The changing face of homelessness is captured artfully in this new series. Tracey Lien, technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a piece for Vox Media entitled "Inside San Francisco’s Housing Crisis" where she describes the toll that the tech boom has taken on the city. She opens this poignant series, which features both photos and audio, with a scene from a local soup kitchen. Whereas a few years ago the crowd would have consisted of “middle aged white men,” mostly veterans, today the dining room “resembles a shopping mall food court” and plays hosts to many different ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. “These are people with jobs,” Lien says, “people who work full time and still can’t afford to live in the city.”
A Lovely.com rental market report confirmed in a study that San Francisco has the second highest median rent of any city in the country. Even New York comes in at number five, below several other California cites like Palo Alto and Cupertino. Lien implies that tech gentrification created an environment where “even those who were once comfortable are now at risk of falling through the cracks.”
In 2013 it was reported that there were 6,436 people in San Francisco who were homeless and Lien is quick to point out that number does not account for people who were living in their cars or bouncing between relatives. She profiles people who were once comfortably middle class and now find themselves on the street. The skew of this series is less “privileged people are being hit so now we should care,” and more that homelessness is a sort of “social barometer” that belies a bigger issue.
Lien ties together oral history, photography, and cold, hard statistics to paint a revealing portrait of the current state of homelessness and the housing market in San Francisco. This series is not one to miss.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark O'Rourke
Got a tip for The Bold Italic? Email us at tips@thebolditalic.com