Quick Take
Housing advocate Don Lane has invited journalist and author Brian Barth to talk to the community – and to his class of 25 UC Santa Cruz students studying homelessness – to discuss why encampments exist and what we should do about them. He hopes the Feb. 27 event at the downtown library will help deepen our understanding of the issue and involve the next generation in finding solutions.
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Sometimes the algorithms pay off.
I have spent more than 30 years working as a volunteer to address the vexing challenge of homelessness in our community. I also teach an annual class at UC Santa Cruz on this subject. So, my online algorithms often lead me to numerous articles and events related to homelessness. A couple of months ago, they pointed me to an excellent new book that focuses on the well-known, but poorly understood, phenomenon we call the “homeless encampment.”
The book is called “Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia,” and it’s written by journalist Brian Barth. Though Barth no longer lives in Santa Cruz, he lived here for about 10 years and attended UCSC. He ended up living in Silicon Valley for several years and started paying attention to the homeless encampments located adjacent to some of the greatest concentrations of wealth in the world.
Barth embarked on a two-year journalistic adventure to figure out what was going on. Who are the folks living in these encampments? What’s life like in an encampment? What should our society do about encampments?
In this new book, he addresses these questions and describes his journey in understanding homelessness. He also introduces us to some surprising and inspiring leaders in the world of homeless encampments.
I reached out to Barth and invited him to speak to my students. He quickly agreed and suggested that we invite others in the Santa Cruz County community who would like to consider fresh perspectives on addressing homelessness.
This month, we’ll have a great chance to engage in this conversation when Barth and a handful of the Bay Area encampment leaders he writes about in his book speak at the downtown Santa Cruz public library on Feb. 27 from 7 to 9 p.m. Barth and his associates will discuss the book, share perspectives on encampments and offer positive ways to respond to homelessness.
As our community grapples with the persistent impacts of homelessness and the hard truth that unhoused people continue to struggle with enormous health and personal safety issues, we need to keep listening and learning. As has been reported every year during the homeless persons memorial event, the average life expectancy of an unhoused person is about 20 years shorter than for the population as a whole. Yet our society has allowed mass homelessness to persist.
Many communities, including ours, break up encampments, but most of the folks simply move to a new spot and then set up camp again. It’s clear we need to come up with a better approach.
And we also need to consider, from the encampment dwellers’ perspective, why so many folks chose an encampment over staying in a temporary homeless shelter.
My class of 25 students will attend the talk, co-sponsored by the Santa Cruz Public Libraries and Bookshop Santa Cruz. These students have been reading widely and hearing guest speakers offer different perspectives on our society’s response to homelessness. This event brings to a close their exploration and marks the point when they begin to articulate their ideas about solving homelessness.
This gathering will be a way for us to have a thought-provoking conversation, include our next generation of problem-solvers, listen to people with deep experience with encampments, and spend time trying to come up with fresh approaches to tackling homelessness.
Don Lane is a former mayor of Santa Cruz. He serves on the governing board of Housing Matters and is a UCSC lecturer.