Show for Sept. 4, 2011. Down and Out in Dogpatch, Part 1
The sociologist Teresa Gowan spent years getting to know a community of homeless recyclers in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. She recounts the experience in her book Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. It’s about many things: not just homelessness but also the ways we talk about it and how they hem us in; the meaning of work (which is why I chose to run this on Labor Day weekend); class and underclass in America; and the not-so-heartening history of attitudes toward poverty and “vagrancy.” Those are some the things we discussed as we paid a visit to a very different Dogpatch than the one Teresa once knew. The neighborhood has gone upscale in recent years, and many of the homeless have been driven out. We talked a lot about that, too.
Warm Water Cove, one of the spots in Dogpatch that Tereza Gowan and I traipsed through. Once a homeless camp, now a park.
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