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Film producer shelters Los Angeles homeless with mobile units

A successful Hollywood producer walks out of a Beverly Hills deli.
[additional-authors]
July 13, 2016

A successful Hollywood producer walks out of a Beverly Hills deli. It’s Nate ’n Al, of course. He is noticeably bothered, as he passes several worn-down homeless people holding tattered blankets and pushing overloaded shopping carts.

In a typical situation, this is where the story ends as the producer continues on without hesitation, gazing anywhere but at the homeless. Nothing changes.

However, Peter Samuelson’s version of the narrative, which took place in 2006, would not be marked by disgust or neglect.

“I was bothered that they invaded my space. But I was bothered far more by the fact that their presence bothered me,” he said. “And I became determined to conquer that.”

In an effort to overcome his “irrational fear” of homeless people, Samuelson, 64, a British-born Jew and Los Angeles film producer (“Revenge of the Nerds”), decided to connect. In order to understand a population in need of assistance and attention, he conducted more than 60 interviews with Los Angeles homeless individuals, learning about who they were, how they lived and what they needed.

“It was a revelation. I thought virtually all homeless people were men, but in fact almost 40 percent are women; I thought they were mostly middle-aged, yet almost 15 percent are under the age of 18,” he said, basing these numbers on his experience. “And the more I came to grips with it, I realized that these people were Americans with no lobby and no plan for action … so I wanted to help.”

During one of his interviews on the streets of Los Angeles, an elderly woman on Santa Monica Boulevard showed Samuelson where she slept: a large cardboard box with “Sub-Zero” written on the side of the box.

“I owned the [brand of] refrigerator that made up this woman’s bed. I felt that I could do more than that. And that’s when I had the EDAR epiphany,” Samuelson said.

EDAR, or Everyone Deserves A Roof (edar.org), was conceived in 2007 and offered an opportunity for Samuelson to “reverse engineer the problem of homelessness.” Rather than build multibed homeless shelters, Samuelson and a team of students at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena invented and constructed mobile shelter units. They were to be shopping carts by day and fully-tented mattresses by night.

“For the homeless population, the benefit isn’t just shelter. It provides privacy, safety, mobility, a bit of self-esteem, a sense of ownership and a step closer to permanency,” Samuelson said. “And if someone feels that their space is being invaded by the presence of an EDAR, the user is able to immediately go somewhere else to settle.”

Street-legal in the city of Los Angeles, there are more than 300 prototype EDAR units currently in use. They cost about $500 each and are distributed for free to those in need. Samuelson is redesigning the unit to reduce the manufacturing price and to improve its capabilities.

“It all depends on how much money we can raise,” Samuelson said. “I want to order a whole lot of them and continue to give them to homeless people. We can put them on the market, too, for urban camping or for organizations like FEMA, to further fund our mission of providing roofs for people living on the streets.”

Samuelson’s crusade comes as the area faces a homelessness crisis: The Los Angeles Homeless Count earlier this year determined that there are nearly 50,000 homeless in Los Angeles County on any given night. Mayor Eric Garcetti has pledged to spend at least $100 million annually to fight the problem.

Samuelson said his organization faces some pushback, stemming mainly from the stigmatization of those forced to live on the streets. He has been told that the mission of EDAR “encourages homelessness,” though he disagrees.

“Many people believe that there are no homeless people except those who want to be homeless, which is flat-out untrue,” he said. “I’ve slept on Skid Row on a Saturday night in an EDAR, and I can attest that the 150 people who shared that block on San Julian Street, of which about 20 percent were minors, did not want to be sleeping there.”

He added that some “more gentrified cities” have been hesitant to welcome EDAR units to the area.

“It’s all very NIMBY [Not In My Backyard],” he said. “What I believe is morally indefensible for anyone with a soul, whether it be homeowners or government heads, is to block other human beings from improving their status.”

However, Samuelson, a father of four and grandfather of three, is optimistic that EDAR will be given the opportunity to break through and make a greater difference, as well as provide the chance for others to be charitable — something he’s been doing for decades. He has founded and worked for various nonprofit organizations over the past 35 years, mainly working with ill children and foster kids. In 1982, he co-created the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which services more than 60 million critically and chronically ill children around the world.

Samuelson, who attends Temple Isaiah, said he was inspired to alter his life path after encountering the writings of the 12th-century rabbi Maimonides and his description of that level of the soul known as neshamah.

“Neshamah, to me, is a membership society of all of the people who exert themselves unto the world to make it a better place,” Samuelson said. “Maimonides said that when two people with neshamah meet, they feel as if they have known each other for a thousand years, and they say, ‘Hineni,’ which is Hebrew for, ‘Here I am, how can I help?’ ”

As EDAR works to raise funding to develop its product through donations, Samuelson hopes others will join the mission to alleviate the symptoms of homelessness by connecting to their inner neshamah.

“With Maimonides, with building that community of people who feel neshamah, we abide to the universal golden rule to balance inequity when we see it in our lives and others,” Samuelson said. “So working to spread EDAR is instinctual for me. It’s not the solution to homelessness, but it is infinitely better than my damp refrigerator box on a cold night.”

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