Home is where the heart is
If you want to feel how lucky you are, just read Brian Barth’s “Front Street (Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia)” (Astra House, 2025, 287 pages). Barth, with maternal roots in WNC going back eight generations and who is a freelance journalist who writes for National Geographic, The Nation, The New Yorker and others and who has won prestigious medals and awards, literally takes us in hand to some of the most populated homeless camps in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area of northern California, introducing us to a cast of characters, describing their personal stories, private philosophies and political activism in order to explain why the country’s current approach to homelessness has become at once cruel and ineffective.
In doing so, he also makes the point that these camps have something important to teach the rest of us about dignity, connection and care.
Blending his memoir with investigative reporting, history, and cultural criticism, Barth paints a picture about the struggle for housing as tech companies moving into the Bay Area raised the price and value of real estate, driving long-time residents out of their homes and into the streets. Regularly harassed by police and local government, Barth challenges the notion that homeless encampments are simply lawless and debased eyesores.
Instead, he urges us to take a compassionate second look and that these camps can offer at-risk adults freedom, independence, safety and community. “This book is my journey from journalist to friend of the unhoused, a transformation that revealed an activist that I didn’t know was hiding inside of me,” states Barth in his prologue. Historically, Barth uses Charlie Chaplin’s film character of The Tramp as a model for the homeless during and after the Great Depression in the U.S. before carrying his conversation forward into the present tense. Using the word “anarchy” to describe the politics of many homeless people he encountered, he explains: “Perhaps there were ancient humans who found themselves in utopic anarchies, but the nature of anarchy situated within a social system that hotly contests its existence is one of extreme friction. But there is also plenty of peace, love, and harmony in these camps — the lesser-known side of anarchy.”
Getting down to brass tacks, the author gets into the factual details and the numbers.
“California is the undisputed capital of both the crisis and the unhoused empowerment movement and has the nation’s highest per capita rate of homelessness and half of the nation’s total unsheltered population estimated to be more than 650,000. Including the unhoused living with friends and family, the estimate of the country’s unhoused population is in the neighborhood of six million.”
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In his opinion, Barth proclaims that the homeless in the Bay Area are a persecuted minority and are aggressively criminalized. He quotes a homeless man from Oakland named Monte who says, “We need to fight. And we need to make the fight large enough that the world is watching.” Then he cites an example of a homeless man in San Francisco who died when someone set his sleeping bag on fire with him in it. “Stepping into a camp is like stepping into an alternate dimension — the rules and norms that govern that world are not the same as those that govern the housed world. And there are subcultures within the subcultures — Black, Latino, hippie, punk; lifestyles based around particular drugs or illegal activities and so on,” he acknowledges.
While the first half of the book is an introduction to the various encampments and “new friends” living there and their problems, the second half of “Front Street” is more about solutions and the future. “The future happens here first,” says a homeless man named Newsom, spinning the trope that the state of California is the progressive trendsetter in the U.S. Another of Barth’s “new friends” is a man named Theo, who is something of a spokesman for his unhoused community and who told Barth, “I told the governor, I said, dude, if you’re gonna sit in meetings with your friends and make decisions about our lives, you need to include representatives from our community at those meetings.”
Moving on to the section on World-Building, we are told of an unhoused woman named Cynthia and her experiences and vision for the future. “How do the homeless folks envision The Fix?” writes Barth. “In a multitude of ways. But the gestalt is to re-create the world, or at least create their own world within it.”
And then there’s Tiny, another homeless woman who is an artist and is building her “new world” by creating art exhibitions or “shows” such as “The Art of Homelessness.” And others who created a magazine titled POOR. Their magazine embodies the notion that poor people should tell their own stories, make their own media, and claim political power in the process.
In the end, Barth concludes that “The Fix” is an illusion and that there exists no grand solution to the homeless problem. But then on a positive note, he quotes, again, his homeless friend Monte, who says “I’m not staying out here to kill myself. I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. Spirits’ energy can’t be destroyed, can’t be consumed. It’s our spark. That spark still exists after the flesh is gone. It’s what’s given me a new lease on life.”
(Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of more than 30 books, including the award-winning nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods,” and is a longtime resident of Jackson County.)
Homelessness in the spotlight
Brian Barth will read from his first book, “Front Street (Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia)” at 6 p.m. on April 16 in the Community Room of the Jackson County Public Library in Sylva.
Following the reading, there will be a roundtable discussion on homelessness that will include Sylva Police Chief Chris Hatton and Paul Phillips, interim supervisor of HERE In Jackson County.
Hatton will speak about Community Care, Sylva’s innovative program pairing a social worker with police officers. Phillips will discuss local homelessness. The roundtable will be a forum for community discussion and everyone with interest or questions is encouraged to attend and participate.
This event is co-sponsored by City Lights Bookstore, Jackson County Public Library and Indivisible/Common Ground of WNC.
