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Life & Times Transcript

08/07/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Bored by the plight of the homeless? One California mayor says that attitude has to change.

Gavin Newsom>> It's a moral shame. It's an assault on everyone to try to go about your day-to-day life where you're stepping over someone on the sidewalk or you're seeing someone passed out on the street corner.

Val Zavala>> And then, this Hollywood home is ready for its close-up. We preview Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House after a five-year multi-million dollar facelift.

It's all straight ahead 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>> If you were a homeless person getting only a few hundred dollars a month in welfare, would you be willing to turn it over to a shelter? Well, that's the idea being put to the test with homeless people in San Francisco. It's called Care, Not Cash. Do we here in southern California have something to learn from the City by the Bay? Saul Gonzalez headed north to see if it's working.

Saul Gonzalez>> The Golden Gate Bridge, graceful hilltop neighborhoods and, of course, the cable cars. These are the picture postcard sights that make San Franciscans proud of their city. But what often casts a shadow over their pride are other sights, the more than five thousand homeless people who try to survive on this city's streets. One of them is Kathleen Reeves who panhandles with a friend near Union Square.

Kathleen Reeves>> "Will you please help us?"

Saul Gonzalez>> She says she has no choice, if she's going to eat.

Kathleen Reeves>> Why do you think I'm out here begging for money? I don't like begging. I don't, but I have to.

Saul Gonzalez>> For years, San Francisco's city government developed strategy after strategy to deal with homelessness from the opening of temporary shelters to restrictions on panhandling, but nothing seemed to reduce the number of the city's street people. Then in 2003, San Franciscans elected Gavin Newsom mayor. He pledged to introduce new initiatives to end chronic homelessness in the city within ten years.

Gavin Newsom>> It's a moral shame. It's an assault on everyone. That old adage that you can't live a good life in an unjust society, to see visual terms, our failure as a society, to try to go about your day-to-day life where you're stepping over someone on the sidewalk or you're seeing someone passed out on the street corner. Now we've got to do something more and do better. Let's try a new model and let's try to do it in a way where we can see real results.

Ben>> "You just hanging out?"

>> "Yeah."

Ben>> "Yeah. My name's Ben. I'm with a homeless outreach."

Saul Gonzalez>> Newsom expanded the city's existing homeless outreach teams. They try to encourage the indigent, many with drug and mental problems, to take advantage of available city services. The mayor also launched an initiative called Project Homeless Connect. Held every six weeks, it's a kind of fair for street people.

[Film Clip]

Saul Gonzalez>> Where city departments, local companies and hundreds of private volunteers offer a range of free services to the homeless. Vision testing and eyeglasses, clothing and food, wheelchair repairs, even the cleaning of dirty and infected feet.

Gavin Newsom>> What Project Homeless Connect now represents is a sense of pride and spirit, a sense of community and purposefulness. So when people say, "Hey, what are you doing, Mayor, about solving the homeless problem?", now I have something to say. "Hey, wait a second. What are you going to do to help the city?"

Saul Gonzalez>> However, the centerpiece of Mayor Newsom's efforts to fight homelessness is a two-year old program called Care, Not Cash. It's a carrot and stick approach to getting people off the streets. In exchange for a guarantee of long-term housing in newly renovated residential hotels, homeless people who receive county welfare checks agree to have their monthly payments cut from as much as four hundred ten dollars to as little as fifty-nine dollars.

The money cut from peoples' welfare checks helps to pay for their monthly rent. Once they move in to housing, usually small single rooms, the formerly homeless receive food stamps and assistance from onsite case managers.

>> "Do you have any life insurance?"

Saul Gonzalez>> The case managers help residents find jobs, psychiatric counseling and drug addiction treatment. This extra support is supposed to ensure that, once people receive homes, they'll stay there.

Gavin Newsom>> That is a much more difficult issue than giving someone a key, a lock and the dignity of a housing unit. You've got to have the wrap-around support of services to deal with the underlying reasons at the same time. That's our housing first model, housing and supportive services.

Saul Gonzalez>> Could you show me around your room? I mean, I know it's not huge.

Leo Patterson>> It's not a big room, but this is home, you know.

Saul Gonzalez>> Leo Patterson was homeless for over three years until he became one of the more than thirteen hundred people placed in a housing unit through the Care, Not Cash program. Patterson says he couldn't be happier.

Leo Patterson>> I'm very settled and I'm not on the streets anymore and I don't have to worry about food or nothing and I got a roof over my head and it feels great.

Saul Gonzalez>> Jim Tribble, who now just gets sixty-four dollars a month in welfare, says he's fine having his payment slashed in exchange for long-term housing.

Jim Tribble>> That's the price you pay, but if you think about it, the rent around here is astronomical, so I made that trade. I thought it was a great trade-off. Take the check. I'd rather have the residence and the supportive staff, etc., all the stuff that goes with the package.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, not everyone in San Francisco embraces the city's strategy to fight homelessness. Some housing advocates criticize the tough love approach of Care, Not Cash and argue that the city still isn't doing nearly enough to get its poorest citizens off the streets and into homes.

Jennifer Friedenbach>> Since specifically Care, Not Cash, there's been an increase in hunger, increased wait in food lines and in increase in panhandling.

Saul Gonzalez>> Jennifer Friedenbach is the Director of San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness. She criticizes Care, Not Cash for creating hardship by cutting peoples' welfare payments. She also argues that the program is too narrowly focused on chronically homeless welfare recipients, a group that accounts for less than half of the city's total homeless population.

Jennifer Friedenbach>> In this city, they're picking welfare recipients primarily and trying to see if they can address homelessness in that particular population. So they're leaving out families with kids, working people, veterans, disabled people. They all get left out of that equation.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, Mayor Newsom says, in the long run, it's best for everyone in his city to help the chronically homeless first.

Gavin Newsom>> So we are focused on the person that's a high-end user of the emergency rooms, the person that's out on the sidewalk day in and day out, that has no hope or expectation. When you can get that person housed, you're saving a huge amount of taxpayers' money and ultimately you are able to then turn your attention to others in need in a more effective way.

Saul Gonzalez>> Even with its narrow focus, Mayor Newsom claims Care, Not Cash and other homeless initiatives such as a program to reunite San Francisco's street people with their families have led to a more than forty percent decline in the number of people living on the city's streets.

That decline, though, is hard to see in a place like St. Boniface Church in the heart of San Francisco's gritty Tenderloin neighborhood. During the day, the church turns itself into a shelter for the homeless, allowing people to use the pews as makeshift cots. Franciscan friar, Louis Vitale, a long-time homeless activist, says City Hall should not be too quick to claim success in its fight against homelessness.

Louis Vitale>> There's a lot of people still on the streets. We have just as many people sleeping here during the day because they've been wandering around all night.

Saul Gonzalez>> Just as many as you did two years ago.

Louis Vitale>> Yes, pretty much so, pretty much so. You can look right now and see. The benches are pretty full and it's not a particularly cold day out. It's summer.

Saul Gonzalez>> Mayor Newsom, seen here visiting the Operation Homeless Connect event, says he understands that, when it comes to finding homes for all the homeless, there are no simple answers, but he insists that goal in his city and others isn't a pipe dream.

Gavin Newsom>> I think on the history of homelessness, success is not a place or a definition. It's a direction. But I can guarantee this. I am absolutely convinced -- I don't think this. I know it -- you can end homelessness in this country. It's a question of resolve. You can end it. You can end it. There is no reason to have a homeless problem in this country. It is absolutely about will. It's about commitment. It's about focus.

Saul Gonzalez>> More than two hundred American cities have pledged to end chronic homelessness within ten years with many of them using San Francisco's strategies as a model. For Life and Times, I'm Saul Gonzalez.

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>> Are you happier in your job than you were, say, ten or twenty years ago? Do you think your children will have decent wages and a secure retirement? Does Wal-Mart really have to pay those low wages? Those are a few of the questions answered in a major new report.

The study, "The New American Workplace", is a follow-up to the ground-breaking 1972 bestseller, "Work in America", which exposed poor conditions in offices and factories and led to major reform. Well, now USC researchers, Jim O'Toole and Ed Lawler, have authored a follow-up report that looks at dramatic changes in the workplace over the past three decades, some good and some bad.

James O'Toole>> Well, let's start with the good news.

Val Zavala>> Okay.

James O'Toole>> The good news is that job satisfaction has increased in the United States. That's probably because a lot of bad jobs have either been exported or they have been automated, particularly jobs in manufacturing.

The other really good news is that, compared to 1972, the status of women in the workplace has greatly improved. The gap in terms of salaries, the nature of jobs that women have, their upward mobility, has improved markedly. As a result, the job satisfaction of women in the workplace has gotten almost to the same level as that of men.

Val Zavala>> Job satisfaction is better overall, especially among women. Could that be because a lot of those jobs that went overseas were really boring, repetitive jobs?

James O'Toole>> Actually, the major cause of job dissatisfaction in the 1970s was working on the assembly line. Hardly anybody in America works on an assembly line today. The bad jobs today are in places like Wal-Mart, in mall stores. What we've done is created -- and we are continuing to create -- quite a few low-level jobs and those jobs have relatively short career paths.

People don't have the opportunity for training. Most of them don't get benefits. The salaries are usually at the minimum wage or just a little bit higher. That's really the biggest problem that we're facing in the workplace. The vast majority of the jobs that we're creating are not really great jobs.

Val Zavala>> Now, of course, the first company that comes to mind when you're talking about low wage, not good benefits, is Wal-Mart. They've been the target of a lot of criticism. Is it justified?

James O'Toole>> I think it is. Almost all employers do have alternatives. If we compare Costco, for example, to Wal-Mart or Sam's Club, we find that the employees at Costco are far better paid, they have better benefits, they have career paths, they have the opportunity to move up in the organization because they have good training.

Val Zavala>> More productive?

James O'Toole>> Far more productive. So much more productive that actually workers at Costco earn their own benefits. They earn what they produce.

Val Zavala>> Oh, really? By being more productive, in other words.

James O'Toole>> By being more productive, which means that it takes fewer Costco employees to produce the same number of sales as it takes a Wal-Mart employee. So the bottom line for Costco is that Costco is more profitable. The overall labor productivity at Costco is far higher than at Wal-Mart. We also find the same thing when you compare Southwest Airlines to United Airlines, when you compare --

Val Zavala>> -- Southwest being, by the way, the one that offers very good benefits.

James O'Toole>> Which we call high-involvement companies with good benefits, good salaries, job security, career paths, training. When you compare General Motors to Harley Davidson, Harley Davidson being another one of these high-involvement companies; when you compare UPS to FedEx, UPS being the high-involvement company.

In almost all of those instances and what we find the same in almost every industry in America, the workers who have the best jobs are the ones in which they participate in decision-making, they participate in profits, they're getting trained. As a result, those workers tend to be more productive and the companies for which they work tend to be more profitable.

Val Zavala>> Another piece of good news is that the workplace has gotten safer.

James O'Toole>> Yes, and healthier.

Val Zavala>> And healthier.

James O'Toole>> Yeah. We always talk about government programs that don't work. OSHA, that was introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has really revolutionized American workplaces. Very few Americans today have to worry about getting some terrible kind of disease from the chemicals that they're working with or worrying about getting killed on the job, which was very, very frequently the case in the 1960s and 1970s.

Val Zavala>> With the exception of coalmining, of course.

James O'Toole>> There are one or two very, very small exceptions. But there is also another side to this too, that job-related stress has greatly increased and job-related diseases that are as a result of stress. Things like heart attack and strokes that come from leading a stressful life has really, really taken off in the United States.

Part of that is because all of us feel that we're much more at risk at work today than we were before. We worry about our job security. We worry about our benefits. We worry about do we have a career? We worry about are we making enough money to be able to support our family?

Val Zavala>> Another big change is the way that companies handle retirement programs. It's shifted a huge amount of responsibility to the worker. Good or bad?

James O'Toole>> Well, I think that the day of a guaranteed pension, even the guarantee that someday you'll be able to retire, is really passed in this country.

Val Zavala>> That's scary.

James O'Toole>> That is really an enormous change. If I'm going to retire, it's really my responsibility now. I'm going to have to save for it. I'm going to have to plan for it. And the same happens with almost all other kinds of benefits that people have. Where the real crunch is is with health care. The corporations have been putting more and more of the burden of health care onto their employees.

Val Zavala>> So, overall, are we baby boomers lucky? Did we hit a good patch in the workplace history or are young people, for example, in a better position than we are?

James O'Toole>> I think we were very lucky actually. We hit a time in which the economy was growing, in which we had really great job opportunities. Today, I think there is a hell of a lot more risk for kids. They don't have the options that we all had when we graduated from college and I don't think they're likely to be getting that same kind of richness in terms of a sense of security and the options that we had. Particularly what they don't get is a sense of community in their workplaces.

Val Zavala>> Jim O'Toole, thank you so much for all your hard work and your insights.

James O'Toole>> Well, I thank you on behalf of my co-author, Ed Lawler.

Val Zavala>> That's right. He's part of it too.

James O'Toole>> Thanks. Bye.

Val Zavala>> You can read about these and other major workplace trends in the book, "The New American Workplace".

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> It's considered a superb example of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, the Hollyhock House here in Barnsdall Art Park in Hollywood. For many years, it fell into disrepair, but now it's been restored and, for the first time in about five years, it's open to the public.

Hollyhock House was part of an unfinished dream by an unconventional oil heiress from Pennsylvania. Aline Barnsdall loved art, music and theater. In 1915, she came to Los Angeles and found a thirty-six acre hillside in Hollywood. She hired renowned architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, to design the center with residences, shops and theaters, everything from the fa�ade to the furniture. But Barnsdall and Wright clashed and only three structures were built. One of them was Hollyhock House, finished in 1923. This film by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department recounts its restoration.

[Film Clip]

Brenda Levin>> It's important that we understand today how this house originated because its association in the public's mind is within Frank Lloyd Wright and, to a large extent, this is what draws people to this house. It is a work by Frank Lloyd Wright and people put it in the context of Frank Lloyd Wright's overall career and they see it in the same way that they see Falling Water or the Robie House or the Guggenheim Museum.

[Film Clip]

Brenda Levin>> We looked at Frank Lloyd Wright's original founding principles for the park, how the park was laid out, the landscaping for the park, how the individual buildings were sited and, of course, Aline Barnsdall's vision for the park as an art center, which would support a theater and fine arts.

Eric Wright>> He had problems with Aline Barnsdall because she was always moving around and always traveling and also, at the same time, he was working on the Imperial Hotel. So, you know, it took quite a while when you took the boat in those days to get over to Japan and then you had to be there for several months, obviously, because it took you eleven days to travel one way and eleven days to come back, so that was almost a month in traveling.

That always made it difficult and she was always traveling to Europe, so he would be home and she would be gone and there were numerous letters back and forth between the two of them asking each other to stop -- you know, for Frank Lloyd Wright to give more time to her building and my grandfather saying, well, you know, Aline, you need to be here.

[Film Clip]

Payton Hall>> Historic preservation projects, in general, are challenging because the materials that are in them represent an important artifact, so we have to protect them.

[Film Clip]

Mike Bandy>> We've given the art stone contractor approximately ten days to get far enough ahead of us so that we can all work up here together, but we're going to be removing the plaster in the areas where they've removed the art stone already and we're just going to be following right behind them as they go along and take the art stone off the exterior.

Charles Kibbey>> When we get over to the B units which are the large ones, they weigh about a hundred twenty pounds each and they have, unfortunately, a step grout line. Mr. Wright was, unfortunately, very devious in his assembly pattern here and it's made it virtually impossible to slice the grout line with the diamond blade which would be the traditional method.

So we're going to have to use a combination of drilling, chisels using light pneumatic Italian carbon hammers especially designed for removing grout. We're going to be drilling, chiseling and very carefully leveraging and moving what's a hundred twenty pounds. Obviously, they don't want to break this stuff, so it's going to be a real challenge.

Mike Bandy>> This is actually the next stage. When we start to fill everything in, you can see this whole section up to this point was broken off and you can see the breaks. We're slowly just filling everything in and trying to match the colors and the stone all the way down.

Brenda Levin>> The major scope of our work in terms of architectural work is dealing with water infiltration. We know that the Hollyhock House has sort of suffered from major water infiltration problems and we have tried to use the FEMA and repair and hazard mitigation work as a mechanism for dealing with that water infiltration so that at least at the end of the day we have not a watertight, but at least a water-resistant building so that, when we do move forward with the restoration, we'll be doing it in a protected house.

Melvyn Green>> This particular building and the work we're doing is making improvements in its seismic performance, but it's not bringing it up to a level that we as engineers would prefer. What we're looking at is more risk reductions.

[Film Clip]

Brenda Levin>> What I think is important to realize here is that the basic plan of the building has never been changed. The same U-shaped configuration surrounding the interior courtyard has remained intact from design to the present day.

Eric Wright>> The whole house in itself is one great feeling of my grandfather's work and the living room is certainly a wonderful statement of this feeling, having light coming down over that wonderful mural over the fireplace and the watercourse right around the front of the fireplace. It's a very really wonderful, romantic room and very dramatic.

[Film Clip]

David Judson>> The nice thing about Frank Lloyd Wright designs is that he never tried to imitate nature. I think he was trying to move himself away from what Tiffany and La Farge and other American art glass designers were doing. Trying to represent nature, he abstracted nature. In this particular house, hollyhock being the theme, he kind of picked up on that design and used that design to mimic nature, but not completely imitate it.

Brenda Levin>> The Hollyhock House was declared a cultural heritage landmark in 1963. The American Institute of Architects nominated the Hollyhock House for preservation in 1963 as one of seventeen Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that has made an outstanding contribution to American culture.

Kate Devine>> She had such a powerful vision and artistic mind and I hate to see that potential not being used.

[Film Clip]

Kate Devine>> I feel a little bit sad that she didn't carry through with it. However, I still think that it can happen here on this hill.

Val Zavala>> Our thanks to the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for that piece. And if you'd like more information on the Hollyhock House and tours, you can go to their website at hollyhockhouse.net.

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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