A deep sympathetic book on homelessness in the Gulf region

There is a strange knowledge that many residents of the Gulf region begin to accumulate with their homeless neighbors. If you have a daily routine or transportation, you are walking by the same people on the same corners or seats, and with the passage of years, you realize that you may see these people more than seeing anyone else other than your family and co -workers. When I moved to Berkeley for the first time, I mostly wrote in the northern campus cafe directly, and I always saw the same man who is homeless to publish, move back and forth across the street from the cafe to the Zawiya store to the Sandwich Store. Sometimes he shouted, including once when he muttered something bad enough for me to turn my head. In other days, I was seeing it in front of the pizza place that was well translated in the city called CheesBoard. At some point, I realized that whenever I heard the name of the store or pizza spot, it immediately filmed it, which in turn kicked a mixture of uncomfortable and guilty. There was no procedure or late necessity after this feeling. I was not sad about the excesses of capitalism, and I did not wish the police to put this man in prison. He was present as a teacher on the map. I realize that this is an inhuman way to think of a person who is clearly in need, but I don’t think I am alone. The homelessness became very difficult and equipped everywhere that it has taken almost a geographical nature.

“Lost and Starting: A true story about homelessness, family and second opportunities“A new book by veteran San Francisco Cronic Reporter Kevin Vagan is trying to get rid of the reader from this mental state. Rita follows the old Habi from Florida and Tesson, a former rich child from the Danville suburb in the Tony Bay area. Their back trials, which Vagan put in lush details but well -noted, are almost the same: it seems to be a natural childhood, but it may feel just an external boost. Difficult parties lead to an acceleration of addiction: Rita, in her thirties, after the birth of four children; Tyson, in the late twenties, after he left the college and practically works every job in the parts of the most beautiful East Bay. Then an unexpected thing happens in a torrent of destruction and isolation that he imposed self. They are in the streets, and very long ago, the demands of addiction and stay their lives.

When we meet Rita for the first time, she is homeless and positive for HIV and she can rely on Tommy only, a warm leading colleague with her on a traffic island near the mission area. During the Fagan reports, he knows that Tommy died due to an infection. His friends on the island were concerned about him, and Vagan falls to tell them. The scene that follows – a severe sadness followed by a quick return to the dull routine and corruption from trying to record their following strikes – progress both extremism and collapse in addiction and homelessness. Extremism is what drives you further, but the suffocating need is why you cannot imagine a completely different life.

Vagan weaves his own story between these two novels: his mother directed him at the age Cronic. In 2003, Vagan spent the street months in reports on how the city’s homeless residents lived. During this time, Rita and her friends met. Tyson met more than a decade while he was reporting again from the displacement. These two elements-a journalist who restores his old work for a book and a loud look at the life of a reporter, which, although it is interesting enough for me, the streetwoman, should not care about anyone else-usually a recipe for a bad book. But Vagan generally avoids cheap politicization and warrior about failed systems, nor does he spend much time talking about the strength of the fourth property or anything else. (There is some in the end, but this is largely audible. If you spend more than two decades, I feel you have gained the right back on the back.)

The crisis of the displaced will not be resolved by the heroes of journalists who overcame their boxes and pushing an aggressive mix of human narration and the dreaded social comment on the public. Vagan, mostly, appears to be agreed. His book contains a faded touch, which can only come when the ego recede from the journalist to something more essential and convincing. For Vagan, it is an accountability for how some bad decisions accumulate and some bad luck; He refuses to sit in the rule of anyone who appears in his book. Vagan’s contributions to literature on homelessness are strengthened by understanding that the first days on the street are not the end as the beginning. Vagan writes:

Here is another fact that may not be clear to people who pass a day, and a day by material users such as Tommy, Reeta and others around the center of San Francisco: This is not the choice of trivial lifestyle. If you are moving sharply as the island’s residents, you are on a drug or wine and perhaps both. You have crashed through each of your support system – family, friends, advice and housing programs that you have abandoned or that threw you, and now you have nothing. It is the definition of the bottom.

Readers will be disappointed with something that goes beyond the prevailing solutions. Vagan often repeats the housing first Medical prescriptions From both California and the federal government during the era of President Joe Biden. The only way to get people out of the streets is to provide them with a stable place to live and fixed services. “Climbing from there is not a matter of getting a little hand, or pulling yourself through bootstraps,” Vagan writes. “It is necessary to create a completely new life. This takes an enormous help, which means providing housing in social care while consulting there in the building to prevent people from returning to the street. It is called supportive housing and is the only thing that I saw at all and who was working with most people The despair, unlike a family resumption of some kind. Instead of linking with any organization you may help. I have argued that, Although housing first may be the best solution, California’s political and economic facts will not survive. Building anything is sufficiently difficult thanks to the division of restrictions and almost condensed condensed Nimby culture. The secretaries of the homeless did not disappear, and their continuous presence leads the public to the belief that the ruling solution is not working. However, Vagan’s book does not provide many evidence that programs such as supportive residential works. Rita and Tyson were not moved from the streets through permanent supportive housing from the province or the state. Both of them had families who paid them to stay away from San Francisco.

Vagan does not pretend to know the answers, but he maintains a few words in the book of the book’s conclusion to talk about the conflict of the city that has such huge wealth and still allows thousands of its residents to sleep in the streets. “Stop betraying our citizens through the national and local policies and practices that crush them and perpetuate the lower class, and the problem can be solved,” he writes. “Until then, they are good intentions and partial successes.” I imagine that Vagan realizes that such a revolution does not come, and for this reason there will be no shortage of Retas and Tyson to write about it.

I have covered the homeless crisis in California for many years than Vagan, but I came to work from a similar place. The presence of many people who suffer from people in one of the richest cities in the world was not logical to me, and none of the explanations provided any clarity. For years, I was convinced that the best way to write about the problem is through politics and that we did not need endless human stories to remind the audience that our homeless neighbors were also people. However, this type of dreadful press does not feel insufficient when every level of support structure has been decomposed for destitute people in California, which means that gossip is about societal assistance, recovery, enabling courts or decisions of the Supreme Court or New temporary shelter solutions You can sometimes feel arguing about colorful aid that should be used to correct a serious head wound. Threar people can disagree about the effectiveness of housing first and how to address the political aspect of the homeless crisis, but “missing and affected” is a serious reminder of the moral aspect of the crisis: Why is it still worth fighting for the basic dignity of all people, especially those who live and die in the teeth of American contradiction.

Last month, during his visit to the Al -Zawiya store across the street from the cafe that I used to repeated, I saw a vigilance in the foreground of a person named Robert. The man who was always at the forefront was no longer present, and I assumed that he had to have been called Robert and must have passed away. The woman working in the table confirmed that the man, Robert Shadik, died in a bathroom on the campus. She said she still could not believe it. I saw him every day for a long time. In late January, a local news site is called Berkeley scanner He published an influential honor for Shadik that included memories of people who encountered every day and got to know him and considered him more than just part of the scene. The workers who got to know Drake, with whom they spoke about politics, who regularly received gifts from him on their birthdays, are still here. It is evidence that Vagan’s approach is correct: this sympathy may feel that it is a shortage of these days, but it is not. ♦