New Book Highlights Human Side of Homelessness Crisis

A new book by Kevin Fagan offers a “profoundly empathetic” view of unhoused people in the San Francisco Bay Area, writes Jay Caspian King in The New Yorker.

According to King, Fagan’s The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances is “an accounting of how a few bad decisions and some bad luck pile up” that “refuses to sit in judgment of anyone who appears in his book.” Fagan interweaves his own experience with homelessness with the stories of others, painting an intimate portrait that is largely absent in the conversation about the ‘homelessness crisis.’

When it comes to solutions, “Fagan mostly echoes the Housing First prescriptions of both the State of California and the federal government under President Joe Biden. The only way to get people off the streets is to provide them a stable place to live and steady services.” Ultimately, Fagan offers few new insights, “ but “The Lost and the Found” is an earnest reminder of the moral side of the crisis: why it is still worth fighting for the basic dignity of all people, especially those who live and die in the teeth of the American contradiction.”