New Haven Independent

Skid Row is a notorious 50-square block area in downtown Los Angeles where an average of 100,000 homeless and transient people live on any given night. The idea, was originally pitched to him by a friend during a game of Scrabble and Pras was not the intended star. He signed on to the project as a producer. “Basically, no one else wanted to do it,” he explains. “Everyone else backed out”.

“I didn’t give it any real thought,” he admits. “On the first day I made about thirty bucks in four hours,” he recalls of his first panhandling experience. “I was like this is it? This is easy!” He blew all the money on an expensive dinner. But he was naïve. “The next day I spent like 7 or 8 hours asking people for money and I only made 6 dollars. It was raining and when it rains people aren’t as friendly. There’s a psychology to pan handling.”

Learning how to panhandle was one difficult adjustment amongst many. Michel transforms before our eyes as he adapts to slum surroundings, sleeping in tents and on the sidewalk, living amongst rats and junkies, escaping danger and hustling each day for food. No fancy cinematography here. In Skid Row, hidden cameras capture the grittiness of the Los Angeles underworld and humanize a condition that most find easy to ignore. There are a few moments of humorous irony such as when the famous rapper is refused money underneath a billboard featuring him and the rest of The Fugees.

It was a risky endeavor that most people would not take, let alone a hip hop star, but Michel found the sacrifice necessary in order to shed light on a serious matter.

“This is not a sexy topic,” he states. “We don’t address issues until they hit home”.

Unfortunately for a growing number of Americans, it has hit ‘home’. Homelessness is no longer a political buzzword, but it still affects a staggering amount of Americans. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates that approximately 3.5 million Americans, 1.35 of them children, are likely to experience homelessness within a given year. Here in New Haven, a city of stark socioeconomic contrasts, the 2007 homeless count identified 788 people living on the streets without shelter, likely a modest figure.

“Most people think the homeless are lazy or on drugs,” Michel says, admitting that he may have also had that misconception. However he learned that poverty in America is far more complex. “Most of us are a heartbeat away from being homeless,” he realizes, citing that about only about a quarter of the nation’s homeless are “chronically homeless”,that is on drugs, disabled, or mentally ill. “The rest, the other 75 percent, are just down on their luck.”

It wasn’t difficult for him to see the link between people down on their luck, and an economy down on its luck, particularly with a looming housing crisis. Michel encountered numerous people who had recently lost their home or were laid-off from their job. More startling, he recalls meeting veteran from the Iraq War, who had returned home to nothing; left out in the cold by the country he had just served.

The star also saw a severe shortage of resources for the down and out. “The 25 percent who make up the chronically homeless use up about 80 percent of all the resources available. So you have the rest scrambling for what’s left.” He thinks that the distribution of social resources to the homeless should be reformed.

“As humans we learn to adapt” he points out. By the ninth day life on the streets had become normal for him, as it is for millions of Americans. “I was walking around barefoot like Skid Row was my living room,” he jokes. “The transition wasn’t that hard but the impact was everlasting. Every day when I connect with people—every day it changes my life.”

The experience of living on the street inspired Michel to launch the PrAsperity project in May of 2007, a non-profit organization that mobilizes community groups to successfully take on humanity issues ranging from social injustice to homelessness. He will appear this year in a movie titled The Land of Oz and Mutants alongside John Malkovich.