The official number of homeless in the United States reached nearly 800,000 in 2024.  This was an 18% increase over the previous year and the highest number since the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began tracking homelessness in 2007.   But HUD’s numbers are far from perfect.  They represent a snapshot in time, a momentary counting of the unhoused in emergency shelters, transitional housing and public spaces.  If we include the number of invisible or hidden homeless sleeping on couches at a friend or relative’s home, using low cost motel rooms, or sleeping in cars the real number could be many times greater.  

If memory often relies on counting and official records how is it possible to remember the homeless?  Further complicating the memory of the unhoused are the stereotypes of the homeless as single men, drug addicts or the mentally ill that don’t conform to the reality of a diverse population that includes the elderly, youth, families and veterans.  In the latest addition to her long oral history career devoted to the stereotyped and misunderstood, writer Alison Owings takes up the subject of homelessness through the story of one man, Del Seymour.  Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness is a story of triumph and redemption that unfolds in Owings’s hometown of San Francisco.  

After chance encounters became multiyear book projects on Nazi women, waitresses and Native Americans, Owings returned to her home in San Francisco where she became interested in the omnipresent plight of the homeless.  But the prospect of undertaking an oral history project covering such a massive, diverse, and far-flung population seemed overwhelming.  Moreover, how many readers would want to buy a book devoted to a topic as deflating as homelessness?  She found her answer on a tour of the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, the neighborhood with the highest concentration of homeless in the city.  The tour was led by the founder of Tenderloin Walking Tours, Del Seymour.  When Del stopped and commented that « he could have gotten a PhD in sidewalks » Owings knew that she had found the perfect subject for her next book.  Del’s wit, insight and sense of humor paired with his personal experience of homelessness, would allow her to tell the story of the unhoused through the experience of one man.  

What Owings could not have imagined at the start of a project that would stretch out over a decade, was the incredible wealth of stories Del Seymour’s life contained.  In my interview with Owings I joked that reading her account of Del’s life reminded me of watching the movie Forrest Gump.  Del seemed to have been everywhere and done everything. Growing up in the South Side of Chicago in the era of Mayor Richard Daley, he first worked as a cab driver at a time when robbers killed five drivers a night.  Del carried his .22 Röhm Saturday night special with him for protection.  He worked with Reverend Jesse Jackson and had a chance to meet Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King when he passed through Chicago.  This was only the start of Del’s story that would take him from his time as a medic during the Vietnam war, a pioneering black firefighters in Los Angeles and a successful construction contractor to his experience living on the streets in San Francisco and ultimately becoming an advocate for the unhoused networking among the business and political elite of the city. 

Of many doorways Del slept in, he said sometimes he got permission but mostly did not. The search alone was exhausting. “It would take you hours to find a doorway. Then I finally found a couple preferred doorways. I would travel to them. I never told anyone where I was.”

Although now housed for years, Del’s scanning impulse has not left him. “When I walk down the street, I’m still shopping. Not that I would ever need it.”  Alison Owings, Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco. 

Del’s stories are so rich and varied that readers might start to wonder if he might be too good of a storyteller.  Owings’s book raises questions about the reliability and the possible distortion of individual memories, if only for the purpose of telling a good story.  In her preface Owings herself questions whether « his memories were accurate and truthful. » She concludes that «from what I could check — and there was much I could not — they mostly were, if with caveats. » Del had no real records of his past.  Owings comments that his filing system consisted of «crumpled money and random business cards among other effluvia. » She remarks that Del was prone to hyperbole and his stories often contained minor contradictions.   But through nearly a decade of interviews and conversations she concludes that he « meant to be truthful, partly for his own good. »

Beyond the challenge of assessing the accuracy of Del’s memories, Owings was faced with the difficulty of organizing them.  She began with a straightforward chronological account of Del’s life but her agent objected.  The primary concern was that readers wouldn’t want to wade through chapter after chapter before getting to Del’s story of triumphing over homelessness and becoming an advocate for the unhoused.  In the final version, published by Beacon Press, the chapters are rearranged so that the story of Del’s life weaves between the past and present—a strategy which I personally found to be engaging, effective and a more realistic reproduction of how memory actually works.  

In the end this is only the story of one man who had an exceptionally rich and varied life before he became homeless.  In fact, Owings surmises that Del’s lust for life and insatiable curiosity may nearly have cost him his life.  As Del tells the story he arrived in San Francisco on Highway 280 and a month later found himself sleeping under it.  The truth is that Del was drawn to the excitement and nightlife of the Tenderloin neighborhood, especially the allure of crack cocaine.  It was crack cocaine that sent his life on a downward spiral, nearly killing him on more than one occasion.  Eighteen seconds of chemically induced bliss, Del comments, robbed him of eighteen years of his life.  

Del’s memories are in many respects a survivor’s story and a manual for what it takes to live on the streets of a major American city for nearly two decades.  The ability to find safe and secure shelter was paramount.  Years after leaving his life on the streets Del still finds himself reflexively scanning the surroundings for an ideal refuge. Isolated doorways, protected from the wind and far from other homeless, provided the best shelter but often took hours to find.  The best bedding was cardboard while the constraints of a sleeping bag could be lethal if attacked.  Although he said he never fired it, Del sometimes carried a 9mm pistol for protection.  Knowing where to go when it was cold, from donuts shops and buses to the BART subway system, could be the difference between life and death. Shelters were often the worst places, because of drugs and unwelcoming staffers who hated their jobs and acted more like prison guards than social workers.  

What does it take to get someone off the streets?  Del stresses that you can’t help anyone if they aren’t ready.  Del recalls a number of episodes where he nearly turned his life around but wasn’t ready.  In one instance he found himself in a welcoming community that gave him a job, trust, responsibility and ultimately a gift of a car but an encounter with a prostitute offering the old temptation of drugs proved his undoing.  It is human nature, Owings told me, to reward yourself after freeing yourself from some damaging habit with the very thing that caused you so much harm.  Owings believes that Del may simply have reached the point of fatigue or the wisdom of years where he was ready to change his life for good.  

Del’s story is above all one of personal redemption.  He lifted himself out of homelessness and founded Tenderloin Walking Tours that employs many of the most vulnerable from his community.  He used his skills as a networker to connect with the political and business elite in San Francisco to fund a program called Code Tenderloin that has helped thousands like himself find jobs and a new life.  While Del enjoys and is inspired by his ability to make a difference, his drive to help his community has deeper and more painful roots than his time on the streets.  In the course of her years of interviewing and earning Del’s trust, Owings learned that Del had spent time as a pimp, employing women from the community to support his drug habit.  It is this deeply shameful past that inspires Del to work on behalf of his community, often helping women who are the age of the daughters of the women he once pimped.  These were the memories that Del was most resultant to share.  Had Owings known about them from the start, she candidly told me, she may never have chosen him as the subject of her book. 

How can the story of one man help us understand the incredibly complex and multifaceted problem of the unhoused?  We can’t reduce the reasons for or the solutions to homelessness to any single life example.  Perhaps what is most important about Del’s story is how it serves as a reminder of the humanity of the homeless.  One of Del’s chief complaints is how the system now in place to address the problem of the unhoused often disregards their humanity.  Shelters treat the unhoused like prisoners with strict rules and regulations typically forcing them back onto the streets in the early hours of the morning.  Social workers assigned to help the unhoused focus more on numbers than understanding the people and the real needs of those they are trying to help.  Sweeps of homeless encampments show a complete disregard for the life and life possessions of the homeless.  Perhaps the first step to changing the story of the unhoused is to recognize that everyone has their own story to tell and knowing that story may make all the difference.