My younger son Sam had come over for a leisurely weekend breakfast, along with my friend Chuck, visiting from Chicago. We were talking about the Tenderloin. Every week Sam works his 40 hours at an equipment rental place; and he goes to a couple of AA meetings; and he volunteers to teach a class in anger management at the sober house he used to live at. So it's a big deal for him to use precious weekend time to drive to the Bay Area from his home near Turlock. He has fundamentalist American food tastes, but tolerates my effrontery in serving him coffee with soy milk, fried potatoes without ketchup. As he has adapted to my habit of injecting "serious" discussions into innocent social occasions. That morning, I told them about a podcast that included a Russian journalist's impressions of the seamy side of the Bay Area. Then Sam told us a little story from his own time living on the streets.
When Sam was in the Tenderloin, he would scavenge clothes from refuse bins, and then try to sell them on the streets to people who'd assume that they'd been stolen. And he kept an eye out for other hustles. There was one guy on the streets the others were afraid of, the alpha male of the street people. Someone told Sam that tucked away in a nook in an alley, the alpha and his girlfriend kept a shopping cart filled with precious items. They stole the cart, and discovered that the only things in it were credit cards. Sam assumed the cards had already been reported as stolen, and went off in search of other opportunities. But his accomplice was identified, and the next time Sam saw him he was lying in the streets, bruised and bloodied. Nobody suspected Sam, who, as he puts it, was just some "random tweaker."
I told him he should write that story down. And the one about getting beat up when he was in jail for the last time. Alas, there's only 24 hours in his days too. But some day, I believe he'll write the homeless the way the tale should be told, a story that gets in your face and follows your around. For now, here's my version: my son could have died of exposure on the streets while people walked past him without comprehending, seeing nothing.
P.S. Here's a whirlwind tour of media depictions of the homeless, as gleaned from my lower rung of the ivory tower.
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If you don't know the Bay Area, the Tenderloin is a district in downtown San Francisco with two museums, a Nordstrom store, a Hilton hotel at Union Square, and blocks that respectable natives know to avoid. That's just part of our urban survival instincts, like how we won't notice homeless encampments near busy thoroughfares. But it's a magnet for runaways, and addicts of all ages who have burnt their bridges by preying on family and friends. Alexey Kovalev checked into the Union Square Hilton as part of a bevy of foreign journalists on a nine-week tour of American newsrooms, thanks to World Press Institute fellowships. The desk clerk told them it was best not to venture a few blocks south.
Of course as a journalist that's the first place Kovalev went. He described what he saw on the Sean's Russia Blog (SRB) podcast, sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies. (The San Francisco segment starts at 25:30 and continues for 8 minutes.) People on the sidewalk shooting up, sniffing white powder, rambling and cursing incoherently. A woman earning her next fix by selling lipsticks that looked like they'd been shoplifted from the nearest Walgreen. People "beyond any help." An American colleague in New York had told him "Be prepared, San Francisco has a homeless problem, but that doesn't even begin to describe it." But Kovalev wasn't prepared, you could still hear the shock and wonder in his voice.
Kovalev had lived through the '90s in Moscow, and witnessed dizzying contrasts in wealth. But somehow the sight of Teslas whizzing by people begging in the street felt different. The journalists on the tour came from all over the world, including Delhi in India, "one of the most polluted, over-populated cities on the planet." Yet by consensus, they agreed that the misery they saw in the Tenderloin was something new and very intense. Kovalev came to agree with his American colleague that homeless is a misnomer. Homeless implies that you could solve the problem by providing a place to live, but these are people seemingly beyond help. That same New York colleague had also warned Kovalev that we natives were all in denial about the problem, whatever you want to call it. Kovalev puts it in the same category as mass school shootings, or the California wildfires: problems we do acknowledge, but which conflicting interests render impossible to solve.
You may be wondering if this Kovalev guy is a Kremlin agent, trying to sow discord? Unlikely. In his home country Kovalev specializes in exposing official propaganda in the Russian media. On the podcast, he makes many flattering comparisons between the situations of American and Russian journalism: he particularly likes our First Amendment rights, the orderliness and punctual habits our newsrooms, our tax deduction for charitable contributions that secures a financial basis for independent journalism. And he had many flattering things to say about America. His favorite place was a tie between he Minneapolis, which fully lived up to its "Minnesota Nice" reputation, and Austin, "just a really cool place." Runner-up, Chicago; he was appropriately edified by the architecture tour of the Chicago River. So in my opinion, the words he uses to introduce his San Francisco experience are sincere: "Seriously, that place is a mess."
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For the homeless experience in fiction, you could do worse than Victor Lodato's short story Herman Melville, Volume I, which he read recently on the New Yorker Writer's Voice podcast. The story takes its title from one of the books the protagonist's boy friend/traveling companion lugs around in his backpack. Both are refugees from imploded families, she fleeing her father's suicide, he escaping blows that deafened one ear. It's good for describing how different kinds of people prey on the homeless for sex, and how the homeless prey on each other to survive. And for the physical details that shape daily life, like brushing your teeth with your tongue.
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Richard Walker's Pictures of a Gone City puts the "homeless" problem, let's just call it that, in a Bay Area context. He did a virtual book tour show on Doug Henwood's Behind the News podcast on 5/24/18. Walker is a Professor Emeritus of Geography at U.C. Berkeley, specializing in California. The subtitle of his book is "Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area," and it's revealing in both departments. Walker says the Bay Area, considered as a single metropolis, has arrived: we're one of the world's "superstar cities." We are the epicenter for tech innovation, and the gusher of tech wealth has generated "more billionaires per square foot that anywhere else on the planet, with the possible exception of Hong Kong." And we have a great climate, an open, experimental culture, and …we are one of the most unequal places on earth, on a par with Guatemala according to the Gini index.
Inequality plays out in housing. The less fortunate are pushed out to the exurbs, and have slow, expensive commutes by car or on decrepit public transit. It's no picnic even for those who luck out and live closer in. Last semester I was a regular on a BART rush hour train from Oakland to San Francisco, and I can assure you it's uncomfortable. And on the lowest rung of housing hell, "…the numbers of homeless are staggering. Official estimates taken one day a year run about 7,500 in San Francisco, 7,000 in Silicon Valley, and 5,500 in Alameda County."
Figure 3.12 in Gone City is a chart showing the causes of homelessness in Alameda County, contrasting with the picture sketched by Vokalev. Addicts are the most shockingly visible of the homeless, but according to the survey, only 31% of the homeless have drug issues, and only 25% might still have homes if they had access to mental health services. On the other hand, 48% would not be homeless if they had rent assistance, as would another 36% if they had employment assistance.
BTW, Gone City takes its title from the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem Pictures of the Gone World 11, which you might call a love poem to a beautiful, but flawed and transient existence. The last stanza starts with these lines:
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and ends with these:
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
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https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/01/17/california-the-state-of-resistance/
And finally, Michael Greenberg has an essay in the 1/17/19 New York Review of Books called California: The State of Resistance, which puts the homeless in a state-wide and national context. For those who think of California as leading the blue state resistance to Trump, you could say that Greenberg plays the role of Ferlinghetti's "smiling mortician."
True, we are not cooperating with scapegoating the undocumented, and "California has strengthened its carbon emissions laws in response to the EPA’s rollback of the Clean Air Act, fuel efficiency standards, and other environmental regulations." On the other hand, if you think California will point the way to closing the yawning gap between rich and poor, the chasm that formed the backdrop to Trumps election — think again. "More than a quarter of the nation’s homeless live in California." (with only about 12% of the population). Thanks largely to Prop 13 and NIMBYism, the median home price is 597k, affordable by only 1 out of 4 residents. Obviously, one cause of homelessness is simply high housing costs. They also cause our state to have the highest poverty rate in the country.
How does housing insecurity play out for people who are not-so-invisible, people we can imagine going through daily lives much like ours? Greenberg has this to say about life in the vicinity of the Magic Kingdom:
In Orange County rundown motels on the edges of cities and towns are crowded with working families paying week to week for their rooms. Disneyland in Anaheim is the largest employer in Orange County, with 30,000 “cast members,” as its hair stylists, costumers, custodians, puppeteers, candy makers, ticket takers, security guards, and hotel and food service workers are called. A recent survey of Disneyland employees found that “two-thirds meet the department of agriculture’s definition of ‘food insecure’; fifty-six percent are worried about being evicted from their homes or apartments,” and 11 percent reported being homeless at some point in the last two years. This invisible homelessness—people living not on the street but without a fixed shelter or address—stretches throughout Orange County: a professor at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) told me that at least 10 percent of his students sleep in their cars.
Don't know about 10%, but homeless and hungry students at San Francisco State have been in the news. Last semester I was stunned to learn that a student in the Computer Science class I teach was living in his car. And surprised to be surprised.
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