Our 18-month look into the one-way bus tickets cities use to move their homeless hinged upon finding people to tell their stories. Here’s how we pulled it off

In December, we published our biggest story of the year, a nationwide investigation into the cities that give one-way bus tickets to homeless people in the hope they will find housing elsewhere. The reporting took 18 months, and one aspect was especially thorny. By making public-records requests we were able to gather information on tens of thousands of journeys, but we knew very little about the travelers themselves beyond their names and destinations. How had they become homeless, and what became of them?



The answer lay in old-fashioned, shoe-leather journalism. We plugged hundreds of names into databases in the hope of finding contact information, but because homeless people are by definition hard to trace, the success rate was low. Reporters in seven cities, from San Juan to New York and Portland, Oregon, visited shelters and encampments in a bid to turn up leads. A colleague and I spent hours hanging around outside a San Francisco social-services office that dispensed tickets with the goal of meeting a would-be traveler.

There was a morning in August when, for me, it all seemed to pay off. On the street outside the ticket office I approached a tired-looking 27-year-old named Quinn Raber, who had just been approved to travel to his hometown of Indianapolis on a bus leaving a few hours later. At lunchtime we met again at the Greyhound station, where he told me he’d been homeless off and on in the western US for three years, that he was exhausted, and that he hoped returning home would be a new start for him. Five minutes later, his bus was called, and we agreed to stay in touch. Just like that, a chance meeting became the personal story with which we began and ended the piece.

Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country Read more

(To hear the response to our piece, check out our appearances on the PBS NewsHour, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, and public radio’s On Point and The Takeaway.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rose Thompson, whose story featured in ‘Bussed out’. Photograph: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Guardian

What we published

Behind the scenes

Just before the 2016 presidential election, a body was found in a dumpster outside an Amazon warehouse in San Francisco, and we revealed the man’s story and the dangers posed by dumpsters in another major piece published last month. Numerous interviews didn’t make it into the final version, including those with local residents who didn’t know how the man died but were shaken by the circumstances.

Death in an Amazon dumpster Read more

In a park across the street from the dumpster, I met a woman, Kris Leifur, walking her dogs. She had lived in San Francisco for over a decade, she told me, and the homeless situation grieved her. She worried if her exposure to it for so long had changed her. “I feel like I’m becoming desensitized and losing my empathy,” she said.

Ultimately, though, her verdict was uncompromising. “I can’t believe this is going on in one of the most expensive, wealthiest cities in the world,” she said. “I feel like San Francisco should be embarrassed for itself.”

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