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Word on the street >> Are newspapers for the homeless headed towards the mainstream? by JACQUIE CHARLTON >>>> Sidebar: Spare Change
>>>> Sidebar: Outsider Perspective
There was also the problem of homeless people's "subterranean self-esteem," Harris says, and the immediacy of their basic needs. When you're wondering whether you have a place to sleep at night, he explains, you aren't going to lobby the legislature for a housing project that might happen five years down the road.
So Harris improvised, taking inspiration from the fledgling street newspaper movement. He founded Spare Change in Boston in 1992--one of the first publications written by the homeless, with proceeds going to the homeless.
There are now about 40 such newspapers across the U.S. and 10 in Canada, from none only a decade ago. The first street persons' newspaper in the world was the Street News in New York City, established in 1989 when a benefit concert for the homeless was cancelled and organizers found themselves with a whole lot of benefactors' money and nothing to spend it on. They began the Street News, put copies of it in the hands of homeless people to sell at a small markup, and a movement was born.
Montreal's own street paper, L'Itinéraire, was started in 1994, and now has a circulation of 12,000. This past weekend, L'Itinéraire played host to over 50 delegates from newspapers across the continent, as part the North American Street Newspaper Association's annual conference. Roughly half of the delegates at the conference, Harris estimates, were once homeless themselves.
"Our paper connects homeless people to broader society," Harris says (besides being NASNA's president, he's also director of Seattle's monthly Real Change). "It's a relationship formed on parity, not charity. People see that homeless people are full humanity." And though Harris believes things are going to get a lot worse for the homeless in the U.S. before they get better, he adds that "a poor people's movement is building, and it's made up of poor people themselves. Street papers are a very important part of that."
Big Issue, big controversy
Currently, though, the street paper movement is split into two distinct camps: those who believe the papers should be aimed at the poor and homeless themselves, and those who believe they should aim to reach a wider audience with general-interest articles. Proponents of the latter think the more money these papers generate, the better the position they'll be in to help the homeless by providing jobs or funds for housing.
The introduction of The Big Issue in Los Angeles last April became the lightning rod for this conflict and was hotly debated at the conference. The Los Angeles Big Issue is an offshoot of the 300,000- to 450,000-circulation weekly Big Issue in London, England. With full coffers from its parent company, it's now competing directly with Making Change, a homeless people's newspaper that's been sold in Santa Monica and L.A. since last year. "No other paper survives where The Big Issue appears," says Jennafer Waggoner, editor of Making Change.
But Big Issue's founder John Bird insisted to delegates that his intentions were good. "My goal in starting The Big Issue was to stop homeless people from getting picked on," said Bird, who was homeless for a period himself. "It wasn't 'I have a dream.' It was 'I have a nightmare,' and that nightmare was full of all sorts of people who want to destroy homeless people."
Big Issue vendors get to keep 60 cents of each issue's $1 cover price and its profits are distributed through a foundation to homeless people's charities. Bird explained that he "went commercial" with The Big Issue and turned it into the mass-circulation glossy it is today when the paper's losses got too big to sustain.
Bird withdrew The Big Issue's bid to become a member of NASNA for the time being because of the controversy, though he plans on making another attempt next year. The Big Issue did have a number of vocal supporters at the conference. "This is divisive, defeating, self-defeating bullshit," one delegate told the assembly after The Big Issue and Making Change had stated their cases.
Coziest dumpsters
Certainly, sitting in a roomful of Americans who work with the homeless gives you some idea of the magnitude of the homelessness problem in the United States. The articles in the American street papers themselves are chillingly practical: The Denver Voice, for instance, talks of the temperature at which hypothermia deaths take place; New Hope offers annual dumpster awards for the best dumpster sites.
"These people are basically just being abolished," says Harris. And what Harris says about poor-bashing in America comes uncomfortably close to the way our own legislators and journalists deal with squeegee kids: "There's a real social crisis regarding poverty, and it's an obvious crisis. And you're forced to either question the way the whole system is working, or you create an ideology that blames the poor themselves."
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How do you organize the homeless? As a social worker 10 years ago, Timothy Harris, now president of the North American Street Newspaper Association, was baffled by the problem. How can you go knocking on doors when people don't have any doors, he asked himself. How can you telephone people?