Romantix Adult Emporium sits off South Main Street in South Bend, Indiana, about a mile from a sign welcoming people to the city. On a warm afternoon in May, Lisa Loww pulled into its discreet side lot and parked her car. Her friend Tracy was riding shotgun. Loww, a youthful forty-year-old with long brown hair who was born and raised in South Bend, wore a baseball cap, bluejeans, and flip-flops. “It’s a running joke between us,” she said. “We park in the porn parking lot and take off into the middle of the woods where the homeless people live.”

Loww became interested in homelessness in South Bend while photographing the city’s many abandoned buildings. “I’ve been through a lot, too,” she said. “I get how someone could be at that point.” She has since worked with South Bend’s weather-amnesty program, which has provided winter shelter for some of the city’s homeless, and she’s pursuing a graduate degree in counselling. “But I spend most of my time and what little money I have on the tent camps,” she said. In addition to this and other spots in the woods, she visits ad-hoc shelters in a garage, in a factory, and on the lawn of a church. “When we get too many camps together, that’s when the city comes through and will evict and vacate. So I’m trying to keep them a little more scattered,” she said.

Shouldering bags of water, food, and toiletries, Loww and Tracy headed behind Romantix into a few acres of scrubby, head-high half-growth, dotted with trash. Until recently, Loww explained, the land was owned by the city. She’d tried to find the money to buy it, so that she could create a “tiny-home camp” for those with nowhere to live. It was purchased for around fifty-six thousand dollars. The name of the buyer has not been disclosed.

South Bend has a handful of homeless shelters, which, together, can accommodate as many as a hundred or so people. But they are only open for certain periods of time and provide limited help, and most of them restrict their services to those who are sober, which rules out a significant portion of the homeless population. On a recent morning, for instance, the beds at Hope Ministries were completely full, and the Center for the Homeless was also at capacity, with two possible openings in the near future. Broadway Christian parish had no beds; it offers meals, showers, and laundry on certain days. Stone Soup Community and Our Lady of the Road provide only meals. Life Treatment Centers, which is for addicts, not the homeless, had a few openings for men who met their criteria.

“These camps are the only option for a lot of people,” Loww said, in the woods. “Our city leadership hasn’t taken a real interest in the homeless.”

She was referring, primarily, to the mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg, who is running for President, and who has pointed to his success in improving life in South Bend as evidence of his readiness to run the country. “In so many ways, South Bend is our message,” he has said. Buttigieg was first elected mayor in 2011, taking office in 2012; he ran for reëlection in 2015, winning the Democratic primary with seventy-eight per cent of the vote, and then the general election with more than eighty per cent of the vote.

But, in Buttigieg’s second term, homelessness became a flash point for the city. A tent camp formed under a viaduct downtown, where, by late 2016, dozens of people were sleeping. The South Bend Tribune began covering the issue steadily and in depth. One reporter, Jeff Parrott, has since written more than three dozen stories on the subject, many of which ran on the front page. (The paper also set up a dedicated Web page for its ongoing coverage.) In early 2017, Buttigieg convened a working group on homelessness, and the city eventually earmarked funds to carry out the group’s proposals; late last year, Buttigieg pointed to these accomplishments while defending his record on the issue in the local press. But critics, such as Loww, say that the mayor has failed to follow through, and that he has not made the problem enough of a priority. (Buttigieg’s campaign referred all questions on the subject to the city, and told me that Buttigieg was too busy to offer a comment for this piece.)

In the woods, Loww and I came upon a jury-rigged enclosure constructed out of canvas, blankets, tarps, and sundry other materials. “This is where Wild Bill lives,” Loww said. A white man wearing a trim goatee, baseball cap, and tucked shirt stepped out. “Just a hardworking guy down on his luck,” Bill said to me, by way of introduction. Next we met Lee and Ruthie, a homeless couple in their thirties, who stood over a pile of blankets, a broken-down tent, and overflowing boxes of personal items. “Here come the water fairies,” Ruthie, a white woman in her thirties wearing bluejeans and a tank top, said.

As is the case in most cities, pinpointing the number of homeless people in South Bend is difficult. The Department of Housing and Urban Development oversees an annual point-in-time count, but, in recent years, it has not broken down the data except by state. The most recent county-specific information is from 2016, when four hundred and fifty-seven “sheltered homeless” and eleven “unsheltered homeless” were counted in St. Joseph County, where South Bend is situated. By all accounts, a majority of the county’s homeless live in South Bend, the county’s largest city by far; given the number of people who were living under the viaduct by the end of 2016, the old St. Joseph figure seems low. In late 2017, the deputy director of the county’s Emergency Management Agency told a local reporter, “We have an increasing homeless population obviously in the City of South Bend specifically, and Saint Joseph County as a whole,” and Loww maintains that the number of homeless has continued to grow in the year and a half since.

The E.M.A. declined to comment for this piece. When I asked the mayor’s office for its figures, a spokesman cited recent numbers from what’s called a coördinated entry list; such lists generally include people who have sought out services—food, shelter, and so on—from organizations or agencies that relay information to city government. This count tallied a hundred and thirty “total individuals,” ninety-eight of whom were unsheltered and considered particularly vulnerable.

Loww insists that, based upon her almost daily interaction with the unsheltered homeless population, this number is “far too low.” Sara Rankin, a professor of law at Seattle University who also directs the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, and whose interest in Buttigieg has prompted her to study the situation in South Bend, said that “some of the larger numbers from South Bend”—I heard five hundred, or more, in a city of a hundred thousand—“likely reflect more realistic estimations based on the experience of workers on the ground.” (Rankin also noted that “the point-in-time technique is widely panned as flawed, resulting in stark underestimations.”) The spokesman from the mayor’s office pointed to figures indicating that homelessness had been largely stable during Buttigieg’s administration, acknowledging a rise in “panhandling and visible street homelessness,” which he attributed to the “growing vibrancy of downtown South Bend.” That is, more people with money around means more people asking for it.