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.
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“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.