It was the fall of 2001. I was frustrated and on the verge of starting my own newspaper.
I was 20 years old… which I guess means I was the same person then that I am today: a go-getter (often to a fault) who was dissatisfied with the way media treated marginalized communities. Funny, I hadn’t even gotten my first real job in journalism yet, but I guess my long, lonely path was already unfolding before me back then.
Before our first edition came out, this little newspaper of mine was making a bit of noise in the city. Some of that coverage was ageist, and a little head-patty, but coverage nonetheless. “What happens when you mix two Gonzaga University students and Spokane’s homeless population?” asked one headline about the rollout of The Rising Times. A friend and I were starting this newspaper on top of full class workloads and part-time jobs.
The plan was, admittedly, ambitious. The Rising Times would exclusively cover issues affecting the unhoused population of Spokane, where we lived. And, in the model set forth by many street papers worldwide, it would be sold by unhoused vendors — who would keep the cash for themselves. Vendors could go through some training, get a seller’s permit, buy papers from us for a quarter, and turn them around for a dollar apiece. It would put a little money in someone’s pocket. We figured downtown shoppers couldn’t really complain about panhandling if people were selling something, right? Why not sell them information?
This idea was not new: I’d been buying copies of The Burnside Cadillac outside of Powell’s, in Portland, for years. As a teenager, I was fascinated by the stories I read about homelessness that upended everything I might have assumed about people who slept on the street. I grew up in the suburbs, after all. What did I know?
But as soon as I stumbled upon street papers and alternative weeklies, that kind of media world really appealed to the budding journalist in me. Everyone could have a chance in the pages of those types of publications, and isn’t that how it should be? When we published honest, first-hand accounts of what it was like to be homeless in Spokane, people were blown away. They’d never even considered what that might be like.
At the heart of things, the goal of The Rising Times was to get people to pay attention. “We want to get it out to everyone,” a very young me told a reporter. “So people on the South Hill know what’s going on down here.” (For you non-Spokane people: “the South Hill” is Spokane-speak for where rich people live.) I ran the paper for a couple years, before handing it off to someone else. All total, the paper published stories of unhoused people for seven years. I’m glad I got to be a part of it. Street newspapers continue to this day in most American cities: Street Roots, here in Portland, should be a part of any Oregonian’s news diet.
I’m telling you all of this because today I published a new investigation in High Country News that reminds me of those early reasons that brought me to journalism: to inform people of realities faced by people in their own community, to empower, to enlighten, to hold power to account.
“Did James Plymell Need to Die?” is a story about the tragic life of James Fuller Plymell III: an unhoused man whose car became stranded on the side of a road in Albany, Oregon — the place he’d almost always lived. After a police officer pulled over to aid Plymell with his car, that officer called for back-up. What happened next was a frantic scene: officers tasing the man, Plymell screaming for help from anyone who might hear him, yelling again and again that he was only out of gas.
You can watch it all for yourself — at the bottom of the story, there’s a link to the full unedited footage of Plymell’s final moments.
This story is not an easy read. The body camera footage is very hard to watch. But reality is uncomfortable and rarely pretty. We must confront deeply uncomfortable things about our society in order to find ways to fix them. In this case, there were multiple systems that failed Mr. Plymell. And by 2019, he was no stranger to what police force felt like: he had the scars on his body to prove that.
I’m amazed that for 20 years, I’ve been writing about ways that unhoused people continue to be cast aside in the parts of the Northwest where I’ve lived. Here’s a quote from the story that shows the urgency of this issue right now:
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic crippled the U.S. economy and forced an estimated 30 million people to face potential eviction, homelessness was on the rise. In 2019, an estimated 568,000 people in the U.S. experienced homelessness. And the issue is particularly severe on the West Coast: In California, Oregon and Washington, in 2019, 29 to 38 people per 10,000 were homeless; those three states, along with the District of Columbia, New York and Hawaii, had the highest rates of homelessness nationwide. (Alaska, Nevada and Colorado had only slightly lower rates.) “There is not one city in the entire United States where there is enough shelter for people that are homeless,” Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said. “That’s rural, that’s urban, that’s suburban. That’s across the board. … This isn’t just a big-city problem.”
Very similarly to extremism — which I have written about extensively, and is likely what brought you to this Substack newsletter — this is yet another issue that is everywhere. It isn’t someone else’s problem to fix; it’s all of our problem to fix.
Like the me of 20 years ago, that is the story I still want to get out to everyone.
Such a sad story. I'm glad people like you are out there, bringing these things to light.
Leah, I first read this in the print edition yesterday and I don't know what to say. So many failures, and in so many ways we are all culpable in our willful ignorance, our willful blindness. Fuck.