Street-Based Journalists: From the Frontlines of the War on Homelessness
Catherine Barrie
…Everything happened inside that tent. We showered in the same place we cooked our meals. We had to fill our bottles with water from far away and carry them inside. We tried to layer rocks on top of each other to keep the rest of the tent from getting wet, but sometimes it was impossible to avoid. Even in the widest part of the tent you could barely stretch out your arms. In that situation, you are vulnerable to all of nature’s elements. Sometimes it got very windy, and other people’s tents would fly away. Other times it would rain and ruin many of the things we had. The worst part, however, was when it was hot. Tents started burning, even with people inside. I remember one time when a tent caught fire and caused another tent to catch fire, since so many of them were so close together, and people died. Whatever the weather was, we were exposed to the most extreme version of it…
- Dlan “From a Syrian Refugee”
In 2019, Street Sheet, a publication that sets itself within San Francisco’s homelessness epidemic, celebrated its 30th year of print. This is just an example of a piece written by one of the magazine’s writers who goes by the pen name ‘Dlan’. The account of asylum-seeking is poignant and highly visceral—an emotional retelling of the day-by-day of a refugee. It is void of politicisation; personal and conscientiously disruptive. It is Dlan’s own account of homelessness. Street Sheet is doing something different: lending a pen to San Franciscans on the front lines of homelessness and poverty: the homeless and the ex-homeless themselves. Tackling homelessness has always been a tactical affair, momentarily making its regular appearance in party manifestos early on in elections then, quite quickly fading out into the oblivion of lost policy. Street Sheet writers are throwing this out the window. Rewriting the narrative that surrounds homelessness in San Francisco is personal. 11% of unhoused San Franciscans actually have jobs and still can’t afford homes. Rent is on the rise and more and more Americans are struggling to keep their head above the water.
Reading Dlan’s personal account of seeking refuge highlights that the homeless in San Francisco are not numbers for politicians to crunch during election periods, but individuals. This is not to say the publication holds its readership at sentimental ransom; one should be clear in saying that the appeal of the magazine comes from the quality of the writing, never from a place of mawkish sympathies. Manifestos, amongst other forms of writing on vaccination, disability, and shelter, are politically cutting, critical, and convincing. Not only do Street Sheet’s writers and vendors pull on the heartstrings of buyers, but readers learn of the writers’ experiences.
Amongst Street Sheet is Street Sense, Megaphone, NYC’s Street News, all of which owe some of their reputation to its exemplar collection of poetry. It has highlighted the capability of poetry to impact and project small voices to thunderous volumes. As it goes, pedestrians grow accustomed to ignoring homeless backs against walls. Street poetry has made this hard to stomach. James Witwicki’s poem ‘Me. You. Tipping Canoe’ is a beautifully nostalgic recall of childhood at Deer Lake, 1975.
Me without you.
Still grieving your ending.
Clinging to my beginning.
No tipping. No falling.
No sinking. No dreading.
It is a child-like retelling that stings and echoes. Witwicki’s biography on the Megaphone website states that the poet found himself living in the Downtown Eastside, homeless, and using drugs and alcohol after tragically losing his wife. But he turned his life around and returned to writing during his recovery in part thanks to the Carnegie’s Thursday Writing Collective.
James Davis’ ‘Arugula Salad’ (Street Sense) is deeply funny, satirising economic class, each one at a time.
Give me your billionaires, your millionaires, your Wall Street financiers;
Give me your Ponzi-Schemers, your entrepreneurs, your one-percenters;
Give me your venture-capitalists, your silver-spooners, your oil men,
as they sit in the parlor of their Fifth Avenue apartments asking the butler,
“What sort of wine shall we have with our arugula salad this evening?”
Give me your middle class, your forty-seven percenters, your blue-collar workers,
your small businessmen, your professional office workers,
your lawyers, your engineers, and your politicians,
as they walk through the produce section,
and contemplate the rising cost of arugula.
Give me your broken-downs, your homeless, your hobos, your welfare recipients,
your poor, your disenfranchised, your chronically unemployed, your low-income earners,
your beggars and bums, your slum dwellers and disaster victims,
as they stand in the unemployment line and ask themselves,
“What the hell is arugula?”
Davis reveals a growing diaspora between the rich and poor who ask different questions and expect different answers. The poem’s structure acts as a mirror of class-based hierarchy and highlights societal disconnect. Impactful, thought-provoking and insightful, Street Sheet, and other publications like it, are paving the way for a new kind of journalism that does not demand the mediation of the middle class. Davis, Witwicki, Dlan, and their contemporaries are asking the questions missing from big time publications and politicians; not ‘how’ homelessness worsened, but ‘why’ it did.
https://www.megaphonemagazine.com/vendors_stories
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/147941/write-the-way-you-feel
https://sfist.com/2019/11/28/street-sheet-turns-30-as-the-underdog-paper-refuses-to-fold/
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Street-Sheet-hits-25th-anniversary-with-5746850.php
https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/24-hours-homelessness/