Works
The Lost and The Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances
DUE IN BOOKSTORES February 2025: “The Lost and The Found” follows the lives of two chronically homeless people as they descend into horrific despair on the streets of San Francisco, and then are rescued when their families find them with the help of the author’s reporting, ending with both enormous tragedy and triumph. As much as anything, it's a story about how the love of family and the resilience of spirit can redeem the most lost of souls.
The book is scheduled to be published by Atria/One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on Feb. 11, 2025: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Lost-and-the-Found/Kevin-Fagan/9781668017111
OTHER WORKS:
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JOURNALISM
Central Valley city's new approach on homelessness: 'We're fed up'
'Ping-ponging' was the tactic of choice to deal with the homeless even before the term 'homeless' sprang into use in the early 1980s. It never went away.
In 1986, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein ordered the teardown of San Francisco's first big homeless camp of the modern era, a shantytown on the south end of the city, and had everyone successfully moved into a residential hotel in one of the city's first examples of successful supportive housing. Such a quick, seamless operation would be virtually impossible today.
Despite spending more than $650 million a year to address homelessness, the city of San Francisco has struggled to efficiently track all of its expenditures and hold all of the programs it oversees to high performance goals.
An interactive graphic and text explanation of best practices in creative supportive housing for homeless people.
The San Francisco Chronicle's "SF Homeless Project," a comprehensive look at homelessness in San Francisco and around the Bay Area, ran from 2016 to 2021 and was led by Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan, exploring the depth, causes and solutions to the crisis.
I spent a year producing this 8-part podcast on the hunt for The Doodler serial killer, who murdered a string of gay men in San Francisco in 1974-75. It's still a cold case all these years later, but a dogged S.F. detective has been pursuing it, and I and my partner on the story, Mike Taylor, uncovered new clues and helped advance the investigation. The podcast, a top-three hit in both America and Britain, was accompanied in the S.F. Chronicle by a 7-part series of stories I wrote (you can find them HERE) giving even more detail on this perplexing and terribly sad murder mystery that terrorized the LGBTQ community four decades ago.
BOOKS
A photographic immersion into the lives of a new wave of gold prospectors who plunged into the California mountains at the dawn of the new millennium to carve out a hardscrabble living from the land with their bare hands and basic tools. Photos by Sarina Finkelstein and text by S.F. Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan and British photo critic Lucy Davies.