0:00 did you guys know that there are more unoccupied homes in America than there are homeless people oh really I say good [Music] there's this amazing story about a guy named Michael Townsend and this dude lived in Providence Rhode Island Townsend sounds like a name in Rhode Island sounds like a pilgrim last name huh yeah it sounds like some Boston Massachusetts show yeah Townsend yeah is is uh so his whole thing he's a he's like a very poor artist he lives in like an art uh kind of colony made out of like a what was called like a Mill Old Mill building it ain't the brewery oh like a cotton like a cotton milk I guess it's kind of like that where like you take these old buildings and then artists like living in them you know every state kind of has that so he's in that community in Providence Rhode Island and what happened to him is that
0:51 the uh person who owned that building came up to a woman was like Hey man like sorry but it's our responsibility to develop this land so we're gonna have to ask all of you guys to leave and we have to like you know put something new here knock this down so you know as sad as that is for him I think it said like his rent there was like 300 bucks a month or something wow that's all good so they replaced it with like some condo that was like 1900 bucks a month so it totally puts all these people out um so what he did is he what's good for the property owner yeah it's a win for him and anyone invested in it he decides to go um this developer had other properties properties right one of the properties that the developer also owned was the main mall in that area like a giant mall huge all those same stores that you see
1:42 in malls except like highly successful very crowd very very good Mall he looks around throughout the whole Mall this mall that he's seen being built over the years he's seen it since it was just wood so he's like always passed it almost every day of his life and he remembers certain pockets in that mall where there was nothing ever built this guy's a genius and take a look at this picture he well there was like empty space he manages to move into an unoccupied area in the mall and live there undetected for four straight years what wait what yeah dude malls are really going away aren't they I'm just really curious how he was able to move a couch by himself because you know I try to move couches by myself a furniture dolly bro him and his friends yes friends okay and the thing
2:33 is they didn't mean to do this as a his intentions basically were not purely uh need a place to live he wanted to send this message of like hey I found an undeveloped area in your mall and it's my responsibility to develop it so he develops it into this living space so he won a little bit of a petty War for four years yeah yeah but then now that it's out it's an excuse he's gonna get kicked out well he's already gotten caught for it so he charges blah blah but there's um he was saying that after he got caught um so this was back in the early 2000s but now after he was caught and everything and people learned about the story he would get up to six uh calls per week asking for the rights to his story because people want to make movies documentaries what TV shows they want to make a thing out of it because they realized uh kind of like the whole way
3:25 that he was able to do this is actually a pretty cool story it's kind of like the next terminal you ever watched terminal it is yeah where you found a way to live in the airport because here you have some like like a lower income artists that are displaced and then they figured out a way to exist undetected and they didn't really hurt anybody yeah if anything they're just getting trespassing charges they're not getting anything like crazier than that but they were able to move all these like all this not a lot of furniture but they were able to move enough stuff to live in this thing where do you take a ████ and uh the mall bathroom cook stuff oh okay so the thing that they would do is they would uh they didn't get this far but after the four years they were all planning to get jobs in the mall whoa that's so small see if they could exist solely in the mall yeah did you guys know that there are more unoccupied homes in America than there are homeless
4:15 people oh really I say good so that means every homeless person can be housed they could be but but there's no point giving them houses we all got to work from right yeah so this dude is getting uh they are making a documentary out of it wow yeah right now so you might be seeing something for it but it's a it's a pretty remarkable story because he really wasn't trying to hurt anybody and he's like an older guy they didn't do anything weird they didn't do like drugs or anything what kind of artist is he he it says he's a a tape artist a tape so the ████ is the tape artist maybe that's why he's like you ████ like duct tape and ████ yeah like like makes art on a table what if he's the guy that puts all the electrical tape on the hot models no it's not that dude the Black Tape Project no he's like yeah here's another shot of their uh
5:05 place a place it was kind of cool it's pretty legit yeah I mean they're clean I can't believe that did four years because it's so yeah if every day the same person walks I feel like the security or somebody would know yeah so that's how they got but if squatters were all this clean and they made the place better like I don't think most people would mind if there were squatters like if you think about your typical squatter right they destroy the spot they ████ all over the ground they tag on everything and then they get high and have a great time and break everything right because that's that's kind of what it is it's they were able to get away with it so long because it wasn't so much of a like as weird as it sounds it was more of a message they were all working they were all they all had lives and they all weren't there all the time like an art installation they made it yeah it was like an art thing so they wanted to the ultimate goal was to see
5:56 if they could exist literally as Mall people like for years and then once they you know got caught it was right shy of doing that and the way they got caught is they would have this rule where they were like okay the four of us started this together we never tell anybody about this and you don't bring anybody here only us and then at some point someone messed up and told uh like some foreign artist who came to town God they brought her there it's always some ████ rat throw some ████ and then it just it all it did was it it just caused more like attention a little bit and the timing they used to have a timing situation where they would only leave they would come and go at specific times where no one would be there for sure yeah it makes sense then because they had this extra person the timing went off and they exited the door the same time Security's right here
6:47 I I'm four years I am Mr Big on like American housing is Wild on this ████ but this is not a ████ art installation and the idea that these cats are like Oh Let's Line it all up for the experiment you know they're just living here for free what the ████ about shut the ████ up shut up like this is your little narrative that you built in the post Haze like yes it's gonna drum up attention and support and all this stuff but dude this is this is not like oh a social experiment or whatever you're living somewhere for free good good on you 50 50. it's like 50 50 yeah it's it's 90 10 bro I guess you're kind of busy I do wonder why they're um like I don't know what the reason is but like so other countries they'll have a lot of different affordable options right
7:37 whether it's like just a studio room for like in Asia they have all these situations where like you can get something dirt ████ cheap that's just even for their standards it's just the room or whatever but you don't really see that at in La so like in LA like the cheapest you go it's still kind of pricey oh yeah like you have to get a a studio apartment and then the rent and then the The Upfront money and all that right so it's like renting a room in someone's house exactly a renting a room is like 700 or more now yeah so then like I'm like what are poor folks gonna do that don't have any help from the government because like if you have uh section eight if you have help from the government if you're in the system then yeah you have a lot of different options but if you're like homeless you have shelters but what if you're just like
8:28 single you want to work and maybe you want a small space for yourself like a container-sized house or something or like a trailer like it's it's pretty the the start is a lot like it's already in the like almost a thousand and above so like what about all the people that can only afford like under that or dude what about like chicks in abusive marriages and they can't leave because there's literally no to go and like yeah all that kind of stuff you think about the ramifications of all that stuff but then you know what what can you realistically do like when there isn't a support system like Joe's talking about yeah because they do have women's shelters but then also like sometimes you have to be on weight or like you have to be in super severe situations or there's not enough housing so I'm like I don't know if it's just building laws or like whatever because other countries have so many options from like small rooms to
9:19 like Mansions whereas ours the the cheapest where it starts it's not that cheap like it's already a full functioning like studio with kitchen bath and it's like it's pretty luxurious well there's like a state here I think who is it Missouri or some ████ where they built a bunch of Housing and they don't have homeless people anymore wow in America I don't know if it's Missouri but yeah all of Missouri the whole state yeah there was a state that just did this they just did it yeah they just built a ████ ton of affordable housing and they they shoved all the homeless people into it and I know like other um I see this all the time where people are getting into like container homes uh tiny homes all that but it's always like somewhere else and I've never seen one like oh I never seen one in person like in LA like I don't know anywhere anywhere or anyone that has a tiny home unless all
10:10 the tiny home ████ I look at on YouTube are luxurious as ████ they're sick they're like balling though it's always like in like I don't know somewhere in Indiana or like far or ████ way you think it's because like the really bougie people in La that they're like oh we don't want um affordable housing for people I have no idea or it could be we have initiatives but the weather's so good the the population that is traveling is constantly higher than faster than we can build you know people are looking for fair weather because it's hard to survive if it's ████ snowing and like crazy weather so it could be we're constantly getting the influx here that we can even support on audience the hard part too is like because our system's so corrupt in that department affordable housing ends
11:00 up costing too much on the back end oh yeah that's true by the end of it yeah yeah hey it's done oh by the way it's not open yet like the Hilda Solis uh you know by kind of close to barbell you see those yellow and orange containers yeah yeah things that's homeless housing and nobody's there and it's been done for a long time oh it's done yeah wow it's like four stories or whatever just haven't filled it yet also there were a bunch of tiny homes that were just built in Las Vegas and oh really they demolished them because there weren't up to code or some ████ wow and they built them for the homeless wow the best and they did that in La too a couple years ago they just keep doing that because it like Cycles the money or something like it's so like even though it's like oh there's affordable housing that wasn't affordable for the state it's affordable for the person that never ended up living there in the first place it's also conveniently competition for places like or companies like BlackRock among these guys who are snapping up all this cheap real estate
11:52 it's interesting interesting little conflict of interest yeah yeah that's what that's that's another story too that's a whole different animal but yeah that's crazy but we love them and we love their advertising dollars and we hope that they come here thank you [Music] thank you foreign
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