According to a recent study conducted by the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, California holds the distinction of hosting a third of the homeless population in the country. Santa Clara County—the central hub of tech-centric Silicon Valley—has the highest number of homeless people in the Bay Area, at approximately 10,700, as revealed in last year’s point-in-time count.
Author Brian Barth spent more than two years frequenting three homeless encampments in Silicon Valley, putting names and faces to the numbers and statistics. “In the beginning, I just wanted to understand the lives of the poorest people in the wealthiest region of America,” Barth writes in his new book, Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia, which he will present at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Saturday, Feb. 28.
“We kind of only talk about homelessness as an individual experience,” says Barth, who lives in Tiburon and has written for The New Yorker, Washington Post, The New Republic, National Geographic and Mother Jones. “I was so enamored with the people and intrigued by their stories. I wanted to understand the scale of the problem, and what these sort of village-like camps were about. They had created an incredible amount of infrastructure, and a network and community around them.”
Barth began visiting the homeless encampments in 2020, namely Wood Street in Oakland, Crash Zone in San Jose and Wolfe Camp in Cupertino, which is located near Apple’s headquarters. Along the way, he befriended more than a dozen homeless people from various backgrounds. Some have college degrees, had careers and served in the military. Others had been incarcerated and institutionalized. One man was the father of nine children, and another was living with AIDS.
They had a myriad of reasons for why they wound up unhoused (addiction, mental health struggles, generational poverty, bad choices) and just as many reasons for why they preferred to stay that way (sense of community, distrust of authority, rebelliousness).
“It’s not entirely economics,” says Barth. “They don’t have that ability to deal with the world as it is. When things complicate their housing stability, they don’t bounce out of it. They don’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They fall through the cracks.”
As the book’s subjects explain, “Front Street” or “doing Front Street” is to live openly and unashamedly in public.
“It basically just means being out on the sidewalk,” says Barth. “When people recently become homeless, they’re so ashamed by that. They’re gonna hide wherever they can. There’s so much psychology around hiding. But after they adjust to life on the streets, they embrace it. They become rebellious. In a way, it can force a reckoning and a conversation to happen.”
Barth is currently working on finishing a documentary called The Spark, about Wood Street, once the largest homeless encampment in Northern California. He writes that the process of going from journalist to friend of the unhoused not only helped him “connect across the poverty veil” but learn more about himself.
“Accompanying people on their healing journey was a rare and sacred thing. I wanted to share all that. It motivated me to support them. I saw this was valuable. I’m meaning something,” Barth notes. “It’s not just about charity, writing a check or bringing a loaf of bread. There’s a reciprocal exchange. And it’s a priceless, human exchange that I think so many people would appreciate having.”
Tiburon’s Brian Barth presents his book, ‘Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia,’ at 4pm, Saturday, Feb. 28, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. bit.ly/barth-front-st.
