15.2. Good Talk #1: Israel Bayer
Hi everyone! Today I’m kicking off a brand new series you’ll see here on the newsletter from time to time. I’m calling it “Good Talk.” Kinda like when you have a heart-to-heart chat with a friend or family member and afterward you high five or hug and say “glad we did this. Good talk.”
Journalism has given me a continual excuse to ask big questions of intelligent change-makers, to get inside brilliant minds. I don’t get to do traditional “Q&A” style interviews much anymore, and I used to love writing them when I worked an alternative newspaper. So, here we are. Good Talk.
As I’ve talked about here and here and here, covering unhoused communities in the West has long been a passion of mine. For the first edition of Good Talk, I sat down for a long conversation with Israel Bayer. He’s the director of the International Network of Street Newspapers in North America — a collective of more than 100 street newspapers in 35 countries, including Seattle’s Real Change and Portland’s Street Roots, where he worked as editor for 15 years. Every time I talk to Israel, I ask him what reporters can be doing to cover people experiencing homelessness, and in this conversation, you’ll see him make a case that reporters — and everyone — need to be discussing the issue on the same scale as we treat climate change. “It’s important to remember that 2 million people in America didn't all decide to become homeless last weekend to make your neighborhood or community or city complicated,” he said.
Before I get to the interview, I wanted to remind people who are reading for free that I’ve got a promotion running until the end of this month on paid subscriptions. If you click the link below, you can help support this project for $5.60/month, or $56/year. This helps me carve out even more time to produce journalism in this space, and the essays I’ve been putting out for the past year.
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Thank you so much to everyone who continues to read and support my work. Here’s the interview.
Leah Sottile:
Let's start with a question that I was going to save for the end, but I think I’ll just ask you right off the bat: what is one experience that keeps you doing this work?
Israel Bayer:
I would attributed it to a lot of my mentors in different capacities. A woman named Genny Nelson, who is the founder of Sisters of the Road, came from kind of a Catholic worker model of working with people on the streets that believed in the idea of just meeting people where they're at. She always communicated to me that it's not about achieving a particular goal in this word, but it's about passing the torch from one generation to the next, because the work ultimately never ends. I've always tried to keep that in mind.
Right when I started was when like the last remaining World War II vets were out on the streets — that was the mid-nineties — and Korean War vets. There was this old World War II vet that I would always go talk to. He was just like, you know, as you do this work, it's about the people. And if you can keep that at the center of your work, regardless of the politics, regardless of the trends, regardless of whatever may be happening, if you center the people and do the best you can to represent them, just keep going, keep that in mind. That’s always stayed in the back of my head.
As far as journalism goes, I have no formal education. I quit high school, dropped out when I was in 10th grade. I have dyslexia, so I had a learning disability and school was very hard for me. So my training in journalism, I like to joke, was like, I worked graveyard shifts at a 7-11 for many years. I like to joke that I started at MAD Magazine and ended up at The New Yorker. Somewhere along the line, it just kind of clicked: journalism’s really just storytelling. How cool would it be to be able to work in a field where you can tell people stories that otherwise may not be heard?
When I discovered the street paper movement, I instantly fell in love and I've been married to the movement ever since— marrying people's voices on the fringes of society with journalism and storytelling and commentary and arts and photography. The whole thing is an inspiration to me. In the work that we do you see some of the most tragic heartbreaking scenarios you could ever imagine, but you also see these acts of humanity and laughter love.
I think people think of homelessness just through a negative connotation or they have this image of what homelessness is and really people on the streets — people experiencing poverty in general — like we experience all the same things as anybody else. And so we love sports and we fall in love and we go on hard times. There’s a range of emotions that are no different than the human experience for any of us.
LS:
Considering all this time that you've been working with the unhoused community, what would you say is the state of things right now in the wider Western United States?
IB:
The housing crisis in America, and especially in the American west, is so much larger in scale than how we're actually talking about it. … The problem is so much bigger than what we can really comprehend. We're 40 years on of massive disinvestment in public housing. We have decentralized housing as a public infrastructure in American life — and this is what we get. Ultimately, when society stops thinking about housing as a public infrastructure that maintains a healthy society, the government has a responsibility to provide that through taxing corporations, through regulating the real estate industry and the banking industry, from tackling structural racism.
Those are the causes of homelessness in America. The housing crisis in America is a federal responsibility that local communities are carrying the weight for. They don’t ever have the ability to ever scale up to solve the issue. And so we find ourselves in these rhetorical loops around ending homelessness. They’re arbitrary realities that can never achieve their goals until the federal government actually begins to think about housing again as a public infrastructure to maintain a healthy society. Because we've disinvested in public housing, we've created a triage system that's responding to homelessness and trying to manage the problem instead of trying to solve the issue. It's quicksand.
LS:
So are things worse than you've ever seen them?
IB:
Poverty has always existed in America. Housing has been used as a weapon against people of color, against Indigenous peoples. If you look at the history and the relationship between housing, displacement, structural racism, it's always been in America's DNA to use housing as a weapon against people experiencing poverty or on what was seen as the fringes of society. In the 1930s and FDR, there was a time where housing was a federal priority. It was riddled with racist policies, with loopholes, with things that didn't make it perfect, but ultimately it created a baseline foundation that didn't allow for mass homelessness in America. And so when we began to disinvest in housing that had been built since the FDR era, then we had mass homelessness in America.
There are these waves. Is it worse today than in the 1980s? Or during the 1990s welfare reform? Or after the 2008 recession? I think that it's apples and oranges. Homelessness, unfortunately, has become the fabric of American society. And until we go back to that place where we prioritize the issue at a federal level, and we actually put the necessary resources into making it a national priority, we're going to continue to just find ourselves in these feedback loops.
LS:
Yeah. I like that way of describing it.
IB:
Why do we have homelessness in America? Corporate welfare. The lack of regulating the real estate and the banking industry. Structural racism. The high cost of housing. The lack of living wage jobs and the shift from the industrial era to the technological era with no clear path for how to provide people across America with living wage jobs. So you have all these contributing factors, but they’re very rarely a part of the conversation about homelessness. It’s typically about people experiencing homelessness and their choices or the city's response, or does a local community have the right plan?
On the west coast specifically you have the most concentrated wealth in the world living right next to people that don't have any resources whatsoever. Take a place like Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, Washington, or really all of the communities up and down the west coast: same conversation, same debates, same fights.
In some ways, especially in the American west and especially in urban environments, we've become, we've become so “successful” where it's almost like we're living in Adult Disneyland. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, there's these places where like most common folk don't have the ability or the capital to ever come here and actually root themselves in society through the lens of homeownership.
In a place like Portland, there used to be, geographically speaking, the Pearl used to be a warehouse district. The Buckman neighborhood from like 12th to the river used to be a warehouse district. There used to be places people experiencing homelessness and poverty could go to kind of be out of sight, out of mind.
This has occurred across the American west. There's just less space for people that were already struggling with the hell that was homelessness to exist. And so as these neighborhoods became gentrified, or these cities began to prosper through the lens of capitalism, there became less public spaces for people to actually be. And so the only place left for those folks are natural areas. So that's when you began to see public parks become overwhelmed by people experiencing homelessness. Public right-of-ways, bike paths. There was no exit for anybody to just go and be. It became more visible in people's faces.
Again, we've had this triage system: we’ve dealt with it with rental vouchers or mass shelters or tent cities or villages, or like all these triage kind of responses. And one of the most effective ways at responding to the crisis of homelessness was through rent assistance. For many years that never solved the problem, but it at least mitigated the amount of people that were experiencing homelessness in our community. The way that the rental system works is that like the government's basically subsidizing landlords in the private market often to provide housing through housing vouchers.
And when the rent began to skyrocket in the vacancy rates went down, basically what was say a million dollar investment to a local nonprofit to provide people real assistance began to not be able to stretch as far as it did pre-2008 recession. Maybe a million dollars in 2008 where you were able to house X amount of people. Well, now when you provide that same philosophy, it's able to only house half of that amount of people.
So when people ask, is it worse now, today? I don't know if it's necessarily worse, but because we have such a complex housing system that's failing our most vulnerable citizens, there’s nowhere really to put people en masse. Hence housing bonds. Going to the ballot. Going back to kind of the original idea of the thing that ends homelessness is housing. We need to build infrastructure that allows for multi-generational people to live in housing. So, you know, when you're about building an affordable housing unit for 94 units, you're not just building it for 94 individuals or families, you're building it for 94 individuals or families over the next hundred years. It's multi-generational.
LS:
So is it possible for useful, long-lasting changes to happen at the local level? Or are the changes really only possible if the federal government changes their mindset about housing?
IB:
It's both. So it's both government has to prioritize housing, and local communities have to hold wealthy and corporate interest responsible to maintain their responsibility to the communities that they exist in.
LS:
Is Portland doing that?
IB:
I think that the recent 2020 housing bond taxes individuals with an income of $125,000 or more to provide money for homeless services — should we be charging corporations the same? Absolutely. I don't know what Nike's taxes back to the state of Oregon are, but they sure the hell should be helping provide housing for the people of this community and throughout the state of Oregon. And they have a responsibility to our communities to be able not just for housing, but for basic public infrastructure. You can't have it both ways. Corporate welfare has driven us to the bottom and the results are, people are living on the streets en masse.
LS:
I’d love to hear you grade how local Portland leadership is doing on this issue. We have a lot of news right now about these six tent cities sites that will be around the city. As somebody who's been in this world for so long, are they focusing on the right thing?
IB:
Through the bonds we have, and through the homeless service levies, we have a strategy to be able to provide long-term permanent housing, and we constantly have to be looking for alternative ways to support our community members. We get so wrapped up into these kinds of minor skirmishes over a triage response that ultimately isn't solving the problem.
LS:
For example?
IB:
Well, do we need six villages? Probably. Is it going to solve the issue? No. Should we be spending all of our time debating whether that's the right strategy versus another strategy? Oftentimes politics are the death of great housing policy, or are any great ideas, because you have a lot of different vested interests working for their own agendas to take an issue and politicize it in a way that isn't talking about the larger issue at hand. It's hard to answer that question. I think what we need to be talking about is new ideas. Again, always going back to what else can be done.
I would love for our local leaders to [talk about] what are they going to do to create new revenue mechanisms, new policies, holding corporate actors responsible. Those are the kinds of things that I think true leadership would be.
Should we have a statewide ballot initiative? Can we be investing in other communities throughout Oregon to do different kinds of housing policies? Can we take this issue and not make it a Metro issue, but make it a statewide issue and make it a regional issue? It's obviously being affected. I mean, places like Bend and the coast. I mean, there's the lack of vacancies. There's people struggling all over our state. This is not just a Portland problem. Well, we have to start addressing it in a way that isn't just based upon kind of one local community versus another, and start taking a more collective response.
We have to stop thinking about this problem like it's fixing our roads or building a bridge or opening a new park. We need to be thinking about poverty in America on the scale of climate change. We're talking big, bold. In order for us really to tackle these deep institutional problems, we’ve got to take off the kid gloves. The public's not buying it anymore. Nobody's buying anybody’s “end homelessness” plan.
… The bad news is that if we don't both federally and locally change the way we're approaching creating capacity to support housing in our communities… the problems we face today are going to pale in comparison tomorrow, there will be mass homelessness, there will be mass housing shortages.
We have to be able to get to think bigger and to be more courageous and to respond in a more robust way. We see that around our state, the forest fires displaced hundreds of people throughout the American west. We don't even know how many affordable housing units we've lost — nobody's assessing any of that. We're grappling with these realities that are playing out right before our eyes. …Everything in our lives start from having a safe and stable place to be.
LS:
It’s interesting you talk about this on the same scale as climate change. Right now, we're hearing people talk more and more about their own personal climate anxiety and the uncertainty that they, as an individual, can really do anything about a global problem. On this issue, what do you say to the everyday person about what they can do to fix it?
IB:
Well, first, it’s important to remember that 2 million people in America didn't all decide to become homeless last weekend to make your neighborhood or community or city complicated. This is a systemic issue that warrants a collective response by the community, government, the private sector, to all be held responsible to provide the basic infrastructure of housing in our community. It's just really important that if you're seeing somebody having a mental health crisis, you have to remember that human being didn't start out in life to graduate high school or get out of the service and say ‘one day want to be homeless.’ These are our neighbors. These are our friends.
Talk to your talk to your friends, your neighbors, your people around the dinner table during the holidays this season, and express to people that all the people on the streets right now aren't there because they want to be. Then I think that it is holding our federal elected leaders responsible that housing should be a top priority. They should do everything in their power to be creating a housing justice agenda in everything that they do.
Ask people in your own circles how they're doing. Is your grandma struggling with rent? Are there people not talking about their own housing and stability in your own circles that people might be able to come together and support? There are people within all of our own circles that maybe could be using help. Normalizing the conversation. Your group of friends, this holiday season, might chip in to pay for one of your friends’ childcare provider for the next six months or rent for a month. It reaches beyond just people on the streets. We have to be thinking about creative ways to support one another.
Everybody getting together and giving a hundred dollars might go a lot further than buying underwear this holiday season, you know? It's not a long-term solution. We may be living in this reality for awhile. I don't hear a lot of politicians or people just being straight with people. It’s time for honest conversations.
LS:
I want to talk about your work as a journalist in this space. How do you think “mainstream media” is doing on the issue of covering unhoused communities.
IB:
For both the public and readers, we don't need the play by play about homelessness in our communities. We can walk outside our doors and experience it. And so this idea that we're trying to cover the issue in a microcosm around the people themselves — I'm not sure most people are getting beyond the second, third or fourth paragraph. We're reading the same news stories from the same publications about the same events that don't really have anything to do with the solutions. And oftentimes they're more around the conflict or the why we can't do something or why this group of people is mad at that group of people. It’s media's responsibility to lift its head and start to report on more of these institutional reasons of why we have homelessness in our community to begin with. Maybe they're going to have more of an effect in our community around the issue of around studying, like, foreign investments in the real estate industry and how it's affecting our market more than it would be covering the homeless camp that may or may not be swept tomorrow. I'm not saying you don't cover the other stuff, but like, it's really important to put it in context.
LS:
Do you think that kind of reporting is possible when you see newsrooms as strapped as they are for resources?
IB:
We need more investigative resources. If local community foundations and all these other foundations in the state have enough money to give like $5 million a year to homeless organizations, they have the ability to give $70 or $80,000 to news organizations. We know that media is the fourth estate that creates change within our community. So it's philanthropy's job to really up their game and invest in journalism.
I really think it's our job as housing advocates is to think about media literacy. Are the style guides out of date? Do we need to be thinking about educating reporters and editorial boards on framing how to talk about the issue, or at the very least to give the reader context to the realities that we're facing? Like, we didn't just wake up one day and have a homeless crisis. This has existed in our community for decades. I just think as the media, we have a responsibility to think about the issue in a more thoughtful way.
(Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity)