Street Vets
by Kayla Green and Thomas Machowicz
Photography by Thomas Machowicz
A version of this story was originally published in The Raw Society Magazine, Issue II.
Like a deconstructed entree at one of California’s ubiquitous trendy brunch spots, their owners’ belongings are mostly strewn outside, everything subject to sunny days and chilly nights. Tents traverse postcard landscapes, erected behind bushy ridges that somewhat hide them from public view.
Makeshift homes, in a setting that many would mood-board as desirable camping, dotted literally on the other side of train tracks from a golf course.
“I cried when I first saw this one,” says a man who goes by C., pointing to Mamas. “She look like my first pit.”
C. is one of up to 25% of people experiencing homelessness in the United States who has a pet.
C. receives free veterinary care from Jameson Humane, one of the many — yet too few — organizations that serve vulnerable people and their pets across the American West in a time when record numbers of people are entering homelessness.
Humans need connection. Crave it. To feel loved and earn a sense of value for taking care of someone or something.
Motivation to stay alive, get housing, take care of yourself, seek treatment and avoid risky activities; protection and safety; mental health benefits; increased walking and socialization; and companionship are all reasons unhoused people give for having a pet, even as interactions with the public range from donations to criticism.
As of the last official count, Napa has 506 people living without a home, up from 464 in 2020. California sees more than 171,500 people experience homelessness daily, a jump from 138,986 in 2007.
In a disproportionate representation, the state is home to 12% of the U.S. population but has 30% of the country’s homeless. More than originally thought were already Californians. Nationally, the number of people experiencing homelessness in 2022 was over half a million.
Comprising the numbers are people. And their pets.
Like Lilo and Kilo and Rain and Smokey. Like Boss and King, Mamas and Michaela, Mercedes, Mocha, Panini, Pogi, Baby Felony, Booboo and Tank, aka Tankeroni, aka Mr. Tankerton.
The country that likes to think it stands above others has a compassion crisis spilling onto its streets, and the hurdles to housing keep mounting. Rent is increasing. Wages stagnate.
Only a quarter of the people who apply for federal housing subsidies get it, all while overpriced residences sit unused; there are 28 vacant homes per homeless person in the U.S.
Inflation is the worst it’s been in a decade. People are getting hours cut, getting laid off, living with family and friends who are also likely poor. A relationship falls through. Units are disappearing, being swallowed by greedy landlords or being transformed, often gentrified, into more desirable ventures.
Neighbors don’t want low-income housing near them. They cling to zoning laws prohibiting anything but single-family lots that were often created during segregation. Pandemic aid is winding down.
We love our pets. We hold birthday parties for them, run their Instagram accounts. We buy them clothes and grain-free chow. We tattoo their paws on our bodies. That connection transcends wealth and poverty, mansions and mobile homes.
Yet we leave our fellow humans to squander and starve. We showboat solutions while deprioritizing time, resources, money. We’d like the problem to go away for our own benefit rather than out of compassion.
The Maricopa Association of Governments reported for its second quarter of 2023 that for every 10 people who are finding housing, 19 are entering homelessness for the first time.
In Phoenix, which has a centralized ‘tent city’ called The Zone, the homeless population has more than doubled since 2017 from 1,508 to 3,333 in 2023. The countywide tally has also increased steadily. There were 5,605 people living outside of a home in 2017. Now, there are 9,642.
In May 2023, officials endeavored to clear The Zone after neighbors and businesses filed a lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2018 that people cannot be punished for sleeping outside if they have nowhere else to go, and city leaders have grappled with how to handle tent cities when they don’t have enough space at shelters or in supportive housing.
They said they’d have outreach workers first offer housing options like shelters or vacant land the city will designate for camping. Lawsuits have come from both sides, with the ACLU and other advocate groups arguing the city hasn’t done enough to provide alternate housing or shelter options.
Capitalism commodifies. Public space, built space, sells. A lack of services and criminalization of poverty exacerbates — and creates — a problem that grows too big to think small. Compassion wanes.
Nothing to be done?
When the UN declared 1987 the International Year of the Homeless, Finland set a goal of eradicating homelessness within five years.
In 1985, the country counted nearly 20,000 people without a home. Ilkka Taipale, a doctor, and Heikki S. von Hertzen, then deputy mayor of Helsinki, created Y-Säätiö, a foundation through which they set out to acquire housing properties and offer affordable rental homes. Their work, along with government and other partnerships, has significantly reduced the homeless population, quickly.
Today, Y-Säätiö is the fourth-largest landlord in Finland. The foundation employs nearly 180 housing professionals and promotes social justice by providing affordable housing.
The country of 5.5 million claimed 3,686 homeless people within its borders in 2022, a reduction of its homeless population by 81%.
What’s hidden with this topic in this country, said Dr. Kwane Stewart, is if you’re driving by a streetside encampment or homelessness is creeping into your neighborhood, if it’s becoming what’s often deemed a “public nuisance,” people’s feelings are usually anger and frustration.
“That’s probably the consensus, if they’re [people are] being honest,” he said.
“These are everyday people who are struggling and need some help. Of course, some more than others and for various reasons; they have a mental health illness, they may have substance abuse, I get that. But more than before, I feel like it’s economic.”
Kwane paints a picture. They’re “average Americans.” They lost their job. Their credit is bad. They find themselves sleeping in their car one weekend, “like, ‘I’m going to do this just to get by,’ and then they’re on the street corner and then six months and then a year passes by, and they don’t know what happened. You won’t see that zooming by. You’re going to see a bunch of tarps, and they’re lazy, and they’re stuck on drugs, and it’s their fault. It’s their fault. But that’s not the case all the time, or that’s not my observation, anyway.”
He would know.
Kwane has over 22 years of experience in the veterinary field. He started traveling struggling streets a decade before founding Project Street Vet, a nonprofit public charity that provides free veterinary care, treatment and support to pets of people experiencing homelessness and housing vulnerability in 2020.
Kwane, often accompanied by Genesis Rendon, a registered vet tech with, visits areas of high homelessness to seek pets and pet parents in need. He calls his treks in the heart of Skid Row going “into the jungle.”
Preventative care and maintenance is vital for any human or pet, but medicine can be costly, if pet owners can access it at all. Even for low-income earners, a $250 ear infection medicine can be out of reach when they’re spending more than 30% of their salary on rent.
The 50 city blocks in the central east part of Los Angeles, which formed in the 1930s, is one of the largest stable populations of people experiencing homelessness in the United States. There were 4,440 people living in Skid Row in 2022.
LA’s mayor campaigned on reining in homelessness, promising money, promising programs, but this July said we need to “normalize the fact, unfortunately, that we’re living in a crisis.”
You get used to the smell, Kwane says as he drives. The people grilling food in the middle of the street. The broken-down cars. The noise that bursts into the air as soon as car doors open. People, car horns, men talking, women talking, people talking out loud but with no one in particular. Spanish, English. Dogs barking.
He looks for new pets and tries to find people he previously served for follow-ups. Like Hector and his dogs, Luna and Kilo. Luna was skin and bones, days away from dying. Kwane gave her deworming and anti-parasite medicine.
“He (Hector) is saying because of Dr. Kwane, she’s alive and thriving,” Genesis translates. “They’re like his family.”
Genesis and Kwane examine a puppy named Rain whom Hector is surrendering to them for adoption. Genesis cradles Rain in towels, her short gray hair tinted blue under the cover of a tarped sidewalk. The puppy has hip issues, and Hector knows she needs more care than he can give.
Kwane tries to find a man whose cat was pregnant to check on her. It’s hard to find everyone. They’ll move tents, move cities, move into housing. The most common health issues he sees are dermatological, skin and ear related. Allergies, fleas. Mites, which leads to mange.
“Some conditions are so simple to treat,” Kwane said, “it just takes somebody’s time.”
Kwane doesn’t see 50 people in a day like he could if he ran a clinic, but he commits time to them. Talks to them. Treats them like people, like human beings. “I’m only one person,” he said. “I do what I can.”
Kwane’s one-man-band concept is spreading. He has trained teams in Orlando, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Webster, Florida. They mainly find his work on Instagram and ask how they can do the same in their city. He sets them up with a kit and answers their questions.
Whether it’s one person or a mobilized team, you can always find the helpers. You just have to look. Beyond the tarps and the assumptions that numb.
Like Jameson Humane in Napa, which runs a mobile veterinary unit to homeless encampments, providing free checkups, vaccines, food and supplies.
And like The Arizona Pet Project, which kept 1,459 families together with their pets in 2022 by connecting people with services and resources.
Studies have shown that while pets provide positives of companionship and compassion, often even promoting better self-care in their owners who feel a responsibility to do better by the animals that rely on them, stress, anxiety and guilt can also result from the loss or surrender of a beloved pet.
In The Zone in Phoenix, Rico recalled the loss of a neighbor’s Husky. They call the woman Mom. The dog always walks out but always comes back in around 30 minutes. This time, it had been hours.
“She was happy when she had a dog,” Rico said. “She’s still looking for her and goes around calling out her name. It’s like losing a child.”
Rico moved to the U.S. from the Philippines in 1990 at the age of 14. By 18, he had a house, was working, living on his own. He has buoyed between bouts of addiction and 10 years of sobriety, between homelessness and being “part of the real world.” When his dad died in 2017, he “started slacking again.”
Now, he has no ID, no credit card. But his barriers to housing are not barriers to his capacity for kindness. He tries to keep tidy and helps out where he can, from volunteering with Feed Phoenix to consoling his recently-brought-on roommate.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. Sometimes, our own minds are our own worst enemy. You can talk to me,” he tells a crying Sandra. Sharing their open-face tent, filled with blankets and a bed, a filing cabinet that had been impaled at some point, a sofa chair, water bowls and jugs, discarded drumsticks he thought were cool, a small American flag, Lilo laps water as the humans do human things.
The white hair on her face, which forms a wishbone between her eyes and around her nose, faces Rico, her chest toward the camera, as she accepts a pet on her neck, tongue hanging to the side. Rico rescued Lilo when her previous owner had to give her away or leave her shelter. Now, he cares for her and her puppy, Pogi.
Kwane knows the scope of homelessness is overwhelming. It’s like finding an end to starvation.
“Where do I start? Where do I step in? What’s the point of trying? I don’t see it like that. If I can help one person, one day, one pet, I’ve done something,” he said.
He estimates he cared for over 1,000 pets in the decade prior to officially forming Project Street Vet in 2020. In 2021, Project Street Vet served 93 pets. In 2022, they reached 735.16. In 2023, Kwane won the CNN Hero of the Year award for his work with Project Street Vet.
“If more people took that attitude, we could solve a lot of problems. A lot of our problems are our own creation. Homelessness is a societal issue, which means there is a solution. It just takes committing time and resources.”
One person at a time.
A homeless man sits on the corner at a 7-Eleven. Kwane would have ignored him before. “The invisible amongst us.”
But he is burnt out working as a county veterinarian in a mass euthanasia clinic veiled as a shelter. Dirty. Depressing. He doesn’t yet know the term compassion fatigue, but euthanizing 60 animals by 10 a.m. day after day is making him want to quit the field altogether.
The man has a dog with him. His fleas are so bad he looks like a burn victim, Kwane thought. The veterinarian tells the man he can help if they meet here tomorrow. Kwane gives the dog a $3 flea treatment. He comes back 10 days later, and the dog is wagging his tail as the man looks up at the doctor with tears in his eyes. Thank you, he says, for not ignoring me.
That was in 2011. Kwane has been walking the streets ever since.
