I wrote about the history of Mark Horvath’s Invisible People.tv project and his visit to Chicago in my last post.

ChicagoNow blogger Megan Cottrell followed Horvath around while he was in Chicago and wrote a great account of what it was like to talk to people who are normally invisible.

I didn’t even see her, sitting on the West side of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, but Mark did.

She was young, small, sitting with her orange tabby cat next to one of the bridges tall sculpted posts. Hundreds of people walking by almost blocked out here small, cardboard sign.

We stopped, and Mark knelt beside her. “What’s your name?” he asked. “What’s your story?”

The story is a powerful first-person view of the feelings and thoughts that come up when you confront homelessness head on by hearing the stories of individual homeless people and not numbers about anonymous populations.

It’s hard to know what to do, we both thought. Do you help people individually? I wanted to get Sandra a ticket home, Reggie a warm place to stay and AnnMarie the help she wants and needs.

But helping one person doesn’t seem like enough.

I highly suggest you go read the rest of her story at her blog One Story Up.

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.

In the style of Mark Horvath’s Invisible People.tv is D-Nice’s True Hip Hop  video series on Vimeo. D-Nice has about a dozen ten-minute interviews with people he feels represent true hip hop, as opposed to some more famous and mainstream artists. Among these interviews is a homeless emcee in Brooklyn who goes by Sawed Off. His interview happens on the street near the river where he hangs out and is as much about his story of homelessness as it is about his vision of the world of hip hop.

The video is visually intriguing and Sawed Off is a fascinating and honest character. I highly recommend it. Check it out below and check out D-Nice’s Vimeo page for more True Hip Hop videos.

True Hip-Hop Stories: Homeless Emcee from D-Nice on Vimeo.

(via Epic Fu)

Street Papers Thrive as Industry Falters – The New York Times
After recently writing about the success of street papers and papers sold by the homeless in American cities, the New York Times writes about similar success in European street papers even as the larger newspaper industry is facing tough times. The story focuses on The Big Issue based in London with editions around the world and Scarp de’tenis (Tennis Shoe) in Italy.

Homeless Real World – Broadcasting and Cable via End Homelessness
Below is an extended trailer for a potential documentary called Homeless Real World. Online video production ManiaTV (the site is under construction right now) filmed the lives of six homeless people in Denver for Tom Green’s online show, but it never aired. Now they are re-editing the footage for a possible new TV show, according to Broadcast and Cable. From the look of the footage, the show could share some of the standard elements of the MTV Real World, namely excessive drinking, love triangles and fights. Another trailer, with much of the same footage, also has a mock Axe Deodorant commercial that is pretty funny. What do you think of the footage? Would you watch this show?

Homeless Real World (sizzle reel) from Broadcasting & Cable on Vimeo.

U.S. food stamp total is record third month in a row- Reuters
U.S. food stamp numbers went up 1.1% from January to February and was up 17% since last year. There are now 32.55 million people collecting food stamps, which is 1 in 10 Americans.

The Soloist didn’t do so hot - Chicago Sun-Times
According to columnist Bill Zwecker, Jamie Foxx was “extremely upset” about the poor opening weekend for the Soloist. The movie grossed $9.7 million the first weekend, which put it in fourth place, according to the Sun-Times. American Violet grossed $243,162 in its opening weekend and has grossed nearly a half a million total according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Sorry it has been awhile since I posted these updates, but I’m back on schedule now and you can expect some good stories coming up.

Homeless magazine Streetwise in financial trouble but receiving donations

The big news in the Chicago homeless community this week was that 16-year-old magazine Streetwise, which is sold by the homeless and covers homelessness, was going to have to close in 45 days because of a drop in circulation and funding from foundations. The new info is that the magazine has received a flood of online donations from individuals and some large foundation pledges. The Chicago Tribune reports that they are half way to their goal for funding this week. And 1st Ward Ald. Manny Flores introduced a resolution to City Council saying that funds to end homelessness could be used to support the paper, according to CBS2 Chicago. Check out my previous post on the reaction to the Streetwise news.

Community addresses barriers surrounding Latino homelessness – Chi-Town Daily News

Megan Cottrell attended Tuesday’s community forum on Latino homelessness in Chicago. An interesting idea the came out of the forum, called Todos Contamos, or Everyone Counts, was that Latinos are underrepresented in homelessness surverys because they are much more likely to double-up with family members than turn to social service agencies for help. Check out the article for an interesting read.

New videos from Invisible People – Invisiblepeople.tv

Mark Horvath over at Invisible People took a trip to New York City recently and filmed a couple of new homeless people for his ongoing series of uncut on-the-street interviews with the homeless. His most recent interview was with Willy, who said he drinks because of the depression of being homeless and that if he had a room of his own he probably wouldn’t drink any more. Mark and other bloggers have pointed this out as an example of the benefits of the Housing First school of thought in social services. For more info about Housing First and some evidence to whether it works, check out my post from earlier this week.

Willy from invisible people on Vimeo.

For more stories check out Tony, a vet who panhandles on the highway, and Jennifer, who is six months pregnant and just getting off the streets and into housing.