This story aired in the February 5, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Today, a new installment of Sidewalk Stories, where we hear from unhoused people about how they survive and build a life outside.
Where do you get your information? Aside from listening to the radio, like some of you are doing right now… do you check your notifications on your phone every morning? Scroll through social media? Turn on the TV for a constant stream of updates?
Without consistent access to a phone or wifi, our increasingly digital world can leave unhoused people behind when it comes to finding up-to-date information.
Unhoused people in Oakland share about how they stay informed, from identifying helpful resources and learning about history, to the very basics — like the time or the weather — that most of us get from our phones.
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Story Transcript:
EDIE: The struggle is real. You lose your phone and you can't get any information. I had my last phone three hours. Yeah. And then I let a friend borrow it and she walked away with it.
REPORTER: How many phones would you say you've lost?
EDIE: Probably about 18 or 19. Yeah. In three years. Yeah. You have to go in and go get your EBT card or your food stamp card again. That's pretty much the only place where you can get information
REPORTER: From social services?
EDIE: Yeah. I'll grab a paper off someone's porch sometimes, just because I'm dying to see what's going on. Yeah.
But other than that, it's just my day to day, you know. It's just of the moment, my local little world here. I am at the, basically the whim of whatever’s happening. I don't have up to date information. Yeah.
SANTIAGO: I mean, you'd be surprised where you can find the current time. The Oakland Tribune Tower tells you, you know, the current time. Bus stops, stuff like that. And a lot of utilities out here are also giving you timestamps. For example, like parking meters.
REPORTER: What about the weather?
SANTIAGO: Being out here for a certain amount of time? You don't just get acclimated to the severe weather conditions. You can kind of tell when it's gonna be a good day. Yeah, like on some Boy Scout type of stuff.
REPORTER: How do you get your news?
SANTIAGO: It used to be off of, uh, Obama phones. Um, but those things come and go on the regular. So word of mouth. Someone usually hears something or announces that there's people out here handing out resources or information.
REPORTER: And do you find that that information is trustworthy or is it, I mean, how, how do you know if you can trust what somebody's saying to you?
SANTIAGO: You can feel it in your gut when, you know when it’s genuine. People who are in that line of duty are reputable people. People who are credible. Someone who doesn't bullshit with information.
REPORTER: Who is that in this community?
SANTIAGO: He's like, he's like an elder. Um, out here. We call him OGs. Just, just someone who's just been through a lot and, you know, still alive. Yeah. I'm not sure if he's there. You usually see like a hooded figure up at the top of the hill.
REPORTER: And you call him OG?
SANTIAGO: Uh, his name's Sam.
REPORTER: Sam. Okay. Thank you.
[Walking]
Hey, is Sam around? Hey. Hi, my name's Alastair. I was just down there talking to Santiago, um. And Santiago is saying a lot of the time people rely on someone who kind of collects information and gives it out to the rest of the community. And he said, you do that.
SAM: I mean, it's just word of mouth. Usually it's somebody needs to know something, I'll help 'em what I can. Like, food at St. Vincent de Paul's or something like that.
Well after living, you know, a long time, you acquire knowledge about how things basically work, bureaucracies and this and that, and share it. Try to be as accurate as I can.
REPORTER: And why do you take that upon yourself to help other people…
SAM: Because I got a double, uh, helping of the human helper gene, I guess you could say, for better or worse.
I'm a real researcher. I like to, I like to find out about things. Yeah.
SAM: What gets me, the government gives out free phones, but yet they, you know, they don't realize that it's so hard to get your phone charged.
You have to go sit in the library or something for whatever, an hour to get it done. And whenever your hand to mouth existence out here, that hour means a lot.
BART: The majority of the information I get from books. The majority of the books that I get will be from the library.
Usually it's going to be the branch head library. You can ask them for old newspaper articles, archives,
Once I just get into one subject, it takes me to a plethora of other subjects. Everything is more or less a rabbit hole. Our political turmoil, um, human rights issues and nature conservation, what we’ve done to the land.
A lot of the information and archives isn't made public. They give us the free public school thinking that it's okay, and, um, we have to pay for a higher form of education, and then they allow you to get more money than the rest of the people.
REPORTER: Why is it important to go back to the roots, to read such old texts in the archives?
BART: Rather than hearing somebody else tell me, I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. When we're reading nonfiction, we're reading what people are seeing at the present time that the book is more or less being written or just after the book is being written, we're talking about people that, they were in the Cold Wars, they were in the Banana Wars, they were in the Civil War, they were in the Revolutionary War, and they're speaking from their viewpoints.
You know, a book is old when they use an F for an S. And so I'd rather read those older books because they're not lying. They're telling me the truth, all the way.
