Chicago’s invisible people with Mark Horvath

The name came from the story of a homeless man living on Hollywood Blvd. One day, the man was shocked as as another man handed him a Christian pamphlet. He was shocked because so many thousands of people has passed him down the busy sidewalk without even a sideways glance that he was sure that he was invisible.

Mark Horvath has been documenting the stories of California’s homeless population for years on his blog InvisiblePeople.tv. This summer he took his project to make the invisible visible across and U.S., and he stopped in Chicago this weekend. Fourteen years ago, Horvath was among the homeless along Hollywood Blvd., but since then he has gotten his life back together and dedicated himself to telling their stories in short unedited videos filmed on the streets.

Horvath has been doing a national tour this summer sponsored by Ford, who provided a Ford Flex for the journey, among other sponsors. Horvath is a big proponent of social media for social service organizations and the homeless themselves, and that is how I found him and his videos. (Some of his selected highlights have been posted here on the blog.)

While in Chicago, Horvath met up with Annmarie (@PadsChicago), a homeless Chicago woman he met on Twitter. (Horvath tweets from his personal account @hardlynormal and his blog account @invisiblepeople.)

Annmarie is able to update her Twitter feed from her cell phone and her Facebook page by using the internet at the library. She uses Twitter to connect with other homeless people and advocates like Mark. Many people find the idea of a homeless person with a cell phone and a Twitter page discordant because the idea is that the homeless shouldn’t spend their money on anything but food and shelter. But for people like Annmarie, Twitter is an important outlet for her to deal with the stress and emotional hardships of being homeless, which can be as big of a barrier to housing and employment as some of the more concrete problems associated with homelessness.

The day Annemarie met Horvath at the Ogilvie Transportation Center she had slept the previous night in a grassy knoll with her sleeping bag. She planned to spend the rest of the day wandering around trying to find free things to do. Watch her interview with Horvath about homelessness and social media.

Horvath spent part of his time in Chicago wandering along the famous and opulent shopping corridor of Michigan Ave. Among the thousands of shoppers and dozens of stores he didn’t stop to photograph the Tribune Tower or the Old Water Tower, but instead stopped to talk to two young homeless women with cardboard signs and pet cats.

He also met Walter Thomas, who chooses to look at his Bible while sitting on the street to avoid the gaze of people who “pass me like so much driftwood.” Watch his whole story here.

Horvath’s road trip will take him to St. Paul, Minn. next and then back through the west to his home in California. And in each city he stops in it won’t be long until he invariably finds another person forced to spend their days outside but invisible.

You can follow Horvath’s trip on Whrll, YouTube, Ustream, Twitter, Posterous, and on his two blogs InvisiblePeople.tv and Hardly Normal.

Related posts:

1. More on Invisible People in Chicago I wrote about the history of Mark Horvath’s Invisible People.tv...
2. Homeless news weekly roundup – 4.17.09 Sorry it has been awhile since I posted these updates,...
3. Homeless news weekly round up – 3.7.09 How to get money to combat homelessness - National Alliance...

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