“It’s my passion—homelessness is what I’ve cared most about for decades,” says Kevin Fagan, whose new book, “The Lost and the Found,” takes a deep look at people living on the street and shows what compassionate action can achieve.
Fagan, a multi-award-winning former reporter and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, knows his subject well.
He has been homeless himself, as a teen from a financially struggling home. Covering homelessness extensively over his decades-long career, his hundreds of articles include the much-talked-about 2003 series “The Shame of the City,” for which he lived on the streets for six months.
Released on Feb. 11, “The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances” (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 288 pages, $28.99) is a character-driven work exploring the entwined tragedies of homelessness and addiction with statistics, insights and human stories. Fagan is speaking about it at various public events throughout the region this month.
Two case studies stick with readers the most. Rita, a former Florida beach girl, had a heroin and cocaine addiction that cost her the custody of her children. After arriving in San Francisco, Rita became a familiar presence on “Homeless Island,” a triangular patch of concrete that’s almost a character in the book.
“That was the most profound example of that kind of despair that I’ve ever seen,” says Fagan, of the now-demolished spot at South Van Ness Avenue and Mission Street where a colony of unhoused people lived, and panhandling and drug use thrived.
Tyson, who grew up in upscale Danville, preferred getting high and being where the action was to taking advantage of higher education and career opportunities. The streets of San Francisco were an irresistible draw.
Tyson “knew that if you have to be homeless, there’s no better place than San Francisco,” the book says. “This is where the booze and the dope are plentiful, the cops are lax and the homeless culture is so widespread you can disappear into it.”
About 8,000 people are homeless in San Francisco on any given night, statistics show.
Fagan effectively follows Rita and Tyson’s journeys. As a result of Fagan’s Chronicle stories, both were reunited with their estranged families. One takes a heartbreaking turn, but both give homelessness a human face and contain terrific hope and joy.
“I wanted the hope to come through,” Fagan says. “Hope is always important.”
Along with their stories, Fagan provides facts and figures, an examination of reasons for the homeless crisis, and how it can be fixed. Poverty and economic inequality top the list of causes. Fagan traces the problem back to the 1980s when the Reagan Administration brutally slashed funding for housing and social programs for poor people. Better housing, and more of it, is essential. Fagan disputes the notion that people who are living on the street want to stay that way.
“Homeless people do want a roof over their heads,” Fagan writes. “They just don’t want to be told what to do, when they can sleep and eat, or when, where and how they can feed their habits,” he adds, referring to rules enforced at traditional homeless shelters.
Fagan is in favor of navigation centers—facilities with onsite social services (including job counseling and housing and medical referrals) that allow residents to be with their partners and pets. While there’s no quick fix—it takes about two years for a longtime homeless person to accept help—“nav centers” (there are about seven in San Francisco) often appeal to chronically homeless people, Fagan says.
As the book covers issues ranging from tent camps to mental illness to the opioid crisis, Fagan also notes that Australia, New Zealand and England have better homelessness policies than the United States: “They have housing programs. There, you won’t end up living outside. They have national health care and better living wages.”
Fagan interestingly states that San Francisco “gets a bad rap” when it comes to dealing with the issue: “San Francisco has some of the best practices in the country,” he says, citing methadone treatment, health care and Homeward Bound, which helps unite people living on the streets with family members looking for them.
“If we didn’t do the things we do in San Francisco, we’d see thousands more homeless people on the street,” he says.
Compassion, too, is crucial, says Fagan, who condemns forced removal of homeless people from public places.
“Just about every homeless advocate I know says that a step-up of sweeps is a terrible idea,” he says. “Police don’t really like harassing homeless people,” he adds. “Compassion ebbs and flows,” Fagan says. “Right now, there is compassion fatigue.”
Fagan, who retired from the Chronicle earlier this year, continues to embrace the profession.
“I was always attracted to journalism,” says Fagan, who, despite getting tossed out by his mother at age 16, “did OK. … I didn’t get addicted to drugs, I went to college,” adds Fagan, who praises his parents for the appreciation of the written word they instilled in him.
He continues, “As a journalist, I was taught to be objective: ‘Don’t get too friendly with your subjects. Keep your feelings out.’ But over the decades, I came to understand homelessness in a fairly deep way.”
Interviewing chronically homeless people, he says, “You have to have a gentle, nonjudgmental conversation.” It is essential to present them as three-dimensional human beings: “They want to talk, it’s nice to be paid attention to. You need to listen.”
Fagan, who has covered serial killings, landmines, wildfires, the Columbine massacre and executions at San Quentin (he calls them “controlled” and “very weird”), admits, “So much that I write about is depressing.”
Exercise, meditation, and therapy are his methods for stress relief.
“And there’s music,” he adds. He’s singer-songwriter in a side career, performing around town in the folk-rock band The Irish Newsboys.
Kevin Fagan appears at 7 p.m. Feb. 19 at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley; 12:30 p.m. Feb. 22 at the Public Library in Mill Valley; 5:30 p.m. Feb. 27 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and 6 p.m. March 26 at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Visit kevinfaganwriter.com.
The post SF reporter Kevin Fagan digs deep into homelessness crisis in ‘The Lost and the Found’ appeared first on Local News Matters.