Homelessness at the End of the Lincoln Highway

Homelessness at the End of the Lincoln Highway

I didn’t ask a soul about Donald Trump or Joe Biden. For the two months I spent crossing the country along the Lincoln Highway by Winnebago, talking with Americans and hoping to reach San Francisco by Election Day, I never brought up the campaign. Sometimes I knew how people felt occasionally they would say, though usually not. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t running a focus group. I was trying to catch glimpses of a more enduring spirit, the kind that has transcended parties and generations, the kind that lives, as Lincoln said, in the better angels of our nature. And maybe those glimpses could help us see more of ourselves in each other, and in the land we share.

On the morning my wife Laurel and I left New York City, Sept. 11, we biked from the World Trade Center to the Cooper Union, where in 1860 Lincoln delivered a speech that catapulted him to the presidency. There in the shadow of the Great Hall, beneath an outdoor sculpture known as the Cube, slept a fellow city resident, lying under a bedsheet on a flattened cardboard box. The image stayed with me as we saw more people living on the street along the Lincoln Highway, including tent encampments that were roiling local politics in Philadelphia and Denver. But it wasn’t until we arrived in California that the problem seemed to overtake cities.

In Stockton, a port city for the state’s massive agricultural industry, which produces two-thirds of America’s fruit and one-third of our vegetables, I saw more homeless people outside a shelter and soup kitchen under the freeway than I did people walking downtown — there was hardly a pedestrian in sight on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Two blocks from the shelter, a large dirt lot beside the city’s children’s museum was dotted with tents, as well as an old motorhome. Homelessness was a major issue in the mayor’s race. A Republican named Lincoln was challenging incumbent Democrat Michael Tubbs, with Lincoln advocating an increase in mental health and substance abuse services, and Tubbs advocating more affordable housing.

We need more of both, Marie Baxter had told me a few days earlier in Reno, Nevada. She’s the executive director of Catholic Charities, which runs a meal program, thrift store, food pantry and sober living facility — all of them working to connect people to housing, employment and independence. On the Sunday morning I drop by, a steady stream of people walk along the Lincoln Highway, some wearing backpacks or pushing shopping carts, turn down a lane to St. Vincent’s Dining Room, and pick up a meal tray. They come mostly by foot, but also by wheelchair and even one car — a late ’80s Toyota Camry in need of a new muffler. One man — middle-aged, neatly dressed — notices our license plates.

“Are you from New York?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“The city.”

He says he’s from Long Island and misses New York. “The food here” — he furrows his brow and crinkles his nose — “is terrible. I’m not talking about this” — he points to his tray. “There’s no good food in this city. They don’t know how to make pizza. You can’t get a good bagel anywhere.”

He smiles, wishes us well on our travels, and returns to his three dining companions sitting on the curb. It’s a conversation like a hundred others we’ve had along the route, a reminder that the face of poverty often defies stereotypes. I had seen similar faces earlier in Canton, Ohio, on the main thoroughfare in the center of town, where I mistook a homeless 20-something for a young professional on a lunch break. A few steps down from him, Anthony Ware, Black and not yet middle age, was dressed to the nines: brown suit, blue shirt, yellow tie, black loafers, flat cap and dark sunglasses. He said he’s been homeless since splitting from his wife in 2016: “Just because I look like this doesn’t mean I live like this.”

In Reno, Baxter has seen the faces change since the onset of Covid-19, from chronically homeless to working poor: “We’re seeing a lot more folks that were two-income families that are now a one-income family, and to stretch their dollars, they’re coming and getting a meal or coming and getting food baskets.” She also sees more young people seeking services — a trend that predates Covid: “Our clients that were in our sober living facility before tended to be slightly older men who were alcoholics, long-term alcoholics. Now they tend to be younger men, like 20s, late teens — the ones that are more of the harder heroin addicts or opioids or methamphetamine.”

Still, she is optimistic and sees hope out their front door, on the Lincoln Highway. “Ten, fifteen years ago, it was all low-income motels. There was a high level of prostitution, not legalized prostitution, but prostitution. And it was just, it was so sad. I wouldn’t have even driven down 4th Street as a young woman.” Now there are three craft breweries on the block, along with other new shops. “We’re bringing in new businesses and we’re really trying to help people,” she says.

West from Stockton, California, the Lincoln Highway skirts the Altamont Raceway — often called the place where the ’60s died by those who forget that assassinations, riots and war defined the ’60s more than Woodstock did. The highway moves through leafy commuter communities before heading into Oakland, where the streets turn tougher, more depressed. At Lake Merritt in the center of the city, a homeless encampment has taken over the community tennis courts. The host at the restaurant across the street says it hasn’t been much of a problem, except that customers are staying away from their main dining space, an outdoor patio. “People don’t like the view,” she says.

Around the corner, another encampment is the scene of abject squalor: tents surrounded by heaps of trash and old furniture strewn across a dry dirt lot. Continuing on East 12th Street, the south side is lined with old motorhomes. On the north side, tents fill the median under the highway overpass, the area littered with debris and garbage. Makeshift plywood and pallet shanties, with tarps for roofs and walls, stand nearby — but barely. The line of shanties ends in ash and blackened wood.

This last mile of driving, so close to the end of the line, is the most depressing of the whole trip. It’s the dark side of the camping and RV boom happening across the country, and it began long before Covid-19 hit.

Robin Smith manages one of Oakland’s three Safe RV Parking sites, home to 44 RVs whose occupants receive free water, electricity and propane for heat, plus two meals a day. There’s a waiting list of about 30. I ask about the biggest challenge she faces. “Just trying to get them to follow instructions, because many of them have been homeless for a long time,” she says. “Hoarding is a big issue.”

There are no mental health services at the site, which Smith says is an ongoing problem: “The last situation I had — by the time the police came they got to wait for the sergeant, then they got to wait for the mental health people, it was about 30 minutes. So by the time they got there to her, she had calmed down. And they were like, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’” Getting residents into permanent housing is another challenge. “Some of them are really not looking to move outside of their RV. They’re going to get whatever they can from the program and then move on.”

Outside San Francisco’s City Hall, five miles from the end of the Lincoln Highway, sits one final statue of Old Abe, facing the homeless encampment across the plaza. At the center of the encampment is the city’s Pioneer Monument, one of the few things to survive the 1906 earthquake. For decades it stood as a symbol of the city’s resilience, but it has come to be seen as something else: a paean to white supremacy. In 2018, the city stripped it of a scene depicting a priest and cowboy standing over a fallen Native American, and the rest of the monument largely ignores the role of Mexicans, Chinese and Native Americans in California’s growth and development. One of the reliefs still there, facing out at the tents, is of a homesteading family.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress. It offered 160 acres to those who built a home and farmed the land for five years. Nearly 800,000 people obtained title to 270 million acres — six times the size of New England. At a catastrophic cost to Native Americans, it offered access to government’s most valuable asset — opportunity — and benefited generations.

I saw one example of that legacy outside of Reno in Fallon, Nevada. Rick Lattin — an owner of Lattin Farms, known for their cantaloupe and corn maze — told me how homesteaders founded his county: “We don’t have very many farms that are more than a couple of hundred acres. It’s all broken up from those days, because people came in and they took 40 acres, 80 acres, 120 acres. You can go 60 miles to Yerington and they have a lot of 1,500-, 2,000-acre farms, because they weren’t homesteaded. They came in and over time they got bigger, bigger. Ours are small farms.”

The Homestead Act was a natural extension of Lincoln’s belief in the purpose of government. In his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, he wrote of the Civil War: “It is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

That struggle did not end with the Civil War. And now, as the hours of Election Day slowly tick past, Laurel and I arrive at Zeitgeist, a punk rock bar in San Francisco’s Mission District. Nothing says “punk” like a patio with picnic tables separated by Plexiglas with signs warning “Do not write on, sticker, or tag glass. Violators will be removed immediately.”

Roll over, Joey Ramone. The returns are about to start coming in and we all wanna be sedated, but there will be no alcohol served without food, by order of the governor. There is just one outdoor television, and our table has a good view. Too good.

“Can you slide over?” a waiter asks. “We’ve got another couple that wants to watch the debate.”

He can be forgiven for mixing up the night’s featured event, but he is grievously mistaken about our willingness to share a table with strangers. Fortunately, we have two friends arriving shortly and he lets us be. I read later that the bar staff is known for its gruff service, but they seem friendly to me. Maybe I just miss New York.

Last call is 8:45 p.m. — punk has never felt so prim. We walk down Valencia Street to a block party hosted by drag queen Afrika America, who is belting out Whitney Houston and Tina Turner to the mostly deflated crowd watching CNN on a Jumbotron. At 10 p.m., with no winner called and the mood tense, the party ends with “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang.

The trip across the Lincoln Highway is over, but the election’s thin margin means it is ending as it began: with an overriding sense of uncertainty about the future. These past eight weeks have convinced me that this journey and its mission is worth continuing, with a return route through the South. Besides, I’m not ready to get on a plane, and I’m just getting the hang of the Winnebago — and feeling fortunate to be living in it on the road, and not on the street. Crank up the Ramones and hey, ho — let’s go.

Want to learn more about Frank’s trip? Visit the Looking for Lincoln Storythread, and follow him on Instagram @looking4lincoln.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Frank Barry is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. This column is part of a series, “Looking for Lincoln: A Portrait of America at a Crossroads.” It features reports from Barry’s journey west along the Lincoln Highway, a zigzagging network of local roads running from Times Square to the Golden Gate Bridge, from Sept. 11 to Election Day.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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