Sidewalk Stories is a collaboration between Street Spirit and KALW (91.7 FM) where we hear from unhoused people about how they navigate life outside. The non-narrated, audio version of this segment will air on KALW in early February.
Without consistent access to a phone, wi-fi, or a source of power, our increasingly digital world can make it nearly impossible for unhoused people to find up-to-date information. Whether that’s the news, a helpful resource, or simply the time of day, unhoused people often have to get creative in order to stay informed—and too often, become isolated as a result.
In my reporting for “Sidewalk Stories”—a collaboration between Street Spirit and KALW Public Media—I spoke to four homeless Oaklanders about their techniques for getting the information they need.
Walking around an encampment in East Oakland, the first person I bumped into was Edie Asbury. She told me staying informed is hard, in the same way that doing anything while living outside poses a challenge.
“I mean, just getting around is difficult,” she says. “Just getting to where you need to be, and getting food, and preparing food. The struggle is real.”
When it comes to gathering information in particular, Edie talked about how difficult it is to maintain a cell phone.
“You lose your phone and you can’t get any information. I had my last phone [for] three hours…And then I let a friend borrow it and she walked away with it.”
Edie guesses she has lost 18 or 19 phones in the last three years. Without a phone, she says she gets most of her information from social services agencies, like CalFresh.
But Edie also says she gets curious about what’s going on in the world. And sometimes, that curiosity gets the best of her.
“I’ll grab a paper off someone’s porch sometimes,” she says with a smile. “Just because I’m dying to see what’s going on.”
Overall, Edie explained that being homeless forces her to live moment to moment.
“It’s just of the moment, my local little world here. I am basically [at] the whim of whatever’s happening. I don’t have up-to-date information.”
I walked through a grassy field looking for somebody else to talk to, and ran into Santiago Lopez in front of his tent.
“You’d be surprised where you can find the current time. The Oakland Tribune Tower tells you the current time. Bus stops, stuff like that,” he told me. “A lot of utilities out here are also giving you timestamps. For example, like parking meters.”
“What about the weather?” I asked.
“Being out here for a certain amount of time, you don’t just get acclimated to the severe weather conditions,” he says. “You can kind of tell when it’s gonna be a good day. Yeah, like on some Boy Scout type of stuff.”
Santiago also touched on something I heard from everyone I talked to: For the most part, unhoused folks get information from other people, through word of mouth.
“Someone usually hears something or announces that there’s people out here handing out resources or information, so for the most part it’s off of someone else who has access to light or power,” he says.
I wanted to know whether he felt that information was credible.
“Do you find that that information is trustworthy? How do you know if you can trust what somebody’s saying to you?” I asked.
“The people who are in that line of duty are reputable people. People who are credible. Someone who doesn’t bullshit with information,” he says.
“Who is that in this community?” I asked.
Santiago squinted, and looked up to his left.
“I’m not sure if he’s available, but he stays at the top,” he says, pointing to a nearby hill with a paved pathway leading to a plateau.
“He’s like an elder out here. We call him OG. Just someone who’s just been through a lot and, you know, still alive. Yeah. I’m not sure if he’s there. You usually see, like, a hooded figure up at the top of the hill,” Santiago says.
“And you call him OG?”
“Yeah. His name’s Sam,” he says.
Trudging up the hill, I was a little nervous to meet the “hooded figure” who takes it upon himself to disseminate information in this encampment community. But when I get to the top, Sam Winters was gentle and friendly.
I asked him about why he chooses to share information with the people around him.
“I got a double helping of the human helper gene,” Winters says. “For better or worse. I just like to help people.”
Sam says that after being homeless for a while, you learn your way around. This makes it easier to navigate the complex landscape of services and resources.
“After living a long time, you acquire knowledge about how things basically work, bureaucracies and this and that, and share it…Usually it’s somebody needs to know something, [and] I’ll help ‘em what I can. I’d go and try to find it by asking and then I tell them about it. Like, food at St. Vincent de Paul’s or something like that. Or clothes.” he says. “[I] try to be as accurate as I can.”
Sam says that beyond resources, he also just loves doing research on his phone, when he has one.
“I’m a real researcher. I like to find out about things…Everything from politics to science.”
Sam says the hardest part about doing research is keeping his phone charged.
“What gets me, the government gives out free phones, but yet they don’t realize that it’s so hard to get your phone charged!” he says, adding that time itself is a critical resource for unhoused people.
“You have to go sit in the library or something for whatever, an hour to get it done. And [with the] hand-to-mouth existence out here, that hour means a lot.”
Over in West Oakland, I met Bart Sessoms: Another unhoused person with a penchant for research. But Bart likes to hit the library for a different reason: To dig through the archives.
“The majority of the information I get from books…usually it’s going to be the branch head [librarian]…you can ask them for old newspaper articles, archives.”
But Bart doesn’t just dig through the archives at local libraries. If he’s really interested in something, he will travel to find primary source documents.
“[At] older structures, missionaries, parishes, they also keep older texts and older documents,” he says.
Bart says he used to go to the San Francisco Missionary, but it closed back in August of last year. So now it’s all about the San Jose Missionary.
“Once I just get into one subject, it takes me to a plethora of other subjects. Everything is more or less a rabbit hole. Our political turmoil, human rights issues and nature conservation, how we treat the land.”
Bart also meditates on who tends to have access to this kind of information.
“They give us the free public school thinking that it’s okay, and we have to pay for a higher form of education…If you don’t have enough money to be up here and smart with us and educated with us, you’re gonna be down there in the commonwealth,” he says. He believes this disparity in who has access to information leads to income inequality.
Reading primary source documents is also a matter of trust for Bart. He wants to make sure his sources are accurate.
“You know a book is old when they use an F for an S,” he says. “I want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
“When we’re reading nonfiction, we’re reading what people are seeing at the present time, that the book is more or less being written or just after the book is being written. And we’re talking about people that were in the Cold Wars. They were in the Banana Wars. They were in the Civil War. They were in the Revolutionary War. And they’re speaking from their viewpoints.
“I’d rather read those older books because they’re not lying,” he added. “They’re telling me the truth, all the way.”
Alastair Boone is the Director of Street Spirit and a beat reporting fellow for KALW covering homelessness.