The A.I. chatbot had been trained to mimic empathy, and dozens of people called into the hotline each week with last-ditch appeals for rescue. A 64-year-old who lived on a Santa Monica sidewalk said he needed a wheelchair and a bus ticket to reunite with family in Philadelphia. A mother and her toddler were being kicked out of their motel with $8 and hoped to go to Boston. Another woman said she had just run away from her abuser and wanted help escaping to Virginia. “He’s hunting for me,” she said.
“I’m sorry about your situation,” the automated voice responded, again and again. “Would you like me to add you to the wait-list?”
The calls came 24 hours a day from all over Los Angeles County, where more than 70,000 people are homeless and most live not in shelters, but on public beaches, park benches and in tents lining the streets. By the time the A.I. transferred callers to a human, the wait-list was full of people with the same hope: that someone, somewhere, might put them on a bus or plane and let them start again.
“How can we help you get off the streets?” John Alle asked, one afternoon, as he responded to a hotline call himself.
It was the problem he’d been trying to solve for years — first as a property manager watching encampments grow outside his buildings in Santa Monica, then as an activist trying to shame the city into action by filming a wave of overdoses and assaults on the downtown promenade, and now as the unlikely architect of a hotline promising free tickets home. The hotline was a two-man operation with no dedicated office space and minimal advertising on social media. Alle and his employee sifted through the wait-list and then packed down people’s tents, paid to wash their laundry and ferried them to the airport. In its first few months of operation, the program had sent about three people each week out of Santa Monica to reunite with family members in different states.
The same strategy has been gaining traction in cities along the West Coast, where leaders have poured billions into systemic solutions to homelessness only to see progress measured in fractions — modest declines set against historic highs. What started as a post-pandemic crisis has become an entrenched reality for many American cities, where empathy and patience are giving way to a more pragmatic calculus for leaders who face mounting pressure to show measurable results.
In recent months, mayors in San Francisco, San Jose and Portland have all embraced programs like Alle’s that promise something cheaper and faster than rehab centers or housing wait-lists: a one-way ticket home, arranged for a few hundred dollars. It’s a way to lower numbers overnight, whether as an act of compassion or convenience.
Alle had been putting his rising impatience on display in the city for several years, erecting a series of 15-foot signs in front of one of his vacant storefronts that had been vandalized dozens of times. “Santa Monica IS NOT safe,” the first sign read. “Crime. Depravity. Outdoor mental asylum.”
“Santa Methica.”
“Have you been a victim of crime in Santa Monica? Join our collective lawsuit.”
And then Alle himself became a victim, while he was taking a walk after a real estate meeting late in 2023. He turned into Palisades Park, once a pristine tourist attraction that he’d been visiting for 40 years, winding through palm trees and alongside the Pacific Ocean. He started to take a cellphone video of someone using drugs near a tent, documenting more evidence of the city’s post-pandemic transformation, until a 34-year-old homeless man began to follow him. “Hey! I’m going to kill you,” the man said, according to police reports.
Alle usually traveled with a stun gun or bear spray, but he felt his pockets and found them empty. He tried to walk away, but a blow struck him from behind. He collapsed to the ground, where witnesses later testified that he was kicked 17 times in the head and shoulders. His jaw was broken in two places. He needed two major brain surgeries to save his life, and he left the hospital weeks later suffering from memory loss, cluster headaches, dizziness and slurred speech.
By the time he recovered, Alle’s grief and frustration had hardened into provocation. He erected a new sign on the promenade last month — a giant, celebratory photograph of the White House aide Stephen Miller, who was raised in Santa Monica and became a driving force behind President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies. “Huge swaths of the city where I grew up now resemble failed third world nations,” the sign quoted Miller as saying.
More than 90 percent of Santa Monica’s homeless population came from somewhere else, so Alle decided to follow Miller’s example on immigration by sending some of those people back to where they had come from. To Alle, the purpose was both rescue and relocation — a way to help them but also himself.
“I’ve got a pacemaker, and it’s not ticking so good,” one man said, after calling the hotline. “I’m not going to survive out here on the street.”
“Don’t worry about luggage,” said another caller, who wanted a bus ticket to Iowa. “It’s just me. I got nothing.”
Then came another call early last month, from a man who introduced himself as Jason Narron, 38. He said he needed to travel home to North Carolina along with his husband and then tried to leave his contact information. The A.I. bot kept fumbling his email, and Narron patiently repeated each letter four times.
“I sincerely apologize for the confusion,” the bot said.
“We can travel by any means necessary, as soon as possible,” Narron said, and after exactly 10 minutes, the recording cut off.
Narron had moved to Southern California almost a year earlier, believing it was the best place to start over. He’d traveled widely in his former life — business meetings in New York, retreats to Jamaica — and nowhere held the promise of Los Angeles in terms of escape and reinvention. He arrived after a decade of methamphetamine addiction in North Carolina and checked into a rehab facility with his husband, Alterrick Hooker, 26. Their insurance coverage ran out after a few months, so they moved into a weekly pod motel. Soon they were out of money, and the nearby shelters were either full or restricted.
“Getting desperate. Can you help?” Narron asked his mother, Pat, one day last spring. She sent him a little money, and he got a tent.
Narron and Hooker had bounced between encampments for the last few months, never staying anywhere for more than a week. A woman having a psychotic episode pulled a gun on them at 3 a.m. in Santa Monica. They were chased out of Palisades Park, robbed in Venice and propositioned on Skid Row before finally landing on a tiny patch of sidewalk wedged between two pillars of the First Street Bridge. Their concrete slab radiated heat and melted the tent, but the bridge served as a natural lookout. They could see trouble coming from a few blocks away, and it was always coming.
Several thousand people lived on the streets within a few miles of the bridge. It was one of America’s most dangerous and destitute neighborhoods, which made Narron and Hooker look like targets by comparison. Their battered suitcases still had handles. Their clothes appeared washed. They had a small monthly food stamp allotment and the appearance of money, even if they were sometimes asking for $10 on Facebook.
Some nights, their relationship felt less like a marriage than a partnership of necessity — two soldiers trading shifts. They could never leave the tent unguarded. One did laundry while the other kept watch. One slept through the night while the other listened, waited and counted the hours until sunrise. It was a life that required constant vigilance, and methamphetamine was the caffeine of the streets: cheaper than coffee, stronger and longer-lasting. A $4 hit could keep someone wired for 16 hours. Every day was a test of their newfound sobriety.
“Can you send me twenty,” Narron asked his mother, and she did.
“Need money for some food,” he said. “Please.”
Pat Narron, 80, knew she couldn’t afford to support him forever, but she kept sending $10 or $20 even as relatives asked her to stop. Her son had been a childhood prodigy on piano, an academic standout in the tiny town of Smithfield, N.C. By 25, he had his own real estate business and a house in the suburbs.
“He could sell ice to an Eskimo,” Pat remembered, but her son also started descending into stretches of depression that confounded her. She wondered whether Narron’s struggles had begun when he discovered he’d been adopted, or when he came out as gay amid the prejudices of the rural South. But soon he was calling from jail, confessing to addiction, and then writing from Los Angeles as her savings and patience ran short.
“It’s bad here,” Narron told her, in early August. “We’re thinking it’s time to go home.”
She told him she couldn’t pay for both Narron and Hooker to travel across the country. She said she could help once they arrived in North Carolina, but first they needed to find their own way back.
Narron saw the hotline number on Facebook and called to ask about the wait-list. “We’re willing to endure just about anything in order to leave,” he said. Then he stayed up that night and kept watch outside the tent, listening for footsteps, scanning for a way out.
The emergencies kept coming. The wait-list continued to grow as Alle and his employee, Adam Gibson, headed into Santa Monica one morning with a stack of fliers that showed the hotline number. It was printed across a photograph of an airplane lifting over palm trees, climbing toward the sunset.
“Have you ever thought about leaving this mess and going home?” Alle asked, as a man slumped against a bus stop. He had a box of cereal in his lap and a tattoo of a rifle on his shoulder.
“Home wasn’t so great for me either,” the man said. “I got charges waiting on me and some child support issues.”
“Give us a call if you ever change your mind,” Alle said.
He handed over a flier and kept walking with Gibson past City Hall, through the downtown promenade and toward the Santa Monica Pier. Tourists posed for photos on walkways alongside the ocean. Nearby, a few dozen people lounged on the grass and sat on benches with grocery carts of belongings. Alle adjusted his glasses and decided whom to approach. He thought his program could reduce the homeless population in Los Angeles by about 15 percent by focusing on people who were relatively new to living on the streets. In his experience, many of the city’s longtime homeless had no desire to leave, no family willing to receive them, and no ability to travel cross-country by themselves.
Alle handed a flier to a man from San Antonio, who said he couldn’t possibly go home, because that’s where militants had been conspiring to control him and spying on him through tiny holes in the walls. A woman waiting outside a day shelter said she might be willing to go back home to Oklahoma, or maybe it was North Carolina, or wait — maybe it was Tennessee. But first she needed to shower, because it had been three weeks since the last time she bathed.
“Do you think we can help her?” Gibson asked.
“Too entrenched,” Alle said. “She needs more than a bus ticket.”
He had no official training in outreach work, no expertise other than what he’d learned firsthand over the last few years. He’d spent his career managing dozens of properties, many of which he owned, dealing mostly with leases and leaks until 2020, when unsheltered homelessness and property crime rose to all-time highs outside his storefronts. Foot traffic plummeted and several national chains left the promenade. Alle started going to city meetings to call for more police, more enforcement and a ban on free needle distribution in local parks. He launched an organization called the Santa Monica Coalition, raising money from hundreds of fellow business owners to support the hotline and deal with “issues of roaming transient addicts.”
“Vacancy, open-air drug use, theft, assaults and filth are destroying Santa Monica,” he wrote to members. “Join our efforts to take control back.”
Now one of his storefronts on the promenade was still vacant, and the two others were turning over a few times a year on month-to-month leases. Alle estimated his losses in the millions, which didn’t account for the hundreds of hours he’d devoted to becoming a full-time activist. He started petitions, organized protests and filed public records requests with the city, but he believed nothing yielded results more quickly than his reunification program, which cost only a few thousand dollars each month.
He said he had tried handing it over for free to the city or the county, but most other reunification programs involved more infrastructure: drug tests, mental health evaluations, steady financial assistance, case workers to help ensure a smooth transition and track success. What some leaders saw as necessary guardrails sounded to Alle like more bureaucratic red tape and unnecessary spending. Pretty much all he requested from recipients was a video to prove that someone was in fact waiting at home, and then another video to confirm the arrival. What happened next was often anybody’s guess.
“I’m taking the Greyhound back to Philadelphia,” said one man, in a video, after he had spent three months stranded in Los Angeles, sleeping inside only when he needed to go to the hospital.
“I’m safely back now in Wyoming,” said a woman in a long-brimmed cowboy hat, after she had spent several months at a women’s shelter in California.
Alle and Gibson kept passing out fliers and then sifted through the wait-list to see who was ready to leave right away. They sent a grandmother back to Valdosta, Ga. They called back a 21-year-old woman who was in the hospital, where she was recovering from drinking bleach after four years of being trafficked in South L.A. A few days later, Gibson and Alle were picking her up from the hospital and driving her directly to the airport. “What year is it?” she asked them, from the back seat, and then a few hours later she was in Idaho, safely reunited with the mother she hadn’t seen in four years, jolting awake with night terrors, delusions and a throat too damaged to process solid food.
“We just dropped the count by one more,” Alle and Gibson wrote on Instagram, and then they went back to the list. Gibson picked up his phone and dialed the next number. A voice answered on the first ring.
“Hello?” Gibson said. “Is this Jason Narron?”
A few hours later, Gibson was standing outside their tent on the sidewalk of the First Street Bridge. A Metro train rattled by. A woman lying on a nearby mattress shouted at passing cars. A hundred feet down the block, a TV crew was shooting a promotional video for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, filming from the bridge toward the skyscrapers of downtown.
Gibson leaned down into the tent with two Mountain Dews and shouted over the traffic to introduce himself.
“So, if I take you guys to the airport, are you going to have any problems in terms of law enforcement?” he asked. “Any active warrants?”
“No,” Narron said. “We did our time. We’re all clear. What else do you need from us?”
“We don’t really require paperwork or anything,” Gibson said. “Our whole thing is just to get you home. How soon do you want to go? Tomorrow? Later this week?”
Narron looked back at Hooker, who had already started to pack a suitcase.
“Let’s go now,” Narron said. “We’re used to keeping our stuff tight and being on the move. We can pack this whole thing down in about two minutes.”
Gibson bought them two airline tickets for $480 on a flight through Denver and into Raleigh, and they folded their clothes into three roller bags and disassembled the tent. Narron jogged up the street to give it to a friend, and 10 minutes later that person was re-establishing camp in the same nook of the First Street Bridge.
Narron and Hooker held hands in the back seat as Gibson drove them to the airport, passing their old pod motel, the encampments on the edge of Skid Row and a new condo development where one-bedrooms rented for $3,600 a month. Gibson parked outside the terminal and walked them up to the counter, but they didn’t have IDs, and the agent said she couldn’t check their bags. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do,” she said. Gibson walked across the terminal to appeal to a supervisor, but he came back shaking his head.
“We’re kind of stuck,” he said, and he told Narron and Hooker they might have to spend a night or two at LAX while he sorted it out.
“Hold on,” Narron said. “Let me try.” He smiled and walked back to the counter, and 10 minutes later he came back with a gate agent whom he introduced as “my bestie Pauline.” She handed over a luggage receipt and a pair of new tickets on a better flight and then hugged Narron goodbye.
“That was impressive,” Gibson said, as they walked toward security.
“I guess I’ve still got a little something,” Narron said.
He slipped off his shoes and sat next to Hooker on a bench in the terminal as they waited for their flight. Gibson watched until the crowd swallowed them — two fewer people on a bridge in Los Angeles, two fewer names on the wait-list. In 12 hours, they’d be back home in North Carolina with no money and no permanent place to live. But even if their problems weren’t entirely solved, they now belonged to someplace other than Santa Monica.
Narron called his mother before they boarded the plane. “We’ll be home soon,” he told her.
“Wonderful,” she said. “And then what?”
Read by Eli Saslow
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Eli Saslow writes in-depth stories about the impact of major national issues on people’s lives.
Erin Schaff is a photojournalist for The Times, covering stories across the country.
The post To Get People Off the Street, He Pays for a One-Way Ticket Home appeared first on New York Times.
