Astra House
Review by Brian Tanguay
In June 2024, the United States Supreme Court ruled that cities can punish unhoused people for sleeping in public, even if they have nowhere else to go. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson joined in a dissent, writing:
“Homelessness is a reality for too many Americans. On any given night, over half a million people across the country lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. Many do not have access to shelters and are left to sleep in cars, sidewalks, parks, and other public places. They experience homelessness due to complex and interconnected issues, including crippling debt and stagnant wages; domestic and sexual abuse; physical and psychiatric disabilities; and rising housing costs coupled with declining affordable housing options.”
Like gun violence and income and wealth inequality, homelessness is an intractable social problem in the wealthiest country on earth. The half million figure cited by the dissenting justices is likely an undercount. For years now, cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle have grappled with homelessness, but smaller towns and locales are not immune and have fewer resources with which to confront the problem. State and local governments and non-profits spend money, issue reports, offer fixes, and pledge to build more affordable housing, but more often than not, these initiatives fall far short of what is needed. When all is said and done, unhoused people still sleep in downtown doorways, in vehicles, and in tent encampments on city sidewalks. We see them, walk around them, sometimes recoil from their smell, and now, after years of failing to adequately address the scope of the problem, it seems our collective solution is punishment.
In his forthcoming debut book, Front Street, journalist Brian Barth leads readers into the heart of the matter, exploring the semi-permanent encampments that ring Silicon Valley, home of the largest and most profitable technology companies in the world. We meet residents, learn how they came to be homeless and, more importantly, hear their opinions about their situation. From the outside, encampments may appear like ramshackle vectors of crime, drug abuse, and anarchy, but the reality is far more nuanced. Barth doesn’t ignore the dysfunctional elements, but what many readers might find surprising is the level of self-governance, organization, and creativity that operates in the encampments. For the comfortably housed, it may seem inconceivable that a person would rather live in a tent encampment with all its hardships than take a bed in a shelter, low-budget motel, or a tiny home village. Through his reporting, Barth shows how an encampment often offers more freedom, security, and community than sanctioned housing can, which is why residents resist attempts to dislodge them with all the agency — some of it quite sophisticated and astute — they can muster.
Life in a homeless camp is stressful, no doubt about it, but it’s still a life. Friendships are made, people fall in love, cliques form, and neighbors try to outdo each other. People share what they have and watch out for one another. This is the mutual aid and community that can’t be seen from the outside or really appreciated by policymakers fixated with top-down solutions. As Barth demonstrates, the missing element in debates about homelessness is input from the homeless themselves.
Homelessness is a complex problem, an intersectional problem, a national problem that requires serious critique of economic, political and social structures, from wealth redistribution to zoning rules. Decades of policy decisions and neglect created a human problem for which no one-size-fits-all solution exists. With Front Street, Brian Barth not only widens the aperture, he alters the nature of the conversation. The question is whether or not society is willing to listen.
