For years, Shawn Pleasants did nothing but rise up.
He was high school valedictorian, went to Yale, landed banking jobs on Wall Street, started his own business.
And then, for years, he did nothing but fall.
Lost his business, his home, the car he was living in, and landed on the streets of Los Angeles.
Advertisement
For about six years, home for him and his common-law husband was a lean-to near 7th and Hobart in Koreatown. And like a lot of L.A.’s sizable homeless population, Pleasants was addicted to methamphetamine, a cheap and abundantly available drug.
“It always felt to me like I’d fallen off a fire escape, and once you get on the ground, the ladder is 12 feet up in the air,” Pleasants told me. “I always thought, ‘If I could just get to that first step.’ But the first step is so far away.”