Skid Row ‘Governor’ Slams Los Angeles for Demolishing His Tent House That Had a Kitchen and Jacuzzi

A woman known as the ‘Governor’ of the notorious Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles has criticized city officials who destroyed her luxury tent last week.

Stephanie Arnold Williams criticized the destruction of her luxurious home, nicknamed the White House, despite the fact that she also owns a small house nearby.

The cheeky drifter’s former property came equipped with a hot water pipe, a generator, solar panels, a bathroom, a kitchenette, sewing machines, and a walk-in closet.

In a video posted to Twitter a week before authorities moved in, Williams showed off his home in a similar way to the popular MTV series Cribs. “Everyone should have one…You better do it right,” Williams said as she lay on her pristine white sheets.

“I call it the White House because the government is not doing its job properly, so I’m here to show you how to do it… you just sit around a round table and talk about things that don’t work,” he added. .

The home of the mother-of-four was destroyed as part of what the Department of Sanitation and Environment has called a “routine cleanup,” reports ABC Los Angeles.

The station described crews dismantling several homeless encampments along Skid Row. The camera captured the moments when a dump truck crane grabbed the canopy of Williams’ store.

The canopy, along with the floor and walls of the house, were loaded onto the truck.

‘So I built my house right here on wheels. I was going to start building it for the homeless. They don’t want tiny houses here,” Williams told the assembled reporters.

speaking to Los Angeles Times, Williams said: ‘I said wait a minute, it’s on wheels. I can push it around the corner. We can push it to the street. We can do a lot of things besides demolish it.

On her Facebook page, Williams references one of her jobs as a “freedom fighter on Stop Police Brutality Now.”

Williams told the social issues publication red canary in a 2022 interview that he moved to Skid Row from his native Indianapolis in 2013 after getting involved in a ‘steal’ with local police.

She saying that an Indianapolis police officer broke her leg during an altercation in which she was accused of trespassing into her son’s apartment.

“We called the police because we had a family dispute, and when they came in, they said, ‘I hate black people,'” Williams said. She went on to claim that an officer handcuffed her and then proceeded to break her leg.

In an interview with LA Magazine, Williams said that on February 13, the day her home was destroyed, she was surrounded by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

‘They didn’t offer me accommodation. They offered me nothing. They took my blankets, my contact lenses, all my food. They knocked over pots, pans, cups and things that I needed to eat,” Williams told the magazine.

He went on to say that he was given a 30-minute notice before the destruction and spent most of that time protesting with police officers.

TO GoFundMe Page has been created by Williams’ assistant Debra Reed to help her recover.

Williams also said that she is known locally as The Governor or Mama Stephanie. In November 2020, she wrote in a Facebook post that she had suffered a stroke.

‘I provide tents around me while people wait for accommodation. There are also protesters and a community policing team that helps police the community. And we are our own security,’ Williams continued.

“He was callous, he was mean-spirited and, in many ways, he was calculating. You had no less than 12 to 15 police officers, you had heavy equipment and the [sanitation crews] went out to essentially demolish that corner while putting the tents across the street,” a witness to the demolition, Pete White, told Los Angeles Times.

The Times article goes on to say that a spokesperson for the Department of Public Works said all of Williams’ belongings were available for pickup at a storage facility.

“News images and videos on social media showed a dump truck crane damaging awnings as it pulled them off the sidewalk, and crews discarding tables used for the distribution of food and clothing,” the Times reported.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has committed to housing more than 17,000 homeless people in her first year by 2022 through a mix of temporary and permanent facilities.

On the same day as the LA Magazine interview, Williams spoke with a representative of the city’s Mayor’s Office for Homelessness, Jarvis Emerson. He told Williams that he did not know about the planned destruction.

‘I put wheels on my house so you can clean underneath. I’m the one who gets down on one knee and mops this floor with a mop. I use a toothbrush to get into the crevices. There isn’t even a cigarette butt on this floor. I’m the best cleaner,” Williams said in her interview.

Earlier this week, Culver City officials voted 3-2 on Monday in favor of the tents and other structures, and the change will take effect when more homeless housing models become available, including a Project site. Room Key and a designated homeless area in Virginia. Parking lot.

Culver City is located just west of Los Angeles.

In total, there are about 100,000 homeless people in California. With other high concentrations in the northern part of the state in cities like San Francisco where almost 8,000 people sleep on the streets.

Homelessness is highly visible throughout California with people living in tents and cars and sleeping out in the open on sidewalks and under freeway overpasses.

Mayor Bass promised to house people and build more housing so residents can see a real difference, which has not been visible despite billions spent on programs to curb homelessness, including $1.2 billion in the budget current city.

The leading cause of death among the homeless in Los Angeles is drug overdoses, other leading causes include murder and suicide.

Between 2016 and 2021, fentanyl overdose deaths in Los Angeles County increased 1,280%, between 2019 and 2020 they increased 149% from 462 to 1,149, and 31% from 2021 to 1,504.