Hobohemian Rhapsody

Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia, by Brian Barth, Astra House, 287 pages, $29

One lesson of Front Street, Brian Barth’s book of immersive reporting from the sprawling homeless encampments of Silicon Valley, is that there is no full-bore solution to the problems presented by the homeless. The unhoused, and the larger community they aggravate, have only least-worst options.

Barth’s well-reported stories stem from three sprawling multiblock or multiacre tent cities, chronicling the types of people who compose them and the communities—troubled communities, but in some ways surprisingly effective ones—that they form. All three are eventually bulldozed away. But such destructive reactions don’t make the homeless disappear, even if they solve short-term problems for neighbors by making them fade from sight at least temporarily (and at least on that particular site, though they often regroup a mile away).

Barth is on the side of the subjects (and eventual friends and frenemies) he meets in these makeshift minicities. Yet he’s an honest observer of what’s awful about them: the rampant theft, the arson, the screaming, the hypodermic needles, the dead rats. These hobohemias are rife with things the modal taxpaying denizens of wealthy and expensive enclaves such as Cupertino and San Jose don’t want to have around.

Nonetheless, Barth concludes that it’s better to let such sprawling encampments exist and evolve, rather than destroying them and attempting to relocate the inhabitants at great expense and trouble (not to mention destruction of property and disruption of lives). Better both for the homeless and for the culture that would rather they didn’t exist.

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The book’s three tent cities are Wood Street Commons, in a decaying industrial sector of Oakland; the Crash Zone, near the airport in San Jose; and Wolfe Camp, abutting Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Some people who end up in these places want a normal life with a normal job and a normal apartment. But the characters Barth brings most vividly to life want nothing to do with being shoved into cubicle-sized tiny homes, repurposed crummy motels, trailer-filled parking lots, or other proposed solutions to homelessness.

In the words of Dave, one Wolfe Camp resident: “Affordable housing sucks because not only are you squished in this little box, you have to do all these things on time and in a certain order. I don’t see that as attractive. For some of us, coming out of homelessness is worse than being in it.”

The more articulate of Barth’s subjects prefer the barely functional anarchy of their camps, complete with unsettling threats of violence and lack of such amenities as running water or garbage collection, but also a surprising amount of camaraderie, community, mutual aid, impromptu “social services” from the more high-functioning homeless to their lower-functioning comrades, and a sense of family from people whose problems often began with their utter alienation from the families they were born into.

Who wants to live indoors if they can’t cook their own food, bring in their own furniture, or have any guests? One of Barth’s central characters, a former property manager in his 50s who can be charismatic and compelling but has a self-destructive impulsive streak, reports that he has had friends who just rushed ahead to drug-induced suicide when their lives were reduced to that.

A single woman tells Barth she feels safer in a community of people who know and care about her than in a barbed-wire fence with guards. Such camps are decidedly no paradise, Barth reports, but for the type of people who end up in them, such camps can provide a somewhat functional “sensible, modest, egalitarian lifestyle…based on resource sharing.” (Because of both charity and dumpster diving, these dense encampments do not generally lack food, clothes, or other basics of survival.)

In Wolfe Camp, none of the people Barth interviewed had goals that involved “working a job they hate, or any scenario in which they spend their waking hours engaged in unfulfilling tasks.” But some do work hard—like Kent, who used to enjoy biking by Apple HQ shouting “Fuck you!” at the company, and who pulls in around $3,000 a month dumpster diving in the office parks of billionaire tech companies.

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California has about a third of the nation’s homeless. This makes waiting lists for official city-provided low-income shelter in the Golden State absurdly long, and the alternate shelter on offer to the denizens of the bulldozed encampments never covers all the people being displaced.

Barth wants us to see these tent cities as not a problem but a solution to the intractable fact that our society will produce people not prepared or able to thrive in it in a standardized job-and-house style. (He also, especially among “homeless” people who live in parked mobile homes or vans, finds many with good jobs and reasonably high incomes.) His characters can be troubled and troublesome but nonetheless are surviving, and by their own standards sometimes thriving, in the delicate combination of liberty and community that their encampments provide—until officials demand their homes be bulldozed and their possessions destroyed or taken (and sometimes sold by contractors hired to evict them).

Barth posits that it would be both cheaper and less damaging to homeless people’s lives if the city would just try to ameliorate the negative externalities of such encampments by providing trash pickup service and some form of water and power supply. Caltrans alone spent $36 million to sweep 1,262 camps in just 2020, and in at least one Los Angeles example it cost $2 million to sweep just one 200-person camp.

Barth is too quick to dismiss “neighborhood warriors wringing their hands about the tents down the street and the people eating, sleeping, fornicating, and getting high inside them.” Having to constantly see these encampments—especially combined with setting fires, a part he leaves out of that sentence but does discuss elsewhere—justifies neighborly alarm, as does having huge parts of what are meant to be public parks along the Guadalupe River in San Jose inhabited by tent dwellers who unnerve joggers or parents pushing strollers.

But his storytelling does show that, whatever mental health problems his homeless characters might have, it’s not crazy in a colloquial sense to value “friendship more than the social services on offer” in homeless-industrial housing. Even as Barth defends their value compared to the destructive, expensive alternatives that—this part is important—don’t make the homeless disappear either, he admits these encampments are “a messy experiment in interdependence” populated by “highly traumatized and dispossessed individuals” such that “things get messy…a lot of trash…screaming…intoxication…dysfunction.”

Still, Barth is convincing that constantly being uprooted and told they cannot be wherever they are on public (and sometimes private) property adds to these people’s edgy unreliability. He also quotes a source who tours through homeless encampments as saying, somewhat convincingly, that the scrappy resourcefulness of a homeless encampment might make it the safest place to flow to if civilization starts seriously collapsing.

Barth’s deeply observed and thoughtful reporting will make most readers whipsaw between sympathy and repulsion toward his characters, even as it hits on many of the ways California makes building new housing absurdly expensive. (One homeless aid program, Homefulness, faced $30,000 in expenses over the city’s demands that it include parking spaces with its new construction.) He notes that one-on-one cash giving beats in practical effect all government homeless aid.

Dave from Wolfe Camp is a fervent voice for his now-annihilated encampment as a solution, not a problem: “A lot of us want to be here. We love the compassion of it. We love the fact that we belong…which is a really magical thing. I would never be able to heal anywhere else.”

Meanwhile, the homeless’ best legal weapon in having their interests hold weight—Martin v. City of Boise, a 2018 9th Circuit Appeals Court decision that slowed homeless camp destruction—has been abandoned by the Supreme Court in a June 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

That case challenged a law in that Oregon city that essentially criminalized sleeping in parks with any bedding or tents. The 6–3 decision by Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected the 9th Circuit’s assertion in Martin that it was unconstitutionally cruel under the Eighth Amendment to make it illegal to sleep in public if the person did not have “access to alternative shelter.”

Gorsuch specifically said this decision reversed the 9th Circuit’s “Martin experiment,” and argued that “Under Martin, cities must allow public camping by those who are ‘involuntarily’ homeless. But how are city officials and law enforcement officers to know what it means to be ‘involuntarily’ homeless, or whether any particular person meets that standard?”

After listing other relevant questions toward judging someone truly “involuntarily” homeless (the characters Barth reports on show that is a tough question in many cases), Gorsuch concludes that “if there are answers to those questions, they cannot be found in the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause.”

Allowing such camps to grow and thrive does create problems for neighbors not living there. They may be ameliorable, if not solvable, by changing cities’ approach to them, or if the camps themselves get better at self-regulation. Completely erasing all the strife caused by people who choose and act as Barth’s characters do is not possible. Living in a society, especially with people who reject some of its core tenets, always requires a complicated set of costs and benefits and a balancing of interests.