Kevin Fagan Takes A Deep, Immersive Look At Surviving Homelessness
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In the current climate, too many companies are just waiting to get to the other side. At IDEO, we partner with audacious leaders to build more courageous futures that take organizations from basic growth to real innovation. Discover more at IDEO.com. That's I-D-E-O dot com.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Sutter Health. From routine heart care to life-changing transplants, Sutter's team of dedicated doctors, surgeons, and nurses all work together to keep patients' hearts healthy. Learn more at SutterHealth.org. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

I know you've heard many, many stories about homelessness. We've probably done 30 shows over the past couple years. There's tons of other reporting, and we all have our own experiences, too.

But even if you think you've been hardened to the human realities underlying our societal homelessness problem, Kevin Fagan's new book, The Lost and the Found, could and should cut through all the layers of armor that we've put on to deal with the tragedy. Fagan's been reporting on homelessness for 25 years, and he joins us to talk about his book and what he's learned from all that time in the streets. It's coming up next, right after this news.

Alexis Madrigal here. We've got a little pledge break going right now, so you get a bonus on the pledge-free stream, podcast, or on our replay at night. I'm writing these mini-essays. We're calling the series One Good Thing.

We all live around the bay, right? Many of us can see it now and again as we go about our daily lives. But there is a select group of people who really act as if they live on the water. They swim in it, go stand up paddle boarding. Maybe they even have a boat. And I always marvel at how different their lives are, how amphibious.

Most of the people I know like this live in Alameda. My friends Camilo and Jessica weren't always water people like that, I don't think. But then they found a good deal on a used boat and they got a membership to a little place called the Alameda Yacht Club.

It's probably not like what you might be imagining when you hear yacht club. Really, it's more of a clubhouse for people who love boats. When we visited our friends there, it was like walking into Cheers or at least into a 1970s bar, complete with a dartboard and those stools that are big and cushy. Somehow, that space has been preserved by an all-volunteer crew to be this affordable way to access the water. And wow, the vibes that kind of community project generates are amazing.

Every time we go there, which is not enough, I'm struck by how different it is to really take advantage of that kind of living. Perhaps a boat isn't exactly your style, but many people figure out what their version of that is. My friends Robin and Catherine go swimming off Alameda with two of their friends. They aren't serious swimmers like the people I watch go in at Keller Beach or my neighbor Pamela getting up at dawn to hit the aquatic park in the city. They just like the experience of heading out and splashing around, bobbing in the water.

And they now have an intimate relationship with the water temperature in a way that most of us do not. Even chiller, I love going to Crown Beach in Alameda and settling down among all the different types of people who love to do beach. You could hear a dozen languages all around you as tiny children go racing after each other.

All this to say, there's something about remembering and acting on the reality that we live on this beautiful body of water, and all you have to do is find your way into its embrace. Diving into the bay, that's your one good thing today. Now I'm just gonna sit at the dock of a bay Watching the tide roll away Sitting on the dock of a bay Wasting time

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. There aren't too many journalists left like Kevin Fagan, people who know the different corners of the city whose daily stories were simply samples of a much deeper knowledge of this place. His new book, The Lost and the Found, is the kind of book you want to read from a reporter like Fagan. It represents many, many years of work, braiding the story of two people he met reporting on homelessness into his own realizations about the problems on our streets.

I read it on a short flight to Los Angeles this last week, and despite myself, I found tears running down my cheeks. Some of those tears were grief for Tyson and Rita, his two main characters and their families and friends, but somewhere from shame. Even though I've said to myself that I wouldn't do it, I had dehumanized the people I encounter on San Francisco's streets, building up stories about them that let me go on about my day without their tragedies seeping into my heart.

I know I'm not alone in this, and maybe this book can help us find new levels of compassion and realism. Thanks for joining us here on Forum. Welcome back, Kevin. Thanks for having me, Alexis.

So I wanted to start where a lot of people begin here, which is encountering people, say, in encampment, not really knowing what's going on there. And there's a key location in the book, no longer exists as it did at the time you were reporting, called Homeless Island. So why don't you set up Homeless Island, then you have like a little passage about it as well. Sure. Sure.

In 2003, Robert Rosenthal, our new managing editor, put me and Brant Ward out on the street for six months. He said, take as long as you want. We didn't want to spend forever, so we only spent about six months. That seems like enough. It turned out to be enough. And the idea was to figure out why there were so many homeless people in the street.

And in the course of wandering around all over from Golden Gate Park, the waterfront and whatnot, we came upon Homeless Island. Actually, Brant found it. The first week or so, I got mauled by dogs. And so I went to the hospital, went home, and took some time off. And the next day, actually, I came back, and Brant had found this little triangle of cement

At Van Ness and Mission Streets. And he'd seen what looked like a little girl walking along the pathway there. And he went over to interview her, and it turns out she was a little person named Little Bit. And there were about 12 homeless junkies, essentially, living on there. They were addicted to crack and heroin and booze and everything. And so their life cycle was...

panhandling the traffic, which was massive at that corner. It was a great corner to try to do that at. You go out with signs and at the stop traffic, you hit people up for money. And then you sleep on this traffic island, which had two big trees, nice shelter, put your shopping cart there, your tarps. This was before tents because tents weren't a big thing until after Occupy in 2011. And one of the people there was

Rita Grant. And she became one of my two main characters, like you said. And her boyfriend was a guy named Tommy, who was also addicted to everything. He started the colony there. Why don't you read this little bit for us, just so we can get a taste of the prose here. Sure. So this is talking about how the place got set up and what it was like. Just like a homeowner, Tommy had picked that corner for location, location, location.

Four-lane Mission Street and six-lane South Venice Avenue, meeting just a few blocks southwest of City Hall, teeming with traffic? Perfect. A big Honda dealership was on one side of the island, and the sprawling A&M Park Carpet Showroom was on the other side, meaning he had no homeowners to complain. Tourists and workers walked by, drivers stopped at the four-way traffic lights. They were all rich targets for panhandling. And the traffic island itself? This little triangle of concrete?

The island's two big leafy trees offered shade from the summer sun and helped fend off the rain, and a tall street lamp gave light. The place was central enough so that pretty much anyone, everyone wandering from the crack center of the Tinloin to the heroin center of the Mission District pulled through with gossip and dope to sell. It was the perfect spot for camping or just hanging out.

Tommy had panhandled there before, and a few unhoused people were parking shopping carts there. But when Rita and Tommy started camping there full-time, it soon blossomed into its full colony of more than a dozen people, parking their carts near the trees in a circle like a Conestoga wagon train. Street cleaners called it Pigeon Island because of the flocks of pigeons that roosted there. But for the people homesteading the concrete, it was always just Homeless Island.

It's Kevin Fagan reading a passage from his new book, The Lost and the Found. So as you started to kind of dig in on this reporting and get to know the people who lived in Homeless Island, what did they tell you about

how they ended up there and if what they thought of their life on the street. That was the key thing. I wanted to know more. You know, I was trying to figure out what led people to the very, very bottom. And these folks were chronically homeless, meaning they'd been outside more than a year and had disabilities, you know, drug addiction, mental illness, you know, something missing. Several of them had one leg only.

that kind of thing. And what the luxury of spending time out there like that, coming back day after day after day, was you got to dig through the layers. 'Cause when you talk to homeless folks at first, you're only gonna get a surface story. And then you wanna get deeper in. What was your life like as a kid? Where did things go wrong? What choices did you make? What did fate do to you? Everyone has a narrative.

And somewhere along the line, something went drastically wrong with these folks. They slammed through a lot of ladder rungs on their way down to the bottom. Family, government services, jobs, everything.

hospitals, you name it. It all had to fail before they wound up at the bottom. Partners, right? Yes. That's a big chunk of it, too. Yes, a lot of domestic abuse or families that threw them out, nearly half of homeless kids are LGBTQ. I mean, there's a range of things that put you out there like that. And these guys are only about 30% of the homeless population. I'm talking about the chronically homeless. Yeah.

And I'd been doing homeless stories for years before this. And Brandt had been shooting photos. So it wasn't some new thing, but it was a wonderful thing to be able to go deeper. And invest that time. Yeah. And you started, in particular, one of the main characters of the book here is Rita. As you started to go deeper with her, what did you find out about her backstory? Well, she looked awful on Homeless Island. Skinnyed out, lines on her face. She had...

AIDS, you know, was jittery. Hep C. Hep C, yeah. I mean, she really looked trashed out and she knew it and she didn't like it. So...

As we got to know each other better, she first told me, well, I have five kids. And I thought, wow. Because a lot of people have a bunch of kids when they're in the street. A little bit had four, for instance. And she said, I used to live in Florida. And I said...

I said, wow, you know, it all sounded interesting to me, but she wouldn't go super deep because by then she had calcified into a survival mode where you don't think a lot about what your life used to be when you had a roof and you had a happy family and, you know, enough food to eat all the time. It's that stuff, that life just becomes...

in your head because you're stuck. The daily life cycle is getting up in the morning, finding your dope, finding your food, wandering around to connect with people for whatever you need, finding stuff to sell on the street or sometimes boosting stuff to sell for what you need. And then

Finding a place to sleep where your teeth aren't going to get kicked in, which for homeless island folks was homeless island because they were all around each other. It was a good safety thing. And then the next day you do it all over again. It's hard to maintain some longer narrative of self in that kind of a cycle, right? Oh, yeah. And you don't find a lot of folks who wax on nostalgically about the great life they used to have. No, it's such trauma and such pain.

by the time you've been on the street for a year or more, it's like, okay, screw it. I'm living now. I'm just surviving. Yeah. We're talking with Kevin Fagan, award-winning journalist and until recently, longtime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle covering homelessness, among other issues. We're talking about his new book, The Lost and the Found. And of course, we would like to hear from you. Has homelessness impacted your life or that of a loved one? Give us a call. The number is 866-733-7000.

6786, that's 866-733-6786. Email us forum at kqed.org, Blue Sky Instagram or KQED Forum, and we'll be back with more right after the break. In the current climate, too many companies are just waiting to get to the other side. At IDEO, we partner with audacious leaders to build more courageous futures that take organizations from basic growth to real innovation. Discover more at IDEO.com. That's IDEO.com.

Support for KQED podcasts comes from Sutter Health. A cancer diagnosis can be scary, which is why Sutter's compassionate team of oncologists, surgeons and nurses work together as one dedicated team. Learn more at SutterHealth.org. Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Kevin Fagan, a longtime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle until recently. He's got a new book called The Lost and the Found.

You know, this book is really about the lives of two homeless people, two individuals out on the street. And we'd love to hear from you. I mean, what do you want to know about the experiences of homeless people? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. There's the Discord. There's Blue Sky. There's Instagram. We're KQED Forum.

So, Kevin, in the structure of this book, it's really about two people. Rita, who we heard about in the first segment, and also Tyson, who kind of is a real everyman, a Danville everyman, it sounds like, right? Tell us more about him. Well, Tyson grew up in privilege, as we say. Danville's an upscale suburb just, you know, east of here. And his dad had a good job. Mom had a good job. He...

What he didn't know was that he was bipolar. He had a bipolar condition. But that was never really diagnosed until much, much later in his life. So in high school, he was popular. He was the guy who would joke around. He's a personable guy. And he went to a great high school in Danville, had every advantage you could think of. But he...

He started drinking and then he liked cocaine. And all of his friends from the time were sort of like, well, we all kind of messed around, but he really liked it. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. You know, you party, you party and then you stop. You don't stop partying. And this he he would get jobs. He would be really good and charismatic at him. And then he'd blow it.

And eventually he used up all the resources around him. His family got tired of his push-me-pull-you and his drugs and the government services. He didn't really reach out that much for help. He wound up in the streets. Yeah.

in San Francisco because San Francisco if you're you're not homeless in Danville not very very few people are homeless in Danville so I came over here because you could get your drugs and you could find a place to crash pretty easy and

You ran into him in kind of an interesting way, like on the Embarcadero across from what became a navigation center. I think he's right. It's kind of like over by South Beach, as it's called over there. Or kind of, yeah. Well, over by the Ferry Building. Yeah. Yeah. I was doing a story about this navigation center. It's a shelter with a lot of services. Great, great technique, the navigation centers are. And there was one being proposed along the Embarcadero. So I'm wandering around with Jessica Christian, this great photographer we have at The Chronicle.

And we come across Tyson. He's sitting on a piece of cardboard and he just smoked up his meth and, you know, he probably shot up his heroin that morning because he'd do the high-low thing where you take one to get you up and one to get you down. And

He was thoughtful. He was a really personable guy. His quotes in the book are just, you're like, oh, what's going on here? Tell us what made you think he was particularly thoughtful about what was going on. Well, at this point in my career then and now,

now. You can tell pretty quickly if someone's going to have an interesting conversation with you. Everyone has an interesting conversation to some point, but I needed some stuff for this story. And he was great. He was thoughtful. He said, well, I think, because I was trying to find out if homeless people would be open to this center. He said,

Sure. You know, give us the right kind of location, the kind of things we need, and I'll give it a stab. And I could tell this guy had been on the street for quite a while. There's a look, and there's, you know, it's even a, I don't know, it's a psychic smell, so to speak. You can tell. I can tell when someone's...

After 20 years of reporting on... Yes. And he was a great interview. So we did this story, put his photo, prominent. It was the lead photo of the story and quoted him. And his brother in Ohio, Baron Fileser, saw this. Family saw it, sent it to him. And he said, wow, that's so...

That's where he is because he'd lost him for, you know, he'd lost track of him for seven years. So he calls me and says, help me find him. And I've had a lot of calls like that over the years. Yeah. How common is that? Well,

Well, I probably had two or three calls like that every year, sometimes more, sometimes more, nevertheless. Help me find my son, brother, father, wife, you name it. And I would often go out to try to find them. Doesn't mean you always do a story. In fact, most of the times I wouldn't do a story because I feel if you're working in this space in journalism, it's a public service to some extent.

So sometimes I'd find people, sometimes I wouldn't. And sometimes I'd do a story sometimes. So I thought, okay, I'll help this guy, you know, because I know where to look. And so he flew out here. We walked around all day and I pretty quickly figured out

He's interesting. Tyson's interesting. This dynamic has some stuff I can actually build a story around. So I took notes and I wrote us. And sure enough, we found Tyson at the end of the day. Went to all the camps that I knew where I thought he would show up. And a great photographer named Nick Otto, who was with me then. Brandt had retired by now. And he shot a great photo of the moment that Tyson met Tyson.

barren again. It was wonderful. So in your time reporting on homelessness all this time, what has worked for people? I mean, I think that's so often people who are not homeless, where I think a lot of people want to just, what do we do? What works? Well, I concluded at the end of this five-day series I did after the six months on the street in 2003 that

Brant and I concluded that supportive housing was the best triage or the best solution given the problem that we have. The best solution would be to handle poverty because we have about 30 percent poverty in this country if you count the cost of living and all those different parameters. You can't eliminate homelessness if you have that many people living by their fingernails

ready to fall into the street. And so once they're in the street, we're doing band-aids. And the band-aid, we don't have enough band-aids. I write in the book about, you know, as many people have, the 80s was the big boom of homelessness. And social service programs got cut to the bone.

Public housing goes down, HUD funding cut. Oh, yeah. Shelters started being created, but mental institutions were finally phased out and not replaced properly. Those kinds of things. So supportive housing is where you take someone in off the street, put them in a unit, a room or an apartment, and then ideally you surround them with services that can help them with the job trouble, mental trouble, drug issues.

emotional, whatever it is that they're struggling with to put them in the street. And you help them get stabilized and then they can go on to a stable life. The trouble is that a lot of the folks who wind up chronically homeless haven't had what you would call a normal housed life for so long you've got to give them a new template. You're creating a new life for them.

I mean, the other thing you said works, though, too, is like getting people reconnected with their family, right? That's the other thing. Supportive housing helped some of the islanders. It was great. And it's helped a lot of people in this city. And, you know, at The Chronicle, we've certainly written about the issues that make supportive housing not what it should be, ideally. But it's housed a ton of people. And for Rita, what worked, and for Tyson, was the love of family. Because that was...

That was what got them off the street. The family read my stories and flew out here with Rita. Her sister Pam and her daughter Joy flew out here from Florida and went and found her. After they read my story, they said, oh, geez, so it's like this, huh? So they flew out, found her at Homeless Island, and...

and she was cooked, as street counselors say. She was ready to take the help. She went back with them and rehabbed beautifully. Yeah, yeah. It's a lovely, lovely story. Actually, we're going to get more into that. Let's bring in a caller here. Let's bring in Mana in Berkeley. Welcome. Hi, good morning. Good morning. Hi, Mana. Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm enjoying listening to this segment of the show about homelessness.

I called in because I was homeless. I'm 54 now, but in 1988, my stepfather and my mother kicked me out, and I wound up homeless for 15 years. Wow. That's a long time. Yeah, from about 1988 to right around 2002. Wow. Chronically homeless, and I was in Fremont and Hayward, right around that area, and at

It was a very traumatic experience for me. There's a lot of things that I learned on the streets that I didn't have to learn. But long story short, I'm okay now. You know, I never thought I'd ever find a woman and get married and have a family. And I have a six-year-old daughter now. Wow, congratulations.

Yeah, it's such a long story, but a lot of the things that you guys are talking about really have touched my heart. And I think it's a big problem that a lot of people ignore because they're so busy with their daily lives, with entertainment, with materialism, with work. People forget. People seem to forget or they just don't pay attention. Hey, Monica, can I ask you, was there like a key thing or a key turning point for you or is it more just...

a series of kind of, uh, balances that got you back on your feet? Well, it was a lot of failing and getting back up and failing and getting back up. Um,

But at some point I realized that it wasn't my parents' fault anymore or my stepfather's fault anymore that I was on the streets or, you know, that I was using drugs. It was now my fault because I was old enough to know better. And if I was going to be on the streets and live this way, then it's because I chose to. Yeah, that's a point. What was the turning point for you that got you off the street?

Um, so one day I was, uh, I was eating some pizza out of a dumpster behind, um, uh, a pizza parlor and I went in to wash my hands and use the restroom. And I looked at myself in the mirror and, uh, and I just started crying. I was like, you know, I looked at myself and I was like, who are you? Who have you become? You know? Um, I just, the person I thought I was on the inside wasn't the person I saw in the mirror. And, uh,

I had been that way for over a decade at that point. Yeah. That's funny. I got thrown out when I was 16.

Also, I guess you were about that age, I'm guessing. And I wound up in Union City without a place. But you can't tell everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but you have to hit a point where you just say, okay, this is up to me. I'm either going to stay like this or I'm going to somehow...

Move up move ahead and and you hit that point and that's wonderful. I've done I appreciate you sharing that story with us this morning really do Thanks. I'm also just so happy for you, too. I you know, it's it's fascinating because so much of Homelessness services and so much of the discourse particularly around chronically homeless people Of course, we know there's many other people who are living in their cars couchsurfing the homeless population is very diverse right right but for these for these folks is

People all want to know what gets people to that point. Why that day eating the pizza out of the dumpster and looking into the mirror, right? Do you have any sense of that after all this reporting? What gets people there? Well, some people never hit it. You have to dig deep into yourself to find that part that believes in yourself, that believes you can get free of

booze, drugs, mental trauma, whatever you're dealing with. And it helps when you have someone who can help you, essentially. Because most people have a very hard time doing that by themselves. For me, I wasn't homeless very long. I had episodes. And certainly not like the folks that I've written about or like the fellow we just talked to. But it's...

Boy, it's a real tricky equation because it's –

You're stuck in your survival mode of that daily hunt for what you need and then the nightly thing of where you're going to sleep. Someone comes along and says, gee, let's give you a shelter and leave all your stuff outside or even take some of your stuff inside. You're thinking, I've got to abandon my survival mode to try this out. And a lot of folks say they've tried it before and it didn't work for them. So there's that layer of resistance. Right.

It takes a street counselor as much as two years, usually, to convince someone to give this rehab a try. Let's bring in another caller, Rosemary in Livermore. Welcome to the show. Hi. Hi, Rosemary. Can you hear me? Yeah, thank you for calling. All right. You want me to just start? Yeah, just start. Go ahead.

Okay. All right, Kevin, this one's for you, man. By the way, I went to Livermore High School. Oh, my God. Yeah, I've been here for 14 years. I was here 14 years on March 15th. And I tried to get out. I left Boston, California.

Because the weather just, I was beginning to fall and have hip and back stuff going on. And so I determined to drive home, which was Portland, Oregon. And I made it 800 miles from home before my truck gave out. Wow.

And so I've been here all of this time, and I've tried 19 times, 19 times, man, to get home. And so I've done all of it, but except for the parts that I have not done that you describe. And what I want from you is to give those of us who are out here working and working

sober and trying to be productive, volunteering when possible, minding our own business, staying to ourselves, not committing crimes, not harming people, just trying to get through, as you said, but not with the props of

of the drugs and alcohol. So please, please, we're not all in that state, okay? But for me, the mobility issues did begin. I knew that it was progressive, but, you know, I was trying to get away from the harsh winters. That was my...

my complete driving desire to go back to Portland. And so I've met some very good people here, but I also have learned seriously not to trust the housing folks because... Yeah, how come, Rosemary? Well, if it...

What has happened to me is that I have been included in pretty much like a block of, not a city block, but a group of apartments or dwellings that are inhabited by all homeless people. And I have to tell you, I do not want to be taking a risk of living next to an unmedicated schizophrenic. And it happens over and over again.

They get treated, they get on medication and they slip away, you know, and they slip off the meds. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That happens in the, in the book as well. You know,

Rosemary, I want to take your question over to Kevin, just about sort of the maybe you could describe a little bit of the different kinds of circumstances that people find themselves in. You know, there's sort of people on Homeless Island and there's a wide spectrum of folks as well. And I appreciate you sharing your story with us this morning, Rosemary.

Yeah. You get people in shelters, in cars, on the street in tents or tarps, and in transitional housing, and then in supportive housing. And Rosemary is expressing something that I've heard a lot. When you move into supportive housing or transitional housing, you're with other people. And when you're chronically homeless, you've got some problems, and you're trying to deal with them, and you've –

You obviously haven't successfully dealt with him or he wouldn't be sleeping on the sidewalk. And so you pull someone inside and

People don't really want to live in that environment if they can help it. But you take that. It's supposed to be somewhat temporary if it's transitional. And then you get yourself together and you find another program, get a Section 8 housing voucher, find roommates, do whatever it takes to move into more independence. If you're in supportive housing, God willing, you've got enough counselors on site there in the building to help you.

mediate and ameliorate the troubles that can manifest because people do they freak out they have a mental episode they get dope sick whatever go off the meds yes you need people there to help it's not like you just put people in the building and it's all okay we're talking with Kevin Fagan about his new book The Lost and the Found he's been covering homelessness in the Bay Area for more than 20 years I'm Alexis Madrigal stay tuned for more right after the break

Welcome to Xforum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about Kevin Fagan's new book, The Lost and the Found. It's been covering homelessness for actually more than 30 years, among other issues. A little more than that even, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a long time. Let me... I want to get people a little more of a taste of Rita's story, one of the two main characters in this book, in part because...

It's such a happy story. And I want to bring it in via Vivian over on the Discord, right? I'm curious what the guest thinks of San Jose's Homeward Bound program. Are there many people who would benefit from simply getting the funding to return to their families? Yeah. So that is what happened with Rita. She's able to get back with her family. But of course, it's not just like getting back to the family, right? It's being reintegrated. So what was the process there?

that, you know, it's not like you just show up in your hometown and suddenly you're better. There's a process of reintegration, right? Yes. Yes. And Rita, by the time her sister Pam and daughter Joy came out here, she, I think I said she had AIDS. She had an abscess that was just about to kill her. Tommy died. Her boyfriend died of an abscess that went bad, turned into necrotizing fasciitis, essentially ate him alive, rot him to death. And

Rita was heading there. And so when her family came out, she still had that spark that wanted to

get back to what could be a better life. And everyone has that spark somewhere in them. Everyone was someone's baby at some point. There's always that light. It's hard to find sometimes. And with Rita, it was lit. And so she went back home and she is religious. She believed in God. So she went to church. She went to NA, Narcotics Anonymous. Her sister is

in my mind, a saint. A wonderful lady. I got to know this family over the last 20 years. They're wonderful people. The daughters were always loving and willing to give support. She had two sons. They were loving. They all reconnected. And it took a while for some people in the family. She had a big family. Some people said, look, you screwed up all those years ago because there was a whole succession of things that went wrong for her. And they...

saw over the years how she really embraced sobriety and stability. She became a health nutritionist, a massage therapist, got a certificate, and did good business.

And became a loving mom and then eventually a loving grandma. And I just loved seeing that. I went back. I waited a year before I went back to Florida to see if this would stick because a lot of times it doesn't. So I wrote a story about her rescue. And then a dentist read the story and she had lost her teeth from meth mouth, as they call it. And he...

arranged to get her some teeth. So I wrote a story about that. Well, Gavin Newsom was mayor at the time and he read these stories and he said, well, hell, that worked. Let's try expanding it. So he created Homeward Bound, which I love as a program because about half the people who take Homeward Bound actually stay with the people they're sent home to. The other half are

Yeah, you know, drift back to homelessness, sometimes even come back to San Francisco. I figure that's a pretty good percentage. Yeah, what do you say to people who say, oh, we're just busting our homeless people out. We're just trying to hide our problems and send people out of the city. It's not... I don't think that's true. I've done stories about people who get bused. You know, the greyhound therapy, they call it. I did a story once...

Some fella named Tim who Reno Greyhound therapied him out to the Castro. He was deaf, blind and mute and homeless and

Good God. They just gave him a one-way bus ticket because he said, I want to go to San Francisco. Well, you don't just say, great. What you do is you call over at the other end and make sure someone's there who's willing to give it a try with you and make sure that the person who's taking the bus ride is willing to give this a try. And then you follow up with a phone call or some kind of communication later to see how it's doing. You can't follow these folks for years on end.

But the city does make an effort to confirm that things are working. And like I said, we did a study a few years back. Half-

work half don't generally speaking but I still I say that half is a great thing yeah just based on what you've also said about trying to get people out of survival mode it feels like at least that if you could be with family for a little while you have it you have a chance to kind of take stock and see if things are going to change yeah you need a you need a roof they a lot of them they're for

Pulling people off the street, there's a big argument over housing first versus sobriety, housing. Essentially, do you pull people in before they're clean of whatever troubles they have, or do you make them rehab first and then give them a place to live? It's

No one size fits everyone. Some people, they need the sober housing and some people do fine with the housing first. The idea is that somehow you have to have a roof somewhere, whether it's a residential rehab or a supportive housing or affordable housing, because trying to get clean of drugs and booze and get

and handle your mental difficulties in the street, just about impossible when you're sleeping on the sidewalk, you got drugs all around you, people are being hostile, you get attacked. Women, my God, they're so vulnerable in the street. You need a place to be that's safe before you can really stabilize off all that stuff that's put you in the street to begin with. Let's bring in Gary in Vallejo. Welcome, Gary.

Hey, good morning. I live in a community that's pretty heavily impacted by homeless people from the garbage, the fires. The homeless have burned down multiple structures in the city of Vallejo. And over time, I've just come to believe that, you know, we can't put people in a tough shed and think that everything's going to be OK. I think it's time to bite the bullet and somewhere come up with the money to rebuild.

or bring back our mental institutions because a lot of these people, they need serious help and help.

getting over drug addiction, alcoholism, or their mental illness, you know, we're not going to cure it. And we're not doing them any favors by leaving them on the streets. They need to be taken, if so, forcibly and put into mental institutions again. And it's too bad that we sold off so many of those properties. And now it's going to cost billions more to open them back up. What do you think, Kim?

Well, that's always a hot button. I was talking with Gavin Newsom about this just a couple of weeks ago. He sees, and a lot of people see, that there is a need for more mental facilities. The trouble with the institutions was in the 70s,

there was, it was just considered too punitive to put people in. And coercive, right? And coercive, yes. And so the right and the left came up with this solution. Well, we'll close down the institution. We'll put people in board and care homes in the community. It'd be great because they'll integrate. It'd be great because we'll save money because institutions are expensive. Well, it didn't work because we didn't adequately fund board and care homes.

There is a thought, there is a growing feeling that having some institutions of some kind would be handy because the most severely mentally ill people that you see in the street screaming at telephone poles, scratching themselves incessantly and, you know, doing, exhibiting a

They do need to be 5150, as they say, put into a psych ward and then into an institution so they can get themselves situated and get on medication. You know, you can have a full life with medication and supervision at first pretty heavy, but it's expensive. It's expensive. Yeah.

Let's bring in Kate in Inverness. Welcome, Kate.

Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I've been a fan of Kevin Fagan for a long time. Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to report a solution that will not work for everyone but is working for me and my family. My tech advisor became homeless and had a crisis and called me and I said, come right now. And it's been three years.

And he lives in a funny little outbuilding on our property in rural West Marin and is part of our family. And we know this is not a solution that many people can, but...

My privilege has blinded me to a lot of the solutions that I could provide, and I was really grateful to find this one solution for this one person. You're a local homeward bound. Yeah.

case of that. One person at a time. That's wonderful. If people can unite like that, it is wonderful. It can't work for everyone. Sometimes you bring someone into your home and if they're still actively using or really troubled in a severe way, it can become

become contentious. But the goodness of your heart, bless you. That's wonderful. Well, and I think there is this sense of helplessness that a lot of people feel, right? They can't vote for something that's going to make a difference. They can't actually, you know, there's no way they can make a difference in someone's life on the street just as they're walking by. They can't

you know, what can people do? Well, that's the trouble. More than half the country is just struggling to get by. What is it? That statistic? Most people don't have more than 400 bucks in their bank account to get by. So you're just trying to get by yourself. And actually, I found that a lot of folks who are lower income have bigger hearts for the lowest income. That's not universal, of course, but the

The thing I guess you can do that I think is really...

for homeless people is when you're, just be a human being when you're walking around. Because especially in a city like San Francisco, San Jose, you encounter a lot of homeless people on the street. If someone's having an episode, you know, chittering to themselves, you know, acting out, fidgeting in a kind of strange way, you can't really have a long conversation with that because you're talking to the problem and not the person really. Yeah.

But the folks – most folks are willing to talk and share. You can bring – a lot of people bring food to folks, and that's nice. But I think that the kindest thing you can do is to –

stop and have a real conversation. Make someone feel seen for a minute. The dignity of a housed person who looks like he has or she has a job and has a place to go home to. You're stopping and you're paying attention and you're listening. We're all ripples on the rock. Those little encounters can help encourage someone to...

You know, to do better with themselves if they find a way to do better, which is enormously hard. Just pay attention to be kind. We're talking with Kevin Fagan, until recently, longtime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle covering homelessness for more than 30 years. We're talking about his new book, The Lost and the Found. This is Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

You know, Danny writes in to say, I knew Tyson in high school and his story is so sad. I was good friends with his brother, Baron, who was my age going back to middle school. Anyways, we lost touch after high school. And at one point, probably in 2012 or 2013, their mom reached out to me on Facebook to see if I knew where he was. I had no idea. I didn't see him again until his picture was in the paper.

I wasn't expecting to hear Tyson's name on the radio this morning. Such a sad story. One of millions. You know, it's got a there is there's a sort of before and after for a lot of folks. Right. Yeah. And there's so many people who, like you say, have kind of blown through their own community. But Kate in San Jose has another spin on community she'd like to bring up. Welcome, Kate.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for addressing this important topic we need to all be talking and thinking more about. I have a personal experience, and also I wanted to share something that I think everyone should go to the internet and look up after this. Giel in Belgium, G-E-E-L, is a community that takes on the foster care model that Kate

Inverness mentioned, but it's facilitated and there are social workers and people receive families, receive placement. It's a historic community in this European city. But I see that mutual aid groups in our communities are something else we can all search for. I did, and I've connected with mine and my community. Mutual aid groups are ways for

caring neighbors to help one another in a safe and organized way. And you can search for it, get involved with it,

one that already exists or create a new one. And, you know, you can help somebody who hoards organize their home, help somebody figure out how to get connected with these services as long as government services remain available, help them figure out, you know, how they're going to address the problems in their life in different ways, or maybe just provide childcare, do their laundry or give them a ride somewhere, help them talk to their doctor, figure out, you know, what they need to do to talk to their doctor. Simple things we can do and

There's a whole list. If anybody in the community thinks of one small thing they'd be willing to do for somebody who's a good person and is just struggling or less fortunate at this time. Hey, Kate, thank you so much. I know that this is so important. So please speak more about what we can do. And I love that you're already talking about it. And I have more ideas. I feel hopeful. I feel like the solution is out there and we can find it.

Wow. You don't hear that that often. Yeah. Thank you so much, Kate. Yeah, that's a really wonderful point. Home risk prevention is absolutely key. San Francisco, San Jose, a lot of big cities do this. And generally it can cost about $7,000 a year. They've costed it out in aid to someone to help them prevent COVID.

to prevent them from becoming homeless with stuff like fix the car, help with a bridge payment because they fell behind on rent. It's all these things. You don't see it because they don't wind up in the street, but it's super important. The trouble is, like you say, people do need help. We don't have enough living wage. We don't have a good enough health care system. We don't have enough housing. So the community can help fill in some of those gaps. Mm-hmm.

Well, in the book you write, the old maxim of measuring a city by how it treats its most vulnerable people is as true today as ever, and by that measure we fail. And whether or not you are sympathetic to the millions of people experiencing homelessness every year, you need to know who they are. Yeah. That really feels like what this book is trying to do. Thank you. That's exactly what I wanted to do. Because Tyson, wonderful guy. I loved him.

hanging out with him, getting to know him and his family. His family is terrific. The loving families of Rita and Tyson really moved me. And the other folks who were rescued by supportive housing or who terrible things happened to, it's important to know really what's going on with this. Instead of

A lot of us walk by and see people and we feel bad for them or we resent them or we ignore them. These are real people and they're neighbors. They're people in our lives. And for people who are irritated having people on their doorstep camping, dumping trash or so forth, well, if we pay attention and we change what we're doing as a society, you won't have people anymore.

on your doorstep. No one really wants to be homeless. If you have a conversation at two in the morning with someone when they're really down to brass tacks, they'll tell you, I don't want to be living out here. Kim Wright tend to say these stories make me so sad. We have so much in this country, but it's such an imbalanced distribution. The insane, unaffordable housing market here is one cause of this problem.

And of course, hopefully she heard Kate from San Jose, a way to channel that sadness.

We have been talking with Kevin Fagan about his new book, The Lost and the Found. If you want to hear more from Kevin, he's got an event coming up at Book Passage in Corte Madera. It's Wednesday, March 26th at 6 p.m. Kevin Fagan, thank you so much for this book. Thanks so much for your reporting over the years. I just feel like we know so much more about what's happening in the streets thanks to your work. Oh, thanks for having me, Alexis. Yes.

We're going out to a song by Kevin Fagan dedicated to the folks in the book, yeah? Yes. Yeah. All right. We can go out on it. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Form Ahead with Mina Kim. When the wind around me sighs, I will think of you. I will think of you.

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