Works
BOOK
The Lost and The Found:
A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances
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, resulting in 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 was 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:
(Click on the headlines to go to weblinks)
Time Magazine essay/adapted excerpt:
"What I Learned From 32 Years of Writing About Homelessness"
I condensed parts of my book "The Lost and The Found" into a new essay for the February 4, 2025 issue of Time Magazine, talking about the causes and possible solutions to homelessness.
HERE'S AN EXCERPT:
"Some people—not many, fortunately—have told me writing about people living in gutters and fields and streets is not worth it. That they are only problems to be shunted aside, hidden, or perhaps gotten housed and saved—but by someone else, out of view. This couldn't be further from the truth. The old maxim of measuring a society by how it treats its most vulnerable people is as true today as ever; by that measure, we fail. And whether or not you are sympathetic to the millions of people experiencing homelessness every year, you need to know who they are."
Stories in the San Francisco Chronicle:
London Breed and I are leaving our jobs. Are we leaving San Francisco a better place?
Outgoing San Francisco Mayor London Breed and I took a walk through the gritty Tenderloin to talk about what progress has or has not been made in alleviating the city's heartbreaking, persistent problem of homelessness. I've known the mayor since before she ran for office, and now that both of us are leaving our jobs in January 2025, we had a lot to assess.
The father of S.F. street medicine retires after decades of caring for the homeless
Dr. Barry Zevin spent his career tending to people experiencing homelessness and struggling with AIDS and poverty, and founded San Francisco's street-side medical care as we know it. Here's a lookback on his exemplary career and its effect as he retires on Christmas Eve.
Fresno takes aggressive stance in response to U.S. Supreme Court ruling on sweeps of homeless camps
Central Valley city's new approach on homelessness: 'We're fed up'
Opinion:
I've covered homeless sweeps in California for 40 years. We're right back where we started
'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.
Dianne Feinstein oversaw S.F.'s first big homeless camp sweep. It would be impossible today
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.
S.F. still can't get a grip on its homeless spending, left crucial housing units empty, audit says
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.
Special Project:
How to design the perfect supportive housing complex for homeless people
An interactive graphic and text explanation of best practices in creative supportive housing for homeless people.
6-Year Annual Project Examining Homelessness In-Depth:
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.
8-Part Doodler Serial Killer Podcast and Story Series
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.
Other 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.