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.
