According to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half a million Americans are homeless on any given night. HUD counted 1.5 million people who used a shelter in 2014, and then there are those who are crashing at a friend’s house or sleeping on the street.
Those big numbers point to the scale of the problem nationally,especially in cities. But often homelessness can seem like an issue that’s too big to deal with on an individual level, something that’s hard to reconcile with daily life. It’s for this reason that Justin Doering, a media-studies student in Idaho who recently graduated from Boise State University, started a project aimed at bridging the gap between those big numbers and real-life stories of homeless Americans.
“No one talks to these people … I used to just try to avoid eye contact with them,” says Doering. “But these are people that no one really knows anything about and are choosing to ignore. So I figured their stories are a really great one to tell.”
[For more of this story, written by Bourree Lam, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...0-sandwiches/479571/]
Comments (0)