I was poor for a lot of my childhood, I was thrown out of my house at 16 and I was so broken at university that I sometimes slept in my car. I then rebounded in several countries as a writer and sleeping street singer in the doors and the fields before finally settled as a full -time journalist. I only say that to show how, decades ago, when I became a specialist in relationships on homelessness, the street was not unrelated to me. In fact, I liked it – and I liked the oppressed people I met there. They were familiar.
This is why when I came across a woman named Rita Grant in a colony of heroin and drug addicts living on a circulation separator in San Francisco Called Island Sans-Abri 22 years ago, it was not difficult to know it. The same goes for five years ago when I met a man named Tyson Feilzer, when he was sitting on a band of cardboard between methamphetamine and heroin.
It was as if I already knew them. We had the same tacit language of pain, desire, frustration – it is a meaning that fills the silent cracks of a conversation with someone who also had difficult times. In this case, as for most chronically homeless people, their difficult moments of sleep on concrete and to face dependence were much more difficult than anything I had suffered. They were street, intelligent and open with me. I dug them, they dug me and I ended up writing about them in San Francisco ChronicWhere I was a journalist and publisher for 32 years. While time goes, I have become real friends with Rita and Tyson and their families – and now they are the main characters in my book, The lost and found it.
What I found in writing about the life of Rita and Tyson – and by intensively reporting to hundreds of other people who are not in accordance with tents, cars, shelters, alleys and everywhere you can Finding refuge – is that their world is a scary mystery for many people. I loved helping to reveal this mystery.
Some people – not much, fortunately – told me to write about people living in gutters, fields and streets is worth it. That they are only problems to keep away, hidden or perhaps accommodated and saved – but by someone else, out of sight. This could not be further from the truth. The old Maxime to measure a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable people is as true as ever today; By this measure, we fail. And whether or not you are sympathetic to millions of people who suffer from homeless each year, you should know who they are.
Rita and Tyson’s trips have made them unthinkable nightmares that most people live very far. To someone by sipping a chardonnay in a white cafe, a cost from bottom to bottom and a distant cost on the sidewalk outside may seem to be part of the landscape. The painting of decades of our modern roaming version is too often now something to divert or take a look, or perhaps to visit a moment while you put a dollar.
But each of these people was someone’s baby’s baby for at least a brilliant time, a potential child or an adult who wanted a life of security and love.
Understanding this has never been so important as now.
Last year, the federal government said that every night, 771,480 people knew homelessness in America – the greatest number since the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development began to count in 2007, and up 18% compared to the previous year. California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has led more than $ 20 billion in recent years to shelter, housing and support services, was a rare light point with only a 3%increase. But recent fires in Los Angeles have stressed that precarious life can be, how narrow the line between the homelessness is.
Light points in our country’s ability to fight this crisis are few. And it’s not a mystery why.
We are in a new era of thieves barons, and the problem has not simply exploded in recent years. This is anything but a local thing – for any city, San Francisco or otherwise. It is largely the result of this long slow burn of government abandonment and poor management of support for the poor, affordable housing and mental health programs that ignited in the 1980s. Economic and a company that remain by low -income inadequate wages, the lack of national health care, housing and oppressive rent practices, and more. There is, of course, a debate on what went so badly. Numerous non -profit and academic studies have accumulated it on the reduction of crucial federal programs of social care and housing under the supervision of Reagan, while others say that the biggest problem is that money from the government intended for the poor is sucked in the bureaucracy or seriously diverted. We also live in a country where greed has too free. But the fact is the societal landscape for those who below, and the subsequent waterfall of programmatic failures and conservative attacks against support for the lower and medium classes are a large part of what has led us where we are today ‘Hui.
The Western Regional Advocacy Project, a non -profit organization anti -fueled led by longtime activist Paul Boden, reported in 2006 that between 1978 and 1983, the HUD annual national budget had been reduced by $ 83 billion to 18 billions of dollars, calculated in 2004 in constant dollars. This shortfall has never been composed in HUD’s budget – which in 2022 was $ 54 billion, or in the dressing programs that grew up around it.
“If you look at the last forty years of the fight against homeless, there have been two constants: using the police and private security and public works to remedy them with sweeping – then blame people to be homeless – and extinguish plans, “said Paul, who was homeless as a very young man just before knowing him as a demonstrator of the Scrappy Bay region and defender of the rights of the homeless that he became in The 1980s. “Plans over ten years, support housing plans, social protection plans – everyone likes an F -C plan. But none of this deals with the way we, as a country, will recover affordable housing where it was before the massive federal cuts of the 1980s and the growth of the roaming that we know today ‘ Hui. Housing will repair homelessness, no more plans. »»
Find out more: American laws make us passers-by to the homeless crisis
Nor is it surprising that racism and historical fanaticism have a role. The homelessly affects tragically disproportionately affects black, brunette and LGBTQ populations – and it has been doing it for decades.
“The fact is that more people become homeless than the system cannot manage it,” said Ann Oliva, CEO of the influence of Washington, a national alliance based in DC. “People lose their accommodation – it’s simply too expensive – and existing systems such as behavioral health, child protection systems and the homeless system have trouble getting out of people from everything that ‘They might have who is a temporary shelter in permanent housing. ”
The poor are therefore poor and the poorest fall into the street. In America. The richest country of the earth.
In San Francisco, a city of approximately 800,000 inhabitants, more than 4,000 people – about half of the total number of homeless people outside, which we call non -diagrams every night. And it is a sub-account.
What we have to remember is that each of these people who slept rough deserves to be saved.
When I was a child to myself try to understand how not to starve and how to create this journalism career that I liked, I managed to avoid hard drugs. And alcohol. And crime. It was all around me, and from the moment I was alone at 16, I could see how easy it would be to enter one of these stands. And here is a central thing that I learned during all these years of life and report: person Really wants to be homeless.
Of course, you have adventurers, vagabonds like I was as a self-stop street singer with a guitar. But these trips are mainly finished, then you find stability. If you don’t, you find yourself in misery. Or dead.
We must do better than have homeless despair as one of our decisive national characteristics. But can we? It is only if we sort of restoring the support spaces of the company that were so decimated during the decades. And it’s a major challenge.
Extract from The lost and found it by Kevin Fagan. Copyright © 2025 by Kevin Fagan. Reprinted with the permission of One Signal Publishers / Atria Books, A Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
