When Brian Barth set out to write a book on Silicon Valley’s ordinary people — those who mow lawns and clean toilets for the area’s uber rich — he knew that some of them would be unhoused in a region famous for its pronounced wealth disparity.
Early in his reporting, he was invited into a homeless encampment near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Barth said he had never been in a homeless encampment before and expected to find misery. But he instead found inspiration in people who had formed tight-knit communities. Members cooked communal meals and set up showers and other rustic infrastructure — all of which was at constant risk of being swept away.
“It made me feel like there’s something really of value here to the rest of us — not just a debate about policy related to homelessness but something about humanity here that I wasn’t hearing about,” Barth said. “And I was like, somebody needs to write a book about this.”
Barth’s book, “Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia,” profiles three homeless encampments that emerged against the backdrop of the nation’s tech capital. Reported between 2020 and 2024, it offers an immersive view of a problem vexing West Coast cities while highlighting an important piece often missing from conversations about homelessness: the voices of people who are actually experiencing homelessness.
An independent journalist with bylines in the New Yorker, National Geographic and others, Barth will be at Broadway Books on Jan. 21 to promote his book. He’ll be joined by several leaders from Oakland’s unhoused community, including John Janosko.
Janosko said he lived at the Wood Street encampment for eight years before the city dismantled it in 2023. He said he wants to counter the narrative that homeless people are lazy and want to do drugs or drink all day. Instead, he said, homeless encampments can function like other neighborhoods where people share each other’s lives.
“There’s nothing different about us, except for we didn’t really have a roof overhead,” he said. “We didn’t live in a traditional way, but we were doing the best that we could with the cards that were laid out for us at that time.”
‘We wanted to feel stable’
Amid the Bay Area’s worsening housing and homelessness crisis, Janosko, 57, said people with nowhere to go began migrating to a stretch of Wood Street near an overpass in Oakland.
Janosko, who grew up in Oakland, said about six years ago, he and a group of other homeless people settled on a city-owned parcel of land that would become known as the Wood Street encampment.
“That’s where this big movement of resistance really started in a positive way,” he said. “Because we were tired of being pushed around. We wanted to feel stable.”
The encampment grew to northern California’s largest, with an estimated 300 residents in several city blocks. The encampment’s closure drew national headlines and is the subject of a feature documentary.
Janosko said the encampment was able to sustain itself for so long by attracting “good attention,” through day-to-day efforts to make the area cleaner and more comfortable. He would collect trash early in the morning and pick up donated or discarded furniture using a trailer hitched to his bike. Residents set up makeshift walls for structures that included a free clothes area, a community center and other amenities.
Truck drivers would stop and remark on efforts to keep the camp tidy, he recalled. Visitors would express surprise at how organized the camp was, and some would later donate money and supplies, he said.
“If people don’t feel comfortable coming on to the (encampment), they will never see us as human beings,” he said.
Janosko recalled being initially leery of Barth when he came to visit the camp after previous news coverage focused on trash and drug use. But the two eventually became friends.
Barth recalled Janosko cooking donated food over a fire pit every night.
He said the encampment’s infrastructure was more “organized and entrenched” than others he visited for the book. He recalled how a professional builder from outside the encampment helped create cob structures made from clay, soil and other natural materials. Those structures, he said, included a kitchen with running water, a bathhouse and a clinic stocked with Narcan and first-aid supplies.
The encampment in Cupertino, an affluent suburb south of San Francisco, similarly began with homeless people who were tired of being pushed around and wanted to make their presence known, Barth said. That camp’s roughly 15 residents, he said, used generators for electricity, had a bulletin board in a communal area, shared grilled food, hauled in jugs of water for a rustic shower and assigned jobs like sweeping.
“These are people who knew each other; they liked each other,” Barth said. “They wanted to be together, cohabitating.”
‘They were all under threat of being swept’
Virtually all of the people living in the encampments profiled in the book grew up in Silicon Valley, Barth said.
That included Rudy Ortega, a major character in the book who spent part of his childhood in a neighborhood that was cleared to make way for an expansion of San Jose Mineta International Airport. What replaced the neighborhood was the “crash zone,” an open area that served as a buffer in case a plane missed the runway, which later became the site of a homeless encampment with the same name.
The crash zone was the most sprawling and least organized of the encampments profiled in the book, Barth said, which he attributed to an influx of people during the pandemic.
Ortega emerged as a leader in the encampment who had some success in challenging local authorities’ efforts to remove it, he said. While Barth described each encampment’s decision making as consensus-based, some members emerged as leaders.
“A lot of it was organized around resistance to being swept,” Barth said. “They were all under threat of being swept.”
That meant reaching out to the media, building relationships with nonprofits and advocates while maintaining a dialogue with city officials, he said.
As Barth was writing his book, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed cities to punish people for sleeping in public places even if shelter is unavailable. Janosko said that after the ruling, the city of Oakland began more aggressively sweeping encampments.
Each of the camps featured in the book were closed, and its residents were displaced.
Beyond ‘lived experience’
After the city cleared the Wood Street encampment, it offered some former residents nearby tiny houses operated by a nonprofit, which Barth, and others, likened to sheds.
Janosko, who is now permanently housed, said the dismantling of the Wood Street encampment meant a loss of community.
He said cities need to offer more resources to help homeless people reenter mainstream society. He also called on cities to stop sweeps of encampments, which he said are pointless because homeless people will gravitate back to neighborhoods where they had connections.
“You can’t keep pushing people around and expect the situation to get any better when you don’t have a place for them to go,” he said.
Like cities in the Bay Area, Portland has also struggled with surging housing costs and homelessness. Late last year, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson announced he would begin enforcing the city’s ban on sleeping in public places or setting up tents or other structures.
While he was homeless, Janosko said he and others were worried about suddenly losing all their possessions in a sweep, including legal documents needed for people “to get back on their feet.”
Although the camps included in his book are gone, Barth said cities and nonprofits can learn plenty from them.
He said there is already a movement to incorporate people with lived experience of homelessness into advisory boards for programs, which he called a step in the right direction. He also pointed to the move away from congregate shelters toward tiny home villages that give residents a little more privacy, even though he said many “are still operated like a jail.”
“The next step would be relinquishing a whole lot more control and truly making these places, ideally, self-governed,” he said.
Barth will discuss the book during an event with Molly Hogan, executive director of the Welcome Home Coalition, starting at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 21, at Broadway Books located at 1714 NE Broadway.
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This article appears in January 21, 2026.