By Eric Ruthford I had an interview with Bill Hobson, executive director of the Downtown Emergency Services Center, today. The DESC is a major homeless-services provider, operating about 750 units of supportive housing and running an emergency shelter with 300 beds. It is also the operator of 1811 Eastlake, a housing project for chronically homeless severely alcoholic adults that I wrote about earlier in this blog.
During the conversation, I asked if he had any clients who might be willing to talk about their experiences in the new style of housing, and he said no, and challenged me to write a story without trying to put a human face onto homelessness. He said that the personalized stories about homelessness are getting way overdone in the news media.
It does pose an interesting question. I must admit that I, too, am tired of the "weeping mother" cliche when it comes to news reporters -- both print and television -- trying to illustrate a complex social problem. But if you just talk to administrators, you end up with kind of a dry story. I think I am still going to try finding someone who's gotten in to one of the new units of permanent housing that have been built in King County, not to emotionalize the story, but I do need to be able to tell readers what it means to get from the chaos of emergency and temporary shelter to the stability of permanent housing.
Hobson does have a point. I told him, "One of the reasons you see reporters present stories that way is that we are bad at math, and it's easier to present a personal story than using statistics."
