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Veteran journalist Kevin Fagan spent decades covering homelessness for the San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on a crisis that persists despite billions poured into housing and services and years of political debate.
The issue is personal for him. Fagan was episodically homeless in his youth, sleeping in his car and camping outside while he attended college and later in doorways abroad as a traveling musician.
Over the course of his career, he’s kept a relentless focus on what really matters: the people living outside. Now in a new book, The Lost and the Found, Fagan argues powerfully that the “atrociously unforgivable” poverty in the US continues to stymie efforts to alleviate the situation. He dives deeply into human stories, exploring the paths of two people who wound up living on the streets of San Francisco: Rita Grant, a mother of five from Florida, and Tyson Feilzer, a charismatic young man who grew up in an affluent Bay Area community. Both reconnected with loved ones who found them through Fagan’s stories in the Chronicle, and Fagan tells of lives ravaged by homelessness and addiction and their families’ tireless efforts to help.
The Guardian spoke with Fagan about homelessness and what’s changed in the decades he’s been reporting on the issue, and why there is still reason to be hopeful.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been covering homelessness for many years. How have you watched this crisis change in that time?
It just got more calcified. I started as a paid daily newspaper reporter the year Ronald Reagan got elected. I watched homelessness explode through the 80s. The root of it all, it seemed clear to me, was the decimation of social aid programs under Reaganomics. And in the late 70s and early 80s when mental institutions were pulled down through an effort by both the left and the right. Liberals thought that it was compassionate to close institutions – which had problems – and put patients into board-and-care homes. The right thought “we can save a lot of money”. The trouble was government didn’t follow up adequately with funding, so we wound up with a lot of mentally ill people in the streets.
Through the 90s, the country discovered supportive housing was a terrific fix for the most severely troubled people. You bring them inside and then deal with the problems that put them out in the street to begin with. As the years have gone by, there’s been a lot of effort put into supportive housing, but it’s expensive.
The problem that has consistently stood out for me as a reporter for the last 45 years is poverty. Affordable housing has disappeared in large numbers. My research, which I put in the book, shows that about 30% of the country lives right at or below poverty level, if you take the cost of living for the individual areas and demographics into account. When you have that amount of poverty and people struggling, you’re not going to get rid of homelessness. You need to attack it at the root, but we’re treating it on the other end with Band-Aids for people who’ve been ruined who shouldn’t have been ruined to begin with.
In 2003, you spent months on the street documenting homelessness in San Francisco. How do you think that experience would be different today?
I don’t think it would be different. The number of homeless people is about the same today as it was then. The main difference is that people use tents. Back in 2003, it was mostly tarps draped over shopping carts and cardboard and shacks. Other than that, you have the same dynamics: poor people who can’t afford a place to live and wound up disabled in one way or another. These are the long-term chronically homeless.
We concentrated on the chronically homeless because that’s usually about 30% of any city’s homeless population but it’s the most visible. They are the most desperate and dysfunctional folks. We wanted to figure out what was going to help them. It’s the same fix today as it was then – supportive housing, outreach, counseling, drug rehab, mental rehab, healthcare.
Today a lot of us have done stories about the scourge of fentanyl. Fentanyl is horrible, but, frankly, heroin was killing people by the droves in 2003, in the 90s, in the 80s. Fentanyl kills quicker and is more volatile. But you still have a very similar dynamic of desperation and fear and mental trauma and addiction today that you did 20 years ago.
What are the most common misconceptions about homelessness?
A lot of people think people are homeless by choice. It’s not a choice. No one wants to be homeless. People get stuck in their survival modes. They wind up in the street unable to pull themselves off or to find a way off. The most severely troubled become addicted, which then starts this awful cycle. You’re stuck and it becomes scary to think of giving up your survival routine to go into a shelter when you hear bad things about shelters. No one wants to sleep outside. It’s hard, it’s cold, it’s dirty. You put cardboard down to keep yourself from getting too cold. People can come by steal your stuff, beat you up, especially if you’re sleeping alone, which I did a lot of in my young life. That’s no way to be. People want a door that they can lock, and a bed they can sleep in with a roof over their heads.
The other thing is most cities believe people are pouring into their city from outside. That is way overblown. Only 30% of homeless people in San Francisco came from outside the city. The rest were housed before they became homeless.
In the time that you’ve been reporting on this issue, are there approaches that stand out to you for their ability to really lead to meaningful change?
The prime example of that is veteran homelessness. Over the last 10 years, veteran homelessness has been cut in half, at a time when homelessness overall has risen. The reason that worked is the VA [US Department of Veterans Affairs] and HUD [US Department of Housing and Urban Development], those two in particular, teamed up to address chronic veterans homelessness. The advantage was the VA could supply healthcare and in combination with HUD special housing vouchers and those could be used in independent housing or in supportive housing contexts. A lot of housing was created for homeless veterans both as complexes and individually, and healthcare was key to helping them. It showed what can happen if we as a society put enough of the right kind of resources into the problem.
Many of the solutions to address homelessness happen at a systems level. What can individual people do to help?
Support programs that work. Pay attention. And that’s hard. Most people are working their jobs, taking care of their families. But be an informed citizen. Read stuff like in the Chronicle, in the Guardian, that examines programs in a journalistically objective way, trying to show what works and what doesn’t. On a personal level, it’s really good to volunteer at soup kitchens, food banks. They always need to help because everyone is underfunded.
On the most personal level, walking down the street, when you pass by homeless folks, be kind. Stop and talk. With the range of difficulty that a chronically homeless person has, having someone just have a conversation and treat you with dignity and make you feel seen for a few minutes, that’s a gift. That having been said, if you walk by someone shooting up, acting out with a mental episode or dopesick, those kinds of behaviors you’re not gonna wanna stop and talk because a lot of times you’ll be talking to the behavior not the person. Stop and talk to people who are rationally available for a conversation.
With the recent supreme court ruling allowing cities to take a more punitive approach to homelessness, and an administration that is seeking major cuts to important programs, where do you think we’re headed?
Cutting social services to the bone probably won’t lead to anything productive in terms of alleviating homelessness. I think that could lead to a more punitive approach. We’ll see where the federal government hits. State and local governments are gonna have to react in their own way as resources dwindle. Whatever it is, it’s gonna be tough.
A lot of cities have been under a ton of pressure over the last several years, as the street population has become more visible, to erase it. The public goes through these periods of compassion fatigue, and we’re in a heavy one right now. The general feeling is: “OK, just make it go away.” So you see people being swept to the edges of town. In the case of San Francisco, the city doubled the number of shelters, vastly increased the amount of supportive housing, so a good number of people are going into facilities. But there are still people being swept off to other neighborhoods, which is how it’s always been.
There is so much about the homelessness crisis that is so heartbreaking. What gives you hope?
Stories like Rita’s give me hope because Rita blossomed into the person she should’ve been. She became a health nutritionist and a licensed massage therapist. She was a delightful person, street smart, and just enjoying the hell out of life. The possibility was always there when she was in the street. Watching her reconnect with her sisters and her kids was wonderful. They came to appreciate each other again in the way that you can when someone’s not in distress on the street. It’s really inspiring to see how someone can become restored.
