For nearly 20 years, Tim Roller has lived on the same stretch of East Hollywood street, and Google's Street View cars have documented every chapter — curled in a cardboard box, stretched beneath a blanket, sitting beside makeshift shelter. A former math teacher, father of four grown children, surviving on a block off the Hollywood Freeway while the most powerful company on Earth drives by, snaps a photo, and moves on.
The New York Post reported on Roller's two-decade ordeal this week. He told The California Post he's been out there 19 years, describing it as "a roller-coaster ride" with "a lot of drug addicts, a lot of violence, a lot of crazy stuff." He doesn't drink or use drugs. His downfall was gambling — "I like adrenaline," he said. "It got me."
Meanwhile, Google is busy signing power purchase agreements. TNW reported that Ormat, a geothermal company founded in the 1960s, just locked in a deal to supply Google with up to 150 megawatts of new geothermal capacity in Nevada — more than ten times its first data-center agreement signed just months earlier. Ormat's revenue hit $662.7 million in the first half of 2026, up 43 percent. The AI infrastructure buildout is real, it is massive, and it runs on power that households competing for the same grid can't access. In Europe, Denmark has already paused grid connections because data centers are overwhelming the cleanest grid on the continent, and the EU has asked households to shift electricity use away from peak hours.
The contrast writes itself. Google can arrange continent-spanning energy contracts to keep its servers humming, but its cameras can drive past the same American citizen for two decades and offer nothing but a pixelated monument to failure. California's Democratic governance has spent billions — on migrant services, on foreign aid priorities, on every cause except the one playing out on that cul-de-sac.
Roller's solution isn't complicated. "We don't need an independent bathroom or our own room," he said. "We just need a place to live like this, indoors." He envisions small private rooms with a door and a bed — not the packed bunk-bed shelters the system prefers. "All you need is a bed."
He's watched the encampments come and go, watched people dig holes at night to bury their drugs, developed his own survival rules: don't eat where you sleep, learn from the raccoons and the squirrels. He uses his phone for online chess and to find cheap food deals. He gets gift cards from UCLA for completing monthly questionnaires.
Two decades of Street View images. Billions in AI power contracts. A man who taught math now learning survival from skunks. The cameras keep rolling. The servers keep humming. The block stays the same.
