What good did it do?

City Beat ends the yearlong campaign to introduce you to your homeless neighbors

By Kelly Davis

About a year ago, during a staff meeting, we came up with the idea for a new feature: Each week, one of us would find someone who’s homeless, get that person’s story and boil it down to 400 words—long enough, we hoped, to get a point across, short enough to appeal to the average reader.

We didn’t give much thought to the name of the feature, dubbing it “Homeless Person of the Week.” It was an obvious title, but, if we had to do it again, we might come up with something that didn’t have the potential of coming across as glib.

The goal of the feature was simple: We wanted to put names and faces to San Diego’s homeless population—a group too often viewed as a homogeneous population, maligned as “bums” and sometimes described in sub-human terms. As one commenter to a recent San Diego Union-Tribune story on homeless services put it: “Only by making it uncomfortable for these leaches [sic] will we get rid of them.”

Read the whole article here... and then maybe write to Kelly Davis to ask that the series be continued