“Sleeping bag, cell phone.” “Birth certificate & Social Security card.” “Seizure medication.” After law enforcement cleared homeless encampments in eleven cities, a team of ProPublica reporters distributed notecards to the unhoused people affected, inviting them to detail the belongings they had lost in the sweeps. Their unedited, handwritten responses, arranged in an interactive group, reveal the care each individual took to protect what little they could carry with them, and the devastation of losses that often go unmentioned in news coverage.
“I lost many things during the sweeps we’ve been through but losing my wedding pictures has been the hardest thing. They were the last copies because [everytime] we get copies we go through another sweep but this time there aren’t anymore in [my] family because we’ve gotten all of them from all our family members.”
