Street Sense may expand into suburbs

Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2006

A Washington, D.C., newspaper partially written and distributed by the homeless is looking to expand its reach into the suburbs, including Bethesda and Silver Spring.

Street Sense, a nonprofit organization dedicated to poverty and issues surrounding homelessness, is currently working toward establishing a single distribution point where Bethesda homeless could pick up and sell copies of the monthly paper. The three-year-old, 20-page product currently has a circulation of 13,000.

The newspaper covers poverty and wage issues, as well as feature stories. It relies on a combination of students, volunteers, retired journalists and members of the District’s 6,000-plus homeless population to report and write stories and sell the paper.

Laura Thompson Osuri, executive director for Street Sense, said the motivation for the planned move to the suburbs, like Bethesda, was simple.

‘‘Just more exposure,” she said. ‘‘We get more readers, we get more vendors, the vendors make more money, [we can] expand the circulation.”

There are 1,100-1,300 homeless people in Montgomery County, according to the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting homelessness in the county. Somewhere between 300 and 600 are in Bethesda and Silver Spring, according to groups that provide services to the homeless in those communities.

As of now, the paper almost solely covers homeless issues in the District. However, aside from Bethesda, the paper is also looking to expand into Silver Spring as well as Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia — all of which boast downtown areas with high pedestrian traffic. These moves would be a precursor to an increase in coverage in the metropolitan area, according to Osuri.

‘‘With that comes more stories from the suburbs, but it’s just a distribution spot at this point, not another office or edition,” she said, adding that there are no plans currently to start separate editions.

The downtown atmosphere and proximity to the organization’s Washington, D.C., headquarters make areas like Bethesda and Silver Spring ideal expansion points, according to Osuri.

‘‘It’s essentially the city. There’s a lot of pedestrian traffic, the same with Silver Spring,” she said. ‘‘They’re both pedestrian friendly, and that’s where vendors sell best.”

Unofficial numbers kept by the paper indicate that two-thirds of the people buying Street Sense live in the District, with Maryland at 17.9 percent and Virginia at 13.1 percent making up much of the rest. The vast majority of its readers, nearly 80 percent, earn $40,000 a year or more, and almost all of them, 95 percent, have never been homeless. Six out of 10 readers are female.

‘‘Vendors” is the term used to describe the 50 or so men and women — almost all homeless or formerly homeless — who sell copies of the paper on street corners in the District. About half the stories featured in Street Sense are written by volunteers, students and retired journalists. The other half are written by vendors who use newspaper stylebooks and a brief training video to learn the basics of the journalism craft.

For many of them, selling Street Sense is a way to earn an income and, in some cases, receive job offers that will get them out of shelters and into housing. Vendors buy the paper at 25 cents per copy, then sell them on the street for $1, and keep the profits. Street Sense estimates most of its vendors make $30 to $60 a day.

The organization recently reached out to the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless to make contact with some of the homeless and distribute copies of the paper.

However, coalition Deputy Director Julie Maltzman said her group decided not to participate in the coordination.

‘‘Logistically, we felt we would have to collect money, buy the newspapers, give them to clients to sell them, keep track of the money,” Maltzman said. ‘‘We have a very limited staff, we’re all really stretched and we didn’t feel it would be a good use of our resources.”

Sue Kirk, executive director of Bethesda Cares, a nonprofit that provides services to the homeless, said her organization had been contacted by Street Sense in the past year to help as well, though details of what the organization would do had not yet been discussed. However, she said that there were some concerns about the possible repercussions of putting the area’s homeless out on Bethesda street corners.

‘‘You have people that use it as a way to panhandle, instead of doing business,” Kirk said.

Osuri said that, overall, that isn’t a concern.

‘‘I see that point, but this isn’t panhandling,” said Osuri, who added that most of the paper’s readers in Washington, D.C., aren’t different from those in Bethesda. ‘‘It’s not like you cross the state and all of a sudden it’s different people.”