13 New Habits to Adopt When Reporting on People Experiencing Homelessness

1. Avoid dehumanizing language: Person-first language is important, especially when referring to the community at large. Many collective nouns are fine — homeless people, unhoused people, people experiencing homelessness, unhoused neighbors. Some advocates suggest that “-less” implies a personal failing, a lack; inversely, unhoused suggests a systemic issue and not an individual’s fault. The emphasis on unhoused, community, and neighbors helps humanize the crisis. Don’t use language that denigrates and dehumanizes the community: the homeless, the mentally ill. Especially don’t use disparaging terms like vagrants, degenerates, or transients.
2. Avoid sensationalized images: The depiction of encampments, shopping carts, tents, and the conditions of sidewalks to horrify viewers is simply wrong. Reporters and photographers have the critical role of representing the homeless community without sensationalizing their lifestyles.
3. Get a subject’s consent: Don’t come to an encampment with a camera and begin taking pictures or filming. Never publish an image of someone’s face unless you have their explicit permission and consent. This applies, of course, to people who are under the influence of drugs or exhibiting a mental breakdown. Capitalizing on one person’s behavior or characterizing one person’s mental health to illustrate the larger community is reductive.
4. Validating the “poop and needles” argument: The lurid “poop and needles” angle is used to make unhoused people seem like public health threats instead of humans. The true threat to public health is politicians’ refusal to provide basic recommendations like trash service, restrooms, and harm reduction support for drug users. Drug addiction is a healthcare issue, not a moral failing. Decriminalizing drug use and developing systems to help those struggling is statistically shown to reduce crime and addiction rates. Unfortunately, too many news programs and politicians here still dehumanize drug users as “addicts” and fuel public perception of homeless people as subhuman--a dangerously slippery slope that emboldens misinformation and vigilante violence.
5. Separate homelessness from mental health topics: Don’t blame homelessness on a failure of mental health infrastructure alone. Do not overemphasize the role of mental health in a person’s ability to find housing; consider instead the impact of housing instability. The homelessness crisis is complex. There is no silver bullet solution through mental health access.
6. Consider the unhoused community’s perspectives: Don’t reiterate an elected official’s press release or pull quote without providing critical analysis and fact-checking. The City and County will often overhype accomplishments and services they’ve made but still ignore their complicity in allowing sweeps to happen.
7. Check your sources’ biases: This leads to platforming an extremist viewpoint, e.g., quoting a NIMBY who advocates for concentration camps as a counterpoint to a homeless advocate
• Giving “equal voice” to citizens whose arguments are not based on peer-reviewed data (like the narrative that people come to LA to be homeless) without also explicitly noting that the person’s argument is not supported by peer reviewed data
8. Think about how issues are being framed: Often in media coverage you’ll see a framing of an issue, such as encampment sweeps, as a choice between “public health and safety” versus civil liberties. The reality is respecting civil liberties does not infringe on public health and safety. Using a false framing like this is profoundly harmful to people’s lives and the way people perceive the issue.
9. Avoid mischaracterizing people as “service-resistant”: Don’t characterize someone who uses drugs or struggles with mental health issues as dangerous or “service-resistant,” or give undue attention to this narrative.
10. Separate the housing situation from labor: You cannot measure someone’s life by their job nor their lack of it. Reducing someone’s worth to their labor ignores the fact that minimum wage jobs tend to be exploitative and insufficient to cover one’s cost of living.
11. Validating housed people’s fears: Noting that housed people feel “scared” or “threatened” by unhoused people is meaningless. This reinforces stereotypes that are rooted in anti-black rhetoric and ignoring that unhoused people are more vulnerable and in reality are subject to actual violence and attacks by housed people
12. Be mindful about centering law enforcement as a public good: Unhoused folks are subject to daily harassment, abuse and violence from the police. Countless homeless people have stories of being harassed, handcuffed, or otherwise brutalized by police officers simply for their being homeless.
13. Avoid seeking unique, “interesting” angles to subjects deserving of housing: In the interest of higher readership, journalists feel inclined to seek interesting subjects to make their stories compelling. It’s important to pause and consider whether you are positioning some individuals as more deserving of housing or help than others simply because they are talented, charming, or have a remarkable background. Always remember the thousands of unhoused people who remain invisible to the general public, like children and people living in their cars.