Tenants over Tents: Why Skid Row is Stuck in the Undertow

The largest concentration of unsheltered people in the country is located on “Skid Row,” a 54-block stretch of eastern downtown Los Angeles. 2,000 people spend each night there. However, Skid Row is simply a more visible component of an underlying dilemma: from 2010 to 2017, there has been a 42 percent rise in the number of homeless people […]

Redefining Homelessness: The Struggle for Recognition

The sudden rush of people cramming onto BART is Brittany Jones’s alarm clock every morning. Since the age of 19, Brittany has been uncertain of where she will sleep each night, bouncing between BART, relatives’ and friends’ houses, group homes, and shelters. She is merely one of California’s thousands of homeless people trying to find […]

Popping the Berkeley Bubble

“So…why’d you pick Berkeley?” my new friend asks, looking at me over the rims of his glasses. It’s a frequently asked question during Welcome Week, the favorite of awkward strangers-turned-conversationists in the dorms. Walking down Telegraph Avenue, I think about the answer as I take in the melange of people and activities around me. There’s […]