Letters to the Housed: When I Started Talking to People on the Streets

by Paul Asplund

Hey everyone, I'm Paul, and this week I want to tell you about the realization that changed how I saw my own experience and how it could be used to help others.

I’ve talked about being unhoused myself when I was 26. That was over 35 years ago. I got help, got my life together, and had a whole career. But before 2014, I rarely talked about experiencing homelessness with anyone, especially at work. I was ashamed. I thought if I told people I'd been homeless, they'd judge me and wouldn't give me opportunities.

I carried that shame until two opportunities presented themselves in San Francisco. First, I had just joined the Board of a music group in the Tenderloin, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP.org), when they announced a partnership with Hospitality House (hospitalityhouse.org) for a 6-week series of lessons on new music (think Steve Reich, Philip Glass, etc.) with 18 members of the Hospitality House community. I offered to help however I could and was excited to have somewhere to be useful again. Getting to Hospitality House, near the corner of Turk and Leavenworth, meant I had to walk up the notorious “Pill Hill,” where I was offered every recreational drug imaginable to ease my morning and afternoon commutes.

Tenderloin mural from Hospitality House waiting room

I looked enough like a cop (with a long beard that often got me pegged as trouble) and I’m big enough to deter most aggressors on sight, so I was given a wide berth. After a couple of weeks, my passing went without notice, and I started to feel comfortable walking those streets. (In those days, a lot of people asked me if I was a Harley biker, but I was a wanna-be 1970s BMW R100 guy, sorry to disappoint.)

The program was fantastic, led by one of the preeminent teachers (and performers) in New Music, Chris Froh, and my job was to help record the whole series. I was in the back of the room watching and learning with one of the Program Directors, Ivan, and as I listened to the stories being told, it occurred to me that my story would probably be met with understanding and empathy here, not judgement. These were people with dreams, college degrees (one Stanford alum, but that’s a story for another letter), and incredible talent.

The first person I told was Ivan. He responded, “Me too,” and that was it. No explanation offered or required. Ivan introduced me to Joe Wilson and told me how Rev. Cecil Williams (GLIDE) had chosen two young activists from the Tenderloin to set up complementary agencies. Hospitality House (HH), which Joe helped create, was to be a constant thorn in the side of the powerful agitating for the rights of people in the Tenderloin, and the LGBT Center, whose task it was to embed themselves deep into the government to push policy from within.

Joe was a legend and had returned to HH as the ED just months before. Ivan told Joe my story in four words,

“Paul was homeless too.” That’s all it took to be accepted. I knew, at 50 years of age, I had found my community.

A valid question here might be, “Why didn’t you just go into social services in the first place?” That choice I have to attribute to Ed’s guidance: “You need to keep this for free and for fun, kid. You don’t owe anybody anything. Anyone can look great in these rooms. That’s easy. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t make this your life. The best example of success is for you to go out and live in society. Be a worker among workers. So go, have fun. Give this the first 10% of everything you do and you’ll be fine.”

Thanks, Ed, for launching this great adventure.

Now a regular on the streets of the Tenderloin, I started to pick up copies of “Street Sheet,” the paper by and for people experiencing homelessness, whenever I could. I got to know two vendors on my path home—Sal (not their real name), a sparrow of a man who stood near the HH offices, and Sandy (not their real name), who stood at the top of the Civic Center station escalators.

And here is where I started to learn how to be a better human.

I introduced myself to each of them in turn and got to know them a bit. Sal and I always lit up when we saw each other. He told me that if no one talked to him or said his name, that he was often lost in the voices in his head for days. He wouldn’t eat, so he was rail thin, and he would just wander.

So I called out his name every time I saw him, and it was a joy to see his response each time, sometimes turning on his heel impossibly fast, a mix of startle and joy. We’d talk for a minute or ten, and we’d be on our ways.

Sandy was different; she was dying, visibly sick with open sores and jaundice. Our exchanges were quick; when I could afford it, I gave her enough so she could get a room and get off her feet. She rarely smiled, and I didn’t know if the money I gave her was really helping (I hadn’t learned the concept of a “mitzvah” yet) but I saw myself in her more than anyone I met on a regular basis. I just wanted her to be safe, to get better.

I was beginning to be “cracked open,” to find a way of living a kind of humanity I didn’t know existed, that no one had told me about. I’d read all of the right books, read about other people’s journeys with rapt attention and attempted empathy, even went to Bolivia to participate in what I now call “voluntourism,” the performative kind of giving that, while useful and most common, doesn’t offer the deep experience I have come to know later in life.

I was starting to live my own journey.

The second opportunity, which I’ve written about before, started when I read this article about a woman named Doniece Sandoval who was taking old Muni buses and turning them into mobile showers, bringing them to the streets. And she said something that just lit me up: "It's not about the shower, it's about the dignity." This was the birth of Lava Mae.

Bells went off. Lights went off. I wrote to her immediately and said, "I am that person you're talking about - the one who took the shower this morning, 25 years later." She introduced me to a new term, “Lived Experience.” I didn’t even know that was a thing. I was the first person on Lava Mae’s board with lived experience. That started a 10-year journey that's been the best time of my life.

(Here’s a long aside to help frame what this time meant to me. After sharing the truth of my using, and the series of crimes and moral failings that defined my life up to that point, Ed said “One day your deepest, darkest secrets will be the most powerful tools you have to help other people.” These are objectively kind words that meant little to me for years (this was in 1991). I tried to be useful, and learned the power of empathy and fellowship to help people, but that promise, one of only two Ed made me, always seemed distant, ephemeral. This series of events I’m writing about today are the very beginning of those words becoming a reality.)

So, here’s what my journey has shown me. For years into my recovery, I couldn’t look at people who were truly suffering with any kind of effective empathy. I could take actions to benefit the community to which we both belonged, but I couldn’t effect change in anyone. I often felt helpless when people I loved died from the disease I had been spared from.

That failure was terrifying to me because I knew it COULD BE ME. I knew it in a way beyond all other knowledge I had at that point. It was deep, real, an abyss. To defend myself from that terror, I constructed a view of people that required them to move toward where I was in order to get what I had. If they moved away from that center, that community, I would distance myself from them. When they died, as they often did, I was protected from feeling too deeply. I had assigned clear measures of success and failure, and those definitions protected me. They also boxed me in.

All that started to change. I started to soften, to see potential in people who were just like me, because it had happened to me. I had come back. I had to believe if that was possible for me, it was possible for everyone.

I’ve already talked about the second promise Ed made to me, about the transformation of my secrets into tools, and now it’s time to talk about the first promise. The one that hooked me, that kept me an adherent to this method for years.

On the night I was introduced to Ed, he ended our rather cursory and one-sided conversation with this, “And I promise that if you do exactly what I ask you to do, you’ll never need to take another drink.”

Now I had been a problem drinker since I was 17, which nearly cost me my high school diploma and scuttled my hopes of college. In the process of losing everything in the ensuing years, I had become hopeless.

This was a promise of hope.

Let me offer you a promise of hope too. We can end homelessness.

In my next article, I’m going to write about some policy and structural changes we can all be advocating for, but ending homelessness doesn’t depend on those changes; it depends on us.

I know that’s a heavy mantle to foist onto some of you, but here’s another promise: ending homelessness for others will transform you.

You will not be able to take this journey without some struggle—it’s hard to let go of things we once thought were true—but we can do this.

Don’t be afraid. Anything you do to this end will help us all. You’re an integral part of this success. You might be poo-pooing me right now, but take it from one who’s been on this journey a few years, I’m right.

Now there’s a case for saying I’m also crazy. I haven’t been able to convince anyone to fund this project, and I’ve brought my family to the brink of bankruptcy chasing this dream. After my friend Wardo was killed, I quit my job and spent more than a year creating an online community-building tool that everyone likes but sits mostly unused. But here I am. As on fire as ever.

I’m 100% clear that I’ve only ever gotten a daily reprieve from my old life, so I spend that day working toward this one thing: ending homelessness for others. I know many of you believe just as strongly that we can succeed at this. We’ve spoken of this dream for years.

So here’s a call to action, a promise of success. A triumph of community and personal transformation.

Join SecondGrace.LA

Choose to join this effort, to strengthen this community, to share your ideas, resources, and dreams to leave fear and doubt behind. There are thousands of people like us who believe in this, but until now, there’s never been a place we can all gather.

Thank’s again for reading this latest installment of Letters to the Housed. Let's end homelessness together.

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About Paul Asplund

Paul Asplund recovered from homelessness in 1988 and has remained housed for over 35 years. After careers in technology, hospitality, and entertainment, he found his calling working directly with people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Since 2014, Paul has led teams providing street-based services, organized large-scale community events, and helped build innovative programs that center community wisdom and lived experience. He is the founder of Second Grace LA, an online platform connecting community organizations working to end homelessness.

Paul has worked with low-income communities in Bolivia, San Bernardino, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He is a passionate advocate for community-based solutions to inequality, poverty, and homelessness—all issues he believes are solvable through collective action and mutual aid.

He believes that everyone deserves the chance to flourish and that dignity, agency, and opportunity can change lives. He sees it happening every day.

Paul lives in Pasadena, California with his husband and their cat.

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"We will not back down on our rights nor our dignity. Instead, we will harness our energy into affecting positive change and lovingly, firmly, persistently setting and maintaining our boundaries and rights."

"Let's combine our talents into creating a world where all are treated with dignity, love, and respect. We all deserve safe shelter, proper nutrition, ample hydration, and quality health/mental care."

"Let's end homelessness together, now and for good."

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