A deep dive on homelessness offers enduring lessons for early-career reporter

When I first met TJ in 2023, she was getting kicked out of her encampment. She had lived for years in her tent under the shade of a bay laurel tree, her search for housing still fruitless after a decade. But a new law in the Northern California city of Gilroy prohibited camping near creek beds and in public parks, and TJ and the rest of the encampment found themselves among the first who had to move after the law passed.

After finishing the story, I began to wonder just how many residents like her were homeless here at the southern edge of Silicon Valley. When I later began to run the numbers for the county and then the Bay Area at large, what I found shocked me.

I discovered that Gilroy had the highest rate of homelessness per capita of any city in the Bay Area with a count. The Bay Area cities more famous for homelessness didn’t come close — Gilroy outstripped Oakland and San Francisco, and had more than double the homelessness rate of San Jose. 

While the city is small — some 60,000 people — as I looked back into the historical numbers and spoke to those who conducted the homeless count, I realized this wasn’t some fluke. By the raw numbers, Gilroy had one of the largest unhoused populations in the Bay Area, a population that had been steadily growing over the last decade and a half, and a rate that had been among the highest in the region for over a decade.

The obvious question was “Why?” I pursued my project for the California Health Equity Fellowship hoping to answer that question.

At first, I spent days poring over statistics that I thought might explain what was going on in Gilroy, but mostly came up confused. The cost of housing has risen more in Gilroy than most other places in the Bay Area, but there were other places where the cost of living had risen more that didn’t have real issues with homelessness. Gilroy had built strikingly few housing units for very-low-income residents — only 42 in the last eight years. Even so, some cities had built even fewer housing units and had less homelessness. As I analyzed factors such as poverty rate, median income, cost burden and overcrowding, a similar pattern emerged. Gilroy was faring worse than most places, but it wasn’t the worst.

At this point, my senior fellow, Will James, encouraged me to get out from behind my computer and into the streets to talk to people more about their experiences. Their stories about their long waits for housing and shelter led me to one of the central themes of my reporting: Gilroy had a stark shortage of resources to deal with its homelessness problem. For example, the city has over eight unhoused people for every available shelter bed, a ratio far worse than other cities like San Jose.

The experience led me to my first lesson: Data analysis is a powerful reporting tool — one that sparked my entire project. But by itself, it’s insufficient unless it’s grounded in the reality of the community you’re reporting on.

I had been trying to get in touch with unhoused people through more typical channels in the early stages of my reporting: asking people in advocacy organizations to connect me to clients and asking if I could join  outreach groups as they handed out resources. Those efforts so far had been fruitless, however. So Will encouraged me just to show up and talk to people, and despite my initial fears, he coached me through it and I spent the next few days visiting Gilroy's encampments.

I found that people were mostly skeptical of my presence, but as I toured the encampments day after day over the course of several weeks, I found strategies that worked to help me find voices and gain trust. 

Finding a community leader was key. In this case, it was Aubrey, a charismatic man who wasn’t quoted in the piece, but ended up being an essential guide to the experience of those living on the streets in Gilroy. Once I had spoken to him, I found that I could mention to others in the encampment that I had talked to him, and it made them more receptive to what I had to say.

My other strategy was to maintain dialogue whenever I could. At one point I was walking through one of the larger encampments and heard someone call out “Hey, who are you?” from a tent behind me. From out of their mesh window, Greg and Sierra asked me who I was and what I was doing in the camp. While my instinct would have been to apologize and move along, I instead tried to explain what I was doing and why I was curious about hearing from the people in the encampment. An hour later, our conversations became two of the dozen in-depth interviews that formed the backbone of my reporting. Months later, Greg became the lead source in another story about issues in the encampment.

Finally, I had to show up consistently, be flexible and follow up regularly. Getting in touch with Angelica, one of the two lead characters in my story, took a half-dozen trips to her encampment and a willingness to ask when a better time might be. Her story became essential to the article.

The throughline to each of these strategies was dropping the guise of a polished, efficient journalist and meeting the people I spoke with where they were. I tried to be professional and communicate clearly about my intentions and what it meant to be quoted in the article, but also I tried to listen with genuine curiosity and empathy. In my experience with many of those on the streets, they are used to being vilified and looked down upon. But by just giving them time, letting them sound off, shaking their hands hello and goodbye — treating them with the respect that they are all too often denied — led not only to fruitful conversations and good quotes, but to trust and even gratitude.

Angelica’s story also forced me to deal with the messy reality that there are no “perfect victims.”

In many ways TJ — the other key figure in the article — had the ideal story to show that someone can do almost everything right and still end up on the streets. She had lost her housing after fleeing an abusive relationship, continued working in special education for years while living on the streets, had been sober for decades and sought housing for years. Once she had housing, she was diligent in her effort to keep it, maintaining a three-inch-thick binder full of files.

Angelica’s story was less straightforward and more uncertain. She wrestled with mental health issues and addiction, she was undocumented, and when she first fell into homelessness, admitted to stealing to get by. 

But her experiences were essential to telling an honest story about homelessness in Gilroy. The lack of aid for undocumented people plays a role in Gilroy’s issues with homelessness. Drug addiction and mental health are also key factors. Engaging with the messy reality of Angelica’s story, and her honest striving for a better life, painted a more complete picture of the issue and better honored her story.

When the article finally published, there was an outpouring of responses. Most were positive, with grateful messages from community members across the political spectrum. A few dismissed my reporting as groundless or lambasted Angelica. The comments that stuck with me most, however, were those who asked why I didn’t reach out. These were largely voices who felt unrepresented — community members whose concerns I already knew well.

I fought for paragraphs that addressed the beliefs of these community members, namely that homelessness is caused by drug addiction and by those coming from elsewhere. But at the same time, I feel that I could have done more to reach out to those who held such viewpoints and discuss my findings, which may have strengthened the impact of the piece and helped those who may not have agreed with my story know that I was taking them seriously.

While these lessons may be obvious to those with more experience in the field, I learned more in this reporting process than with any other story in my early reporting career. And I think every lesson helped me more faithfully tell the story of a small city and its most vulnerable population.