When Gil Kerley bought an empty building in Albuquerque and started turning it into a used bookstore, the folks who lived nearby were all for it. He wasn’t that outgoing, necessarily, and he didn’t seem too concerned about the folks sleeping outside the store, but that would probably calm down once the store opened, right? Not exactly. For Slate, Alexander Sammon covers the worst kind of neighbor-on-neighbor conflict: the kind where there’s no “good” side, just bad feelings.
Reyne, Gil’s deputy, vouched for Jeremy to stay, and so he started sleeping there, too. Soon, Gil was selling Jeremy’s art in his store. Janet came down, and when her son Evan went through a painful breakup, he sought her out and joined as well. Then there was Birdman, and Carlos. Some stayed for a while, left, and came back. Who exactly the core crew was depended on who you asked. “This is the best bookstore ever,” said Mo, who had lived there a while before Gil had to ask her to leave.
There were new challenges—even Gil could admit that. “Reyne definitely did better when it was just him camping back there,” he told me.
The housed neighbors began to see things, and hear things, things they hadn’t seen or heard so much before. Every once in a while, Ed would see drug dealers, or people having sex in cars, or people having sex in front of the store. The amount of stuff accumulating began to reach out from behind the store and obtrude into plain view; the amount of stuff disappearing from their properties was increasing. Sometimes, there was yelling and shouting or people giving haircuts in the street.
More picks about the housing crisis
St. John the Wondermaker
“Since April, on the past five fourth Wednesdays of the month I have driven to St. John the Wondermaker Orthodox Church, in Atlanta’s Grant Park neighborhood, to wash and trim and file the feet of a handful of the city’s 2,200 unhoused men.”
Portland Said It Was Investing in Homeless People’s Safety. Deaths Have Skyrocketed.
“The city responded to an increase in homeless deaths by intensifying encampment sweeps and adding emergency shelter at the expense of permanent housing. Experts say this has perpetuated the problem.”
“I Have Lost Everything.”
A record number of Americans are living outside. Cities have responded by removing encampments from public spaces, a practice commonly referred to as “sweeps.”
The Invisible Man
“We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody. He still is.”
An Ambulance, An Empty Lot and a Loophole: One Man’s Fight for a Place to Live
“He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner.”
The Man Who Turned His Home into a Homeless Shelter
“[S]ince 2020 he has offered hundreds of homeless people a bed in his small flat – and for many of them, it has been life-changing.”
