Deseret News Article
Mark Horvath, a one-man homeless outreach agency, was in Salt Lake City this weekend, recording stories of residents most Utahns never see, then putting them on the Web for the world to see — literally.
He's good at it because he's been homeless twice — and could well be there again.
He's managed to stave off that day by taking homelessness head on by driving cross-country the past 50 days, traveling 8,598 miles in a borrowed car, gathering stories of fellow downtrodden Americans and sharing them with the world by putting homeless people smack dab in the middle of digital society — on Facebook, Twitter and Whrrl.
"Homeless people are invisible, and I'm trying to make them visible," Horvath told the Deseret News after a visit to Palmer Court, a permanent apartment complex in downtown Salt Lake City that is the showpiece of a government and private "housing first" program aimed at ending homelessness in Utah by 2014. The idea is to provide a stable, one-stop shop for chronically homeless people by setting them up in a subsidized apartment, then dealing with the various life factors that made them homeless in the first place.
"I've been a housing-first guy forever, but this is the first place I've actually seen in operation," Horvath said. "It's the most amazing thing I've every seen. People are treated with respect, there is a coalition of government agencies, politicians, corporations and caseworkers, so a guy doesn't have to make 15 different stops to get plugged into the various programs. That saves the state so much money, not to mention gives people respect that many long ago learned they couldn't expect or didn't feel they deserved.
"We'll never end homelessness, but if there's a state that could if we could, it would be Utah," he said.
Utah has obviously taken things seriously, he said. "That's the rarest exception around the country. People are aware of the homeless, or they see a popular move, but they don't really see homeless people. I know the homeless are invisible because I've been there."
And because people don't tend to notice or simply dismiss a homeless person when they encounter one, "the country isn't seeing the storm — the perfect storm — that's coming of families driven into hardship and with nowhere to go."
Shelters, private housing and social-welfare agencies nationwide are seeing increases of 50 to 70 percent the past year, he said. And most of the families aren't in urban areas and cities, but in the wide and generally poor expanses in between, he said, adding that a kind of dust-bowl mentality is building — families forced to be on their way when all they want to do is stay put.
Horvath, who was a Hollywood television executive who battled addiction, lost the life he knew, got another one and then became one of the country's most well-known anti-homelessness activists, said the scariest statistic he's heard, and the most telling, is that the average age of a homeless person today is 9 years old.
"Yes, 9 years old. The stereotypical scruffy, bearded man on the street corner is giving way to a younger couple with a child or two."
Horvath, himself unemployed for nearly two years, managed to keep his house out of foreclosure for a few months, but it was sold at auction in Los Angeles this past Thursday.
Horvath heads to San Francisco next and then on to Los Angeles by the end of the week. He will arrive with hundreds of stories from homeless people and will have shared nearly all of them by putting them on Facebook and Twitter, plus real-time stories on Whrrl. He'll still have one story — his own — to tell.
"I officially have no place to go," Horvath said. "I'll find something, an apartment to rent; I've actually got a ways to go before I'm homeless again. A lot of times, it's kind of how you look at it. I'll find a place to go."
Until then, others will come first. But telling their stories on social networks where "me" is king and the mundane is the stock in trade seems a sure way not to have the issue taken seriously.
"Well, I guess I'm going to make Twitter matter. It should. It's the new way in this one-on-one world. There's no reason for a mediator or a press aid to spin the message. People are out there, and they are watching and documenting what's happening to them. It doesn't have to be cleared or get past an editor."
Without interference in the middle of things, "people give an immediate response, and they will take action immediately, too," he said, noting that a Twitter conversation he had with a college student in Orem resulted in her folding $5 bills into paper airplanes and tossing them to homeless people as she drove around.
"Not everyone's going to do that or want to," he said, "but it was something actually seeing people who are struggling, then doing something rather than just put it off or put it out of their minds."