FRONT STREET

Charged investigative reporting on unhoused people living in the interstices of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Underneath a stretch of snarled interchanges called the MacArthur Maze in Oakland, California, stands a mile-long “megacamp” that, writes journalist Barth, the local news media liken to the Mad Max movies: “mountains of junk, hard-looking dudes ambling about, and an incredible number of burnt-out cars.” Still, writes Barth, it is a home for homeless people, a place they call Wood Street Commons. The city of Oakland, emboldened by new laws and the expressed wish of California Gov. Gavin Newsom to remove those people from the streets, has formulated plans to move the Wood Street Commons population to “cubicle-like tiny homes inside a fenced lot,” complete with security guards, suggesting a prison more than a community. The problem is pressing: As Barth writes in this modern rejoinder to The Jungle and other social-critical exposés, California has a third of the nation’s homeless population. Barth, who’s done his homework, holds that homeless people have always been with us—in 1893, for instance, about the same percentage of the population as today’s was unhoused, with peaks and valleys; he identifies the nature of the current population as the product of Ronald Reagan’s huge cuts to the social safety net, which put the mentally ill and the addicted on the streets. Admittedly, homeless people are not their own best representatives: “Difficult people,” writes Barth, “don’t tend to inspire others to be kind and giving toward them.” Yet, he urges, the answer is not to sweep them off the streets: “Without being able to remain in one place, it’s difficult to develop the stability required to move ahead in life, ­whether your goal is to build a new world, or simply get a job and get back to the existing one.”

A tough-minded, well-reported look at what would appear to be an intractable, and growing, social problem.