'The Lost and the Found' takes an intimate look at homelessness in San Francisco

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kevin Fagan embedded with the city's unhoused population. Now retired, he's written a book built around two of the people he got to know through his reporting. The Lost and the Found zooms in on the lives of Rita and Tyson, who ended up chronically homeless in San Francisco through a cascade of circumstances. In today's episode, Fagan speaks with Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes about their stories, Fagan's own experience with poverty and housing insecurity, and the Reagan-era policies that led to an increased unhoused population in the 1980s.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Let's take one number, 36.8 million.
0:08.5	That's how many people lived in poverty in the United States in 2023, according to the latest census numbers.
0:14.8	Now, think about how big of a number that is. And even before we talk about housing affordability or addiction or mental health,
0:22.6	you can already see why homelessness is such a big intractable problem. For his book, The Lost
0:28.9	and the Found a True Story of Homelessness, Found Family, and Second Chances. Reporter
0:33.8	Kevin Fagan zooms in on the lives of two people to talk about that big impossible
0:38.7	problem. Now Fagan's been covering this issue for a long time, and in this interview with
0:43.1	Hereinaz Dippa Fernandez, you can hear how frustrating it is that we as a country have yet to
0:50.2	figure it out. That's coming up. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:57.7	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:02.2	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:04.2	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,
1:08.0	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:11.8	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:17.4	Homelessness is a deeply entrenched problem in the United States, and perhaps no journalist knows that better than Kevin Fagan.
1:26.5	As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, he embedded
1:29.8	with the city's unhoused population, often sleeping next to them on a piece of cardboard
1:35.7	and becoming deeply involved in their lives. Now Kevin Fagan has retired and written a book
1:42.1	about two of the unhoused people he profiled.
1:45.8	It's called The Lost and the Found.
1:48.6	Kevin Fagan joins us now.
1:50.5	And Kevin, before we start, I want to be transparent with our audience.
	...

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