I’ve covered California’s homeless since before the word was used. This is what I learned – LA Times

“In 1980, I reported on Sacramento’s ‘public inebriates.’ Most of them, a few hundred in all, lived in flophouse hotels. But some slept ‘in the weeds.’ I walked the wooded banks of the rivers that converge in the capital and found just a few dozen spots where men had bedded down on simple mats of cardboard or newspaper. There were no tents or camps.

“The word ‘homeless’ was rarely used then. It didn’t appear in my article for the Sacramento Bee.

“By 1982, amid a recession, newcomers who had lost their jobs began to appear in the weeds. In 1985, after three years of reporting on the subject, I co-authored one of the first books on contemporary homelessness. In 1988, I spent a week walking 10 miles of Sacramento riverbank and found 125 elaborate camps. This was new.

“I returned to Sacramento more recently amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the tent cities in the woods along the rivers stretched as far as the eye could see, rivaling those photographed by Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression. The most recent federally mandated survey found more than 5,000 unsheltered homeless people in the city.”

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