A Profoundly Empathetic Book on Homelessness in the Bay Area
Kevin Fagan’s new work moves beyond predictable policy critique to offer a powerful reminder of the moral side of the crisis.
By February 21, 2025
Photograph by Robert Gumpert / Redux
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There’s a strange familiarity that many Bay Area residents start to build up with their homeless neighbors. If you have a routine or a daily commute, you walk by the same people on the same corners or benches, and as the years pass you realize that you probably see these people more than you see anyone other than your family and co-workers. When I first moved to Berkeley, I mostly wrote in a coffee shop just north of campus, and I would always see the same homeless man posted up on the block, moving back and forth across the street from coffee shop to corner store to sandwich shop. He would sometimes rant, including once when he muttered something offensive enough to me that I turned my head. Other days, I would see him in front of a well-trafficked pizza place in town called Cheeseboard. At some point, I realized that whenever I heard the name of the store or the pizza spot, I immediately pictured him, which, in turn, kicked up a mix of uneasiness and guilt. There was no action or imperative that trailed after this feeling. I did not think ruefully about the excesses of capitalism, nor did I wish the police would put this man in jail. He existed as a landmark on a map. I realize that this is quite a dehumanizing way to think about someone who is clearly in need, but I don’t think I’m alone. Homelessness has become so intractable and ubiquitous that it has taken on an almost geographic nature.
“The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances,” a new book by the veteran San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan, attempts to shake the reader out of this complacent state of mind. It follows Rita, a down-and-out old hippie from Florida, and Tyson, a former rich kid from the tony Bay Area suburb of Danville. Their backstories, which Fagan lays out in breezy but well-reported detail, are roughly the same: a seemingly normal childhood but one that might feel just a nudge off-kilter. Hard partying leads to an acceleration of addiction: Rita, in her thirties, after giving birth to four children; Tyson, in his late twenties, after crashing out of college and working practically every job in the nicer parts of the East Bay. And then something unexpected happens that casts them into a torrent of destruction and self-imposed isolation. They are on the streets, and before too long, the demands of addiction and survival take over their lives.
When we first meet Rita, she is homeless and H.I.V.-positive and can rely on only Tommy, a warmhearted fellow-addict who lives with her on a traffic island near the Mission District. During the course of Fagan’s reporting, he learns that Tommy has died from an infection. His friends on the island have been worried about him, and it falls on Fagan to tell them. The scene that follows—an intense grief followed by a quick return to the dull and depraved routine of trying to score their next hit—captures both the extremism and the banality of addiction and homelessness. The extremes are what push you further, but the suffocating need is why you can’t quite imagine a different life.
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Fagan weaves his own story among these two narratives: his mother kicked him out at sixteen, and he spent the next few years in cars and on couches until he finished up a patchwork education that led to a lengthy career in journalism, mostly at the Chronicle. In 2003, Fagan spent months on the street reporting on how the city’s homeless residents lived. During this time, he met Rita and her friends. He met Tyson more than a decade later while once again reporting on homelessness. These two elements—a journalist repurposing his old work for a book and a meta look at a reporter’s life, which, while interesting enough to me, a fellow-journalist, should interest nobody else—are usually a recipe for a bad book. But Fagan generally avoids cheap, incendiary politicizing about failed systems, nor does he spend too much time talking about the power of the fourth estate or whatever. (There’s some of that toward the end, but it’s largely forgivable. If you spend more than two decades covering homelessness, I feel that you’ve earned the right to pat yourself on the back.)
The homeless crisis will not be solved by journalist heroes who beat their chests and push an aggressive mix of humanizing narrative and damning social commentary onto the public. Fagan, for the most part, seems to agree. His book has the deft touch that can come only when the ego of the journalist ebbs into something far more substantial and convincing. For Fagan, it’s an accounting of how a few bad decisions and some bad luck pile up; he refuses to sit in judgment of anyone who appears in his book. Fagan’s contributions to the literature on homelessness are bolstered by his understanding that the first days on the street aren’t so much the end as much as the beginning. Fagan writes:
Here’s another reality that might not be obvious to people who day in, day out, walk by substance users like Tommy and Rita and others all over downtown San Francisco: That’s not some frivolous lifestyle choice. If you’re as acutely down-and-out as the Islanders were, you’re on dope or booze and probably both. You’ve shattered through every support system you have—family, friends, counseling and housing programs that you ditched or that tossed you out, and now you have nothing. It’s the definition of the bottom.
Readers hoping for something beyond the mainstream solutions will be disappointed. Fagan mostly echoes the Housing First prescriptions of both the State of California and the federal government under President Joe Biden. The only way to get people off the streets is to provide them a stable place to live and steady services. “Climbing out from there is not a matter of getting a little hand up, or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” Fagan writes. “It takes creating a whole new life. And that takes massive assistance, which means providing welfare housing with counseling right there in the building to keep people from crashing back into the street. It’s called supportive housing and it’s the only thing I ever saw that worked for most desperate folks other than a family resume of some kind.” Jail time for homeless people, Fagan believes, only leads to diminished trust, which in turn means people would rather go back to encampments than associate with any organization that might be offering help. I’ve argued that, although Housing First might very well be the best solution, it likely will not survive the political and economic realities of California. Building anything is hard enough thanks to restrictive zoning and an almost comically intense NIMBY culture. Homeless encampments have not gone away, and their continued presence leads the public to believe that the governing solution is not working. Fagan’s book, however, does not provide much evidence that programs like supportive housing work. Rita and Tyson were not taken off the streets through permanent supportive housing from the county or state. They both had families who paid for them to get away from San Francisco.
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Fagan does not pretend to know the answers, but he does reserve a few words in the book’s conclusion section to talk about the incongruity of a city that has such phenomenal wealth and still lets thousands of its residents sleep on the streets. “Stop betraying our citizens with national and local policies and practices that crush them and perpetuate an underclass, and the problem can be solved,” he writes. “Until then, it’s good intentions and partial successes.” Fagan, I imagine, understands that such a revolution is not coming, which is why there will never be a shortage of Ritas and Tysons to write about.
I have covered California’s homelessness crisis for far fewer years than Fagan, but I came to the work from a similar place. The presence of so many unsheltered, suffering people in one of the richest cities in the world did not make sense to me, and none of the explanations provided any clarity. For years, I was convinced that the best way to write about the problem was through policy and that we did not need endless humanizing stories to remind the public that our homeless neighbors were people, too. But this type of wonky journalism feels inadequate when every level of the support structure for indigent people in California has been degraded, which means that the chatter about Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment courts or Supreme Court decisions or novel temporary shelter solutions can sometimes feel like arguing about which color Band-Aid to use to patch up a serious head wound. Reasonable people can disagree about the efficacy of Housing First and how to address the policy side of the homelessness crisis, but “The Lost and the Found” is an earnest reminder of the moral side of the crisis: why it is still worth fighting for the basic dignity of all people, especially those who live and die in the teeth of the American contradiction.
Last month, while visiting the corner store across the street from the coffee shop I used to frequent, I saw a vigil out front for a person named Robert. The man who was always out front was no longer there, and I assumed that he must have been named Robert and he must have passed away. The woman working at the counter confirmed that the man, Robert Shadric, had died in a bathroom on campus. She said that she still couldn’t really believe it. She had seen him every day for so long. In late January, a local news site called the Berkeley Scanner published a moving tribute to Shadric that included remembrances from people who had come across him every day and had got to know him and considered him more than just part of the landscape. The workers who got to know Shadric, who talked with him about politics, who regularly received gifts from him on their birthdays, are still here. They are proof that Fagan’s approach is the correct one: such compassion might feel like it’s in short supply these days, but it is not. ♦
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Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of the weekly column Fault Lines.
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