Hobohemian Rhapsody |
Homelessness
Hobohemian Rhapsody
Author Brian Barth explores the makeshift tent cities of Silicon Valley.
Brian Doherty | From the May 2026 issue
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(Illustration: IMAGO/Sabine Gudath/Newscom/Brian Barth)
Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia, by Brian Barth, Astra House, 287 pages, $29
One lesson of Front Street, Brian Barth's book of immersive reporting from the sprawling homeless encampments of Silicon Valley, is that there is no full-bore solution to the problems presented by the homeless. The unhoused, and the larger community they aggravate, have only least-worst options.
Barth's well-reported stories stem from three sprawling multiblock or multiacre tent cities, chronicling the types of people who compose them and the communities—troubled communities, but in some ways surprisingly effective ones—that they form. All three are eventually bulldozed away. But such destructive reactions don't make the homeless disappear, even if they solve short-term problems for neighbors by making them fade from sight at least temporarily (and at least on that particular site, though they often regroup a mile away).
Barth is on the side of the subjects (and eventual friends and frenemies) he meets in these makeshift minicities. Yet he's an honest observer of what's awful about them: the rampant theft, the arson, the screaming, the hypodermic needles, the dead rats. These hobohemias are rife with things the modal taxpaying denizens of wealthy and expensive enclaves such as Cupertino and San Jose don't want to have around.
Nonetheless, Barth concludes that it's better to let such sprawling encampments exist and evolve, rather than destroying them and attempting to relocate the inhabitants at great expense and trouble (not to mention destruction of property and disruption of lives). Better both for the homeless and for the culture that would rather they didn't exist.
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The book's three tent cities are Wood Street Commons, in a decaying industrial sector of Oakland; the Crash Zone, near the airport in San Jose; and Wolfe Camp, abutting Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Some people who end up in these places want a normal life with a normal job and a normal apartment. But the characters Barth brings most vividly to life want nothing to do with being shoved into cubicle-sized tiny homes, repurposed crummy motels, trailer-filled parking lots, or other proposed solutions to homelessness.
In the words of Dave, one Wolfe Camp resident: "Affordable housing sucks because not only are you........