Muir College Staffer Casts Light on Plight of Homeless

By Paul Mueller I December 6, 2004

The day arrived when I kissed my little angels goodbye.
My tears revealed the hurt I felt, that deep inside my heart did melt.
The days are long and the night grows cold.
I have nothing that I can hold

"There's a lot we don't know about the homeless," says Jamie Browning Riehl in a soft, articulate British accent, "but we do know there are many more homeless women and children than people suspect, and we do know that punitive laws don't help things at all."

The Muir College staffer can speak authoritatively about the homeless because, in his spare time, he's a writer and editor for the San Diego Street Light, a monthly newspaper that covers issues of homelessness, poverty and social justice. Riehl, who works in the college's Residential Life office, is committed to serving not only his UCSD student wards but also the area's least fortunate.

His work with San Diego Street Light gives him a chance to combine the socialist idealism of his youth with the humanitarian principles. The paper, published by Self Reliance House, a nonprofit corporation, uses homeless and near-homeless people as vendors, reporters and writers. Both Riehl and his wife contribute their time to the paper. "Ninety cents of the dollar price goes to the vendor," says Riehl, "and the remaining dime covers printing costs." All other expenses, he says, such as computer supplies, film, time and travel are paid out-of-pocket by the reporters.

Riehl uses his computer skills to format the paper, and contributes editorial and writing skills to its content, notably the paper's "International Diary" column. Recent issues of the paper have featured stories on migrant workers, the "modern-day slavery" of the sex trade, runaway children, and interviews with both the homeless and the activists working to help them. The paper also offers drawings, stories and poetry written by homeless people, and prominently displays a list of community resources available to the homeless, from shelters to day centers and churches offering meals.

"As I've said, there's much we don't know about the homeless" says Riehl. "But we can separate fact from fiction in some areas. Immigration, for instance, is not to blame for the rise in homelessness in the U.S. - an increase in poverty and a growing shortage of affordable rental housing are the causes.

"Another sad surprise is that almost 40 percent of the homeless are families with children," he says , "and such families are the largest subgroup of homeless people in rural areas." Homeless women may not be as visible as homeless men, says Riehl, because they typically make an effort to maintain appearances, they don't congregate in downtown areas and they avoid pan-handling."

Homeless veterans often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (with attendant flashbacks and nightmares), says Riehl, and many have drug- and alcohol-related problems related to their experiences. These veterans constitute about 2,000 of San Diego's estimated homeless population of 15,000.

Riehl is equally passionate about the plight of the migrant farm workers, who face "a schizophrenic border policy: we want them here badly, but we also do our best to keep them out." Although they have homes in their native lands, he says, the workers are essentially homeless while they're here, and the farm industry does very little for them. "We need to legalize migrant workers - the Bush policy I most agree with - but we also need to enforce strong laws on the treatment of these workers," Riehl says.

"We believe that citing or arresting a homeless person is counterproductive," he says. "You just give him or her a police record, which makes it all the harder to find work. And police departments have far more important work to do. Fortunately, efforts such as the Homeless Court Program and certain police department initiatives are looking at more sensible alternatives than citations and arrests."

Riehl comes by his sense of social justice honestly. Born in Lewisham in southeast London, he's the son of sociology lecturers, and he absorbed their discussions of Marxism and socialism. "My mother likes to insist that she was very careful not to impose her views on me as I was growing up," he says, "but we all know how that goes."

As a result, he says, "I grew up around a lot of theory. I took an A-level - a post-high-school, pre-university qualification - in sociology, and I love to read social science."

In addition, he says, he was influenced by the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in his London neighborhood, and by his youthful participation in theatre groups and Forest School Camp, an alternative school "sort of like a hippy Boy Scouts," he says, whose motto is "Learning by being, seeing by doing."

He also traveled extensively, with visits to France, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Crete, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, Russian, Austria, Finland and Denmark.

Riehl first came to the U.S. to attend the United World College (UWC) campus in New Mexico. The institution, which has ten sister colleges around the world, offers a two-year program in which students from around the globe live, learn and work together. "It was a life-changing experience," he says. "You live for two years with people from 80 different countries, and learn about how everyone in the world really feels about each other." After graduating, he returned to England to enroll in the University of Sussex, where he majored in philosophy.

"Then I met my wife, Manda, who had also attended UWC," he says, "and we got married. She lived with me in England for six months and then we moved to Boston. She completed her undergraduate work in math at MIT and was accepted for graduate school in math here at UCSD. And that's where we are now."

It's a far way from the gritty streets of southeast London to the Lexus-filled avenues of La Jolla, but political idealism and civic compassion clearly transcend time and place. Despite their respectable positions within the university, the Riehls have not forgotten such unfortunates as the woman whose sad poem, above, laments the loss of far more than shelter.