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Homeless struggle beneath the lights of Las Vegas
DW (English)
Follow
3/10/2025
Most people associate Las Vegas with gambling, show business, and luxury hotels. But the city's underground storm drainage system is home to some of America's poorest citizens, many of whom also suffer from mental health problems.
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News
Transcript
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00:00
Las Vegas. Known around the world for parties, gambling, show business and luxury hotels.
00:06
But underneath in the storm drains that crisscross the city, there's another reality.
00:12
Untreated mental illness and drug addiction. Homelessness.
00:16
Forget glitz and glamour, the damp and darkness down here is home to around 12,000 people.
00:22
So if you're walking in the dark, you keep your hand on the wall. You know where you're at. You're not drifting.
00:28
Rob was homeless for five years and spent a large part of that time in the tunnels.
00:33
Now he's working with Shine-A-Light. That's an organization that helps people down here with food and batteries
00:40
and also guidance on restarting a regular life.
00:45
Rob guides us through the tunnels and introduces us to some of those who still live here.
00:51
Freedom wants to talk with us outside.
00:54
She is 47 and has lived in the tunnels for five years.
00:59
Traveling, hitchhiking, train hopping before I came here. Schizophrenia.
01:09
So how do you get your meds?
01:11
I don't. They don't really make any of the symptoms go away.
01:15
They just make it really hard for me to express it in any way that you can understand.
01:21
It puts a big cloud around me. I still got the same voices saying the same stuff.
01:25
I just can't really get out and do anything.
01:29
The first three years I was raped each year.
01:34
It's weird to wake up with a stranger in bed with you.
01:41
It happens.
01:45
We learned to compartmentalize. Put everything in its own little space and leave it there.
01:53
There's only so much we can do. Sometimes it's tough being alone.
01:59
Sometimes it's just tough.
02:02
Freedom takes us back in to show us where she does her laundry.
02:07
On our walk to the pipe we pass people's homes.
02:10
Some are very orderly with food for the cats which keep the rats away.
02:15
Others are more messy and chaotic.
02:18
Ten long minutes into the tunnels we meet Jay.
02:22
I've been here nine or ten years.
02:24
That's the worst part I think. The stuff follows you.
02:27
It's not like TV haunted. It's seriously haunted down here.
02:31
So what do you mean by haunted?
02:33
Ghosts, demons, things from here, things not from here.
02:37
It's musty down in the tunnels.
02:40
Rubbish food, old clothes and people all add to the smell.
02:44
But then we hear running water and there's a new smell.
02:48
I've been told that it's from Caesar's Fountains and it often smells fairly highly chlorinated.
02:54
I do laundry here. Sometimes I shower here.
02:58
So you don't think about what's going on up there?
03:01
Oh no, not when I'm down here. It's completely different.
03:05
There's no interaction. It's cement and ground. It's like a totally different world.
03:12
This could well be the water Freedom washes her clothes in.
03:17
And here's just part of the glamorous landscape for people to walk past on their way into the casino.
03:24
Less than five minutes away we reach the headquarters of Shine-A-Light.
03:29
Robert Bangard, who took us into the tunnels, is the outreach manager.
03:34
All the staff here have lived somewhere in the network of tunnels at some point.
03:41
When I was homeless I had no hope. I had no hope.
03:44
And when you don't have hope you don't plan. You don't think about the future.
03:48
You're just living very much in the moment.
03:50
We're just trying to build relationships, humanize them, relate to them, talk to them.
03:55
All the things we can do to try and bridge the gap.
03:59
And usually it's sharing our own experience of what we went through when we were out there,
04:04
and how we got out, and what it's going to be like, and just loving on them.
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