Contributor: May we never grow inured to homelessness

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Most Saturday mornings, I stroll half a mile downhill from my tiny apartment in a bosky part of San Francisco to a farmers market.My usual reverie of anticipation (about carrots with their tops attached, about the price of berries) was interrupted recently by the sight of three bodies.That is, I thought of them as bodies; it was not evident whether they were alive or dead.

All lay splayed on the sidewalk, one a couple blocks from my home, the other two, blocks apart, closer to the market, itself located in a neighborhood where need is evident.(Food stamps are often the tender for buying produce.) The bodies belonged to shabbily but fully dressed men — except one man, who was missing a shoe.

Maybe the men are sleeping, I thought, or unconscious from drink or drugs.Or maybe they are dead.

Nobody walking by — including me — slowed down to pay attention to them, beyond a glance.For decades, encountering such a scene, I used to stop, then wait to see a leg twitch, a chest rise.I rarely do even that anymore.

In high school, I had read with shock that poor people in India, people with no home, slept on the sidewalk, while others just walked by.How awful of those others, I remember thinking.

How could they live with themselves? The reproach has come home.We’ve gotten used to homelessness — the homelessness of others.I guessed the three men on that recent Saturday had no homes, but from many years interviewing a formerly homeless man who is now a civic leader in San Francisco, I learned not to rush to conclusions.

Del Seymour, today known locally as the mayor of the Tenderloin, taught me that a man lying with his eyes closed on a sidewalk may have a home, but perhaps was interrupted by temptation or a medical situation on his way there.I also learned from Del, to my initial shock, that some homeless people work full-time jobs.

I’ve learned a lot about homelessness, mostl...