will be very much like a regular apartment building, any old apartment building that you see. The only difference is that it will include in it services and those services are really aimed at assisting people who are currently homeless to stay housed.
Sam Louie>> Helmi Hisserich is in charge of the project for the CRA. She says this project should break the cycle that so many homeless get caught in.
Helmi Hisserich>> The way we've been trying to treat homelessness for a number of decades has really been with transitional housing. People have been revolving through the system, going into jail, going into the hospitals, going into shelter care, going back into the streets.
Sam Louie>> The CRA bought the property last October from the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood for almost six million dollars.
Helmi Hisserich>> There's a new sort of emerging trend nationwide and it is that the way to solve homelessness is to actually build housing, to create housing that people can live in permanently. Not shelter, not transitional, but permanent housing.
[Film Clip]
Sam Louie>> Twenty-four year old Devlin Murphy is a potential tenant if the apartment building is constructed. She has been homeless in Hollywood for more than a year. She says she came here after escaping a violent relationship with her ex-boyfriend.
Devlin Murphy>> When you're homeless, you are really unstable and it's hard to keep a job or stay in school because you got to be worried about if you're going to be in a center in time to eat. Are you going to be able to be there to take a shower or to get clothes or to do laundry? Things like that.
Sam Louie>> With the permanent support of housing planned for Hollywood, there's a glimmer of hope.
Devlin Murphy>> Most of us want to work. Most of us want to go to school. Most of us want to do something with their lives.
Sam Louie>> The CRA decided on the project after hearing from concerned people like Sarah Phelps. Phelps is the Associate Director of L.A. Voice, a coalition of churches and synagogues dedicated to helping the homeless.
Sarah Phelps>> As it exists now, you know, a homeless person is out on the street and has to go, you know, one place for meals, another place for a shower, another place to pick up their social security checks, another place to get job training or, you know, a new pair of clothes that are clean. It's almost a full-time job to be homeless and just to survive.
Sam Louie>> And the problem is growing. In recent years, Hollywood has been overwhelmed with more numbers of homeless. At "My Friend's Place", Executive Director David Brinkman sees the impact on a daily basis.
David Brinkman>> Over the last three years, the number of homeless youth that "My Friend's Place" serves has doubled. Three years ago, we were seeing about forty-five young people a day. Right now, we see anywhere between seventy-five and a hundred young people a day.
Sam Louie>> This growth is exactly what worries some business owners and neighbors.
[Film Clip]
Sam Louie>> Samir Salama is the owner of Al Wazir Chicken, a Mediterranean restaurant just two blocks away from the proposed apartments.
Samir Salama>> That's why we're really so concerned about what's going on in the future about this shelter. This will kill our business very, very bad.
Sam Louie>> Samir says it's hard enough on business with throngs of homeless panhandling, loitering and sometimes fighting.
Samir Salama>> Our customers, when they just drive by, see that and they drive away. We start losing little by little of our business.
Sam Louie>> He says it's even worse when they use their property as a public restroom.
Samir Salama>> That's what they use as a bathroom.
Sam Louie>> You might understand why neighbors would be opposed to the project, but surprisingly, a long-time homeless advocate, Ted Hayes, is also unimpressed.
Ted Hayes>> That's not going to do any good. Sixty people? What's going to happen? It's just a waste of money and time.
Sam Louie>> Hayes is the founder of Dome Village, a small community of homeless living in small fiberglass domes near the 110 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles. Hayes believes a better way to invest in the homeless is to take them out of the city.
Ted Hayes>> If you look at the national homeless plan and you study where I talk about transitioning people out of the inner cities to former military bases that are turned into townships with employment and twenty-first century type of industries, that's how we end it.
Sam Louie>> Whether it be military bases, permanent housing or emergency shelters, Los Angeles County is home to the largest population of homeless in the country, both old and young, with jobs and without.
David Brinkman>> They're victims of pedophiles, of pimps, of drug pushers and they're continually exploited by the adult population while sleeping on our streets of our city. So there's no doubt that, if there was a roof over their heads, they could come in off the streets twenty-four hours a day and not have to deal with those horrors of our society.
Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> Imagine cutting our use of gasoline by twenty-five percent. Well, that's the promise behind the California Clean Alternative Energy Initiative. It will put a tax on oil companies and use the revenues, about four billion dollars, to encourage alternative energy sources. But as Toni Guinyard tells us, that idea is not without its critics.
Toni Guinyard>> Welcome to California, the state with the dubious distinction of being rated number one in gas consumption. You don't have to look far to find proof that we are dependent on oil.
Fiona Hutton>> We have to invest in new technologies. We simply can't go at the pace we're going and expect to be living the life we're living and relying on the energy resources we're relying on today in twenty-five years. It just won't work.
Toni Guinyard>> Fiona Hutton is spokesperson for Californians for Clean Energy. It's a coalition supporting the Clean Alternative Energy Initiative. The proposed November ballot measure would dramatically transform how the state funds alternative energy research and production. The initiative calls for taxing every barrel of oil pumped from California oil wells.
Fiona Hutton>> We are the third largest oil-producing state in our nation, yet our oil-producing companies here in the state don't pay what we call an extraction fee. The extraction fee is based on each barrel of oil and it's based on a sliding percentage anywhere from, say, one to six percent based on the actual price per barrel of oil.
Toni Guinyard>> This extraction, or severance, fee would equal four billion dollars over a period of ten years.
Nathan Lewis>> We spend more money in ten minutes buying gas at the pumps than we spend funding solar energy research in the United States in an entire year. So doubling it is still an incredibly small drop in the bucket and it's measured in tens of millions and this initiative is measured in billions.
Toni Guinyard>> Caltech chemistry professor, Dr. Nathan Lewis, is one of several experts consulted by backers of the initiative.
Nathan Lewis>> The idea of this initiative is to bring really environmentally sustainable large-scale energy technologies to the consumer. We want to find ways to roll out solar panels like carpet on your rooftops so you can power your houses in an affordable way and not have to buy electricity from fossil energy, from someone that can jack the price up. We want to develop engines and use technologies that are here right now to get consumers to afford very efficient vehicles that will save people gas and save them money.
Toni Guinyard>> The initiative aimed in part at cutting our use of petroleum by twenty-five percent within a decade and another twenty-five percent every ten years thereafter is not without critics. Scott MacDonald is spokesperson for Californians Against Higher Taxes.
Scott MacDonald>> It is our job to say yes, alternative fuel is important, and not just to say it, but we believe it. We believe that alternative fuel is important. But this is not the answer because it is an initiative which has just run amok. It may sound like a good idea, but it has dreadful consequences for the economy, for the state's budget.
Toni Guinyard>> California Taxpayers Association president, Larry McCarthy, says the initiative will cost the state in the long run. How? Because the money from the extraction fee will go to a dedicated fund, not the state general fund.
Larry McCarthy>> We think the most serious implication of this initiative is what it will do to the state's budget process and the state's general fund. We think that, if this initiative were to be enacted, it is going to reduce revenues for critical public services that the state of California provides.
Toni Guinyard>> For every argument for the initiative --
Nathan Lewis>> Unless we find some other way, we have a serious national security concern that looms bigger and then there's an environmental concern.
Toni Guinyard>> There is an argument against it.
Scott MacDonald>> Let's not forget this severance tax, four billion dollars taken out of our economy, will go to the private pet projects of the people putting it on the ballot. It will not go for education. It will not go for law enforcement. It will not go for health care and it won't fight poverty. It can only be spent on their pet projects.
Fiona Hutton>> Well, I think it's a series of false attacks. At the end of the day, those are people that are saying they're opposed to clean energy and, you know, they're opposed to cleaning our air.
Toni Guinyard>> Both sides say they want clean air and affordable accessible clean energy, but how best to make it happen at a faster pace is at issue.
Nathan Lewis>> So we are working on long-term research that this initiative would accelerate to help get that done more quickly and get it out into the marketplace in a much faster time than we would do on the federal government money alone.
Fiona Hutton>> The initiative sets up a very competitive process for the scientific grants that will be made, as well as the production grants. At the end of the day, we need to fund the best and the brightest, so to speak.
Larry McCarthy>> Putting the state of California on the cutting edge of trying to pick winners and losers in search for alternative fuels and energy efficiency is just, I think, destined for failure. It's going to slow the process down more.
Toni Guinyard>> Over time, we've adjusted to the use of clean energy terms and concepts such as hybrid cars, hydrogen powered vehicles, photovoltaic cells and bio-diesel. But there are other ideas stuck in labs.
Nathan Lewis>> These are painted-on solar cells. We make them like you screen-print t-shirts.
Toni Guinyard>> That initiative supporters want to get to the marketplace and integrated into our lives. The Santa Monica office of the National Resources Defense Council in many ways is a case study of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Here, they put into practice what many others just talk about.
Daniel Hinerfeld>> We're in an energy efficient structure that is using less energy through all sorts of techniques that are on the shelves and they're available to consumers today. We are generating power with photovoltaic cells on the roof, about twenty percent of the power that we use. When you open the windows in this office, the building automatically shuts off either the air conditioning or the heating that's going to your office so that you're not air conditioning or heating the great outdoors.
Toni Guinyard>> The office complex is considered to be America's greenest building.
Daniel Hinerfeld>> There are so many on-the-shelf materials and technologies that could be used to save energy and it's somewhat frustrating that they aren't more widely adopted at this point.
Toni Guinyard>> Under the Clean Alternative Energy Initiative, California is poised to lead the way in weaning the public from its oil addiction.
Nathan Lewis>> Relative to other states, no one else is playing in this game right now. There are no state initiatives that would be anywhere comparable to what California would be doing here.
Toni Guinyard>> While language in the initiative clearly prohibits oil producers from passing the tax to consumers, critics say that would be near impossible to enforce.
Scott MacDonald>> If you take anything and add four billion dollars to the cost of it, it's Economics 101 that someone is going to field that money and there are a variety of ways you can field it.
Larry McCarthy>> We would just simply urge the voters to look at the legislative analyst's review of the initiative.
Toni Guinyard>> It's a request both sides ask of consumers. Read and study the initiative to better understand its potential impact and the arguments for and against.
Scott MacDonald>> We're going to tell people it's not about alternative fuels. It is about this initiative. Is this the way to go about it?
Nathan Lewis>> In the end, if you could buy hybrid cars and it costs you less than a regular car and you save money because you didn't have to pay as much for gasoline in the end, that's when people listen.
Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.
Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:
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Val Zavala>> Question? How do you name a new planet? Well, scientists never thought they'd have to worry about that because they thought all the planets had been discovered, all nine of them, but then something happened here last year at Caltech. A new planet was discovered, the tenth planet nicknamed Xena.
She's smooth, incredibly cold, wrapped in frozen natural gas and she has a moon nicknamed after the television Xena's sidekick, Gabrielle. And this is where she was first spotted. In the office of Professor Michael Brown, an astronomer at Caltech. These days, you don't have to be peering into a huge telescope in the wee hours of the morning to discover a planet.
Michael Brown>> The entire process -- one of the reasons that we can actually do this is because this entire process is run by computers and robots. The telescope is the Samuel Oschin telescope up at Palomar Observatory and it now completely runs at night with nobody there.
Val Zavala>> That's incredible.
Michael Brown>> If it didn't do that, we couldn't do this because I would have to be up there every single night observing all night long, every single night, and I'm pretty sure my wife would stop talking to me (laughter). In the morning, the computer gives me maybe a hundred images, little shots like this. These are the three little postage stamps of the sky in a row. Mostly you see stars. The stars are all stationary.
Val Zavala>> This is moving. One, two, three; one, two, three.
Michael Brown>> That's right. The only thing you can see, the computer has picked up something that it thinks is moving right there. So you look at that and you think there's nothing there. The reason you think there's nothing there is because --
Val Zavala>> -- Oh, my gosh, there's something right here?
Michael Brown>> Nope, because there's actually nothing there, so that's actually nothing.
Val Zavala>> For seven years, Michael and his colleagues scanned thousands of images like this one.
Michael Brown>> The next one, it will pick out another one where you can sort of see why the computer thinks something is moving, but there's nothing moving there. It's just that that star kind of smears into that star. There's nothing going on.
Val Zavala>> Wow, you've got to have an eye for this. Then on the morning of January 5, 2005, Michael's well-trained eye spotted something exciting.
Michael Brown>> When I saw this one, this one was brighter, almost the brightest thing we'd ever seen. Bright is good because bright means big. It was also moving about half the speed of anything we'd ever seen and that means it's twice as far away as anything we'd ever seen. So really bright and really far away means huge. I immediately did a quick calculation and then just picked up my phone and said, "Call my wife. I just found a planet."
Val Zavala>> She was the first one you called?
Michael Brown>> She was the first one I called.
Val Zavala>> And this is what the first glimpse of our solar system's tenth planet looked like. An orb three times as far as our furthest planet, Pluto.
Michael Brown>> This is the tenth planet. It's the brightest thing that we'd ever seen moving and it's moving more slowly than anything we'd ever seen also.
Val Zavala>> So everything else is stationary --
Michael Brown>> That's right.
Val Zavala>> -- that's relative to each other, and this one moves just enough for you to say --
Michael Brown>> That we really picked it out and said, "There it is."
Val Zavala>> After he phoned his wife, Michael sent off an email to his colleagues at Yale and in Hawaii, and the subject heading?
Michael Brown>> The subject heading was "why we get up in the morning" (laughter).
Val Zavala>> Oh, that's great. Followed by "New bright object. Please sit down and take a deep breath."
Michael Brown>> At that point, we kick into action everything that we can on the planet. We try to go observe it with some small telescopes to track down its orbit a little bit better. We observe it with the Hubble space telescope, with the Spitzer space telescopes, with the Keck telescopes. So the second we see this, suddenly our lives get much more complicated than they were earlier that morning.
Val Zavala>> Complicated in part by a basic question: is this new object actually a planet? You would think scientists would have settled that question by now. Not so. In fact, it was an issue back in 1930.
Michael Brown>> When Pluto was found seventy-five years ago, there was even debate back then whether Pluto should be called a planet, but there was nothing else to call it, so it was called a planet. Now there are more than a thousand objects in this region of the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune right where Pluto is and right where this new planet is. So people have been wondering, shouldn't we maybe call all of these things Kuiper belt objects and not planets? Scientifically, it sort of makes sense not to call Pluto a planet, but we have been calling it a planet for seventy-five years. Pluto has been a planet for seventy-five years. People don't want to get rid of Pluto.
Val Zavala>> Meanwhile, as the debate was in full swing, astronomers got an added bonus. In July of 2005, they discovered that the tenth planet has a moon.
Michael Brown>> That little spot of light right there is the moon to the tenth planet.
Val Zavala>> Ah, so once it had a moon, then that qualifies it more as a planet?
Michael Brown>> You know, a lot of people feel that way. I don't actually feel that way because Mercury and Venus don't have moons and about ten percent of the objects that we found out in the Kuiper belt, out in that region beyond Neptune, about ten percent of them have moons. Even very small ones have moons.
Val Zavala>> And they're not planets.
Michael Brown>> And they're definitely not planets. And scientifically, it's actually fantastic because having that moon means that we can track the moon around the planet and, by tracking the moon, how fast the moon is going around the planet, we can weigh the planet. If it goes around really fast, it's because the planet is very heavy. If it goes around slowly, it's because the planet is very light.
Val Zavala>> Oh, that's amazing. So the moon gives you all sorts of information about the planet that you could not normally have.
Michael Brown>> Exactly. You wouldn't have it otherwise at all.
Val Zavala>> And what would it be like if we were on this new planet?
Michael Brown>> If we were on this planet, we would be very, very cold. It's so far away from the sun. It's a hundred times further from the sun than the earth is. It's only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero. Right now, of course, it's as far away from the sun as it ever gets. It takes five hundred eighty years to go around the sun, so in another two hundred ninety years --
Val Zavala>> -- wait, say that again. It takes five hundred --
Michael Brown>> Five hundred eighty years to go around the sun.
Val Zavala>> For this planet to make one orbit around the sun?
Michael Brown>> Right.
Val Zavala>> So if I were standing on this new planet, outside of being extremely cold and probably dead in half a second, I would nevertheless see that the sun would be really, really far away? It would look like a star?
Michael Brown>> Yes. The sun would be the brightest star in the sky. It would be brighter than any stars that we see in the sky right now. If you took a pin and held it out at arm's length, the head of the pin would cover the disk of the sun. That's how small the sun would be.
Val Zavala>> But its moon is huge.
Michael Brown>> The moon is huge in comparison to the sun. It's interesting that, on the earth, the moon and the sun sort of look the same size in the sky. It's just a coincidence. From the tenth planet, because the moon is so much closer than the sun, the moon is relatively huge compared to the sun, although the moon is a very, very tiny moon around that planet.
Val Zavala>> Now the lay person out there says, "Oh, great. New planet. We get to name it." Do you get to name it? You discovered it.
Michael Brown>> It's funny. The official group that gets to name it is the International Astronomical Union. They sort of have the authority to name everything in the sky and they have rules. They have very strict rules for everything in the sky. The obvious rule for a new planet name is that it should stick with the tradition of the old planets. All of the first nine planets are named after Greek and Roman gods.
Val Zavala>> So, of course, my question is, what would you like it named?
Michael Brown>> My first choice would be Persephone. Persephone is the wife of Pluto and the myth actually fits very well with how the planet is in the sky. In mythology, Persephone spends half of her time in the underworld with Pluto and the other half further away. But it's just what this planet does. The planet comes in about half the time close to Pluto and the other half further away and back and forth.
Val Zavala>> Gee, if it was named Persephone, then that familiar grade school pneumonic, "My very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas", could be easily updated. Just add pepperoni to that pizza. Well, Michael Brown, thank you so much and congratulations.
Michael Brown>> Thank you.
Val Zavala>> That is quite a find.
Michael Brown>> It's been quite fun.
Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Sponsored in part by:
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