Because homelessness is a condition, not an immutable characteristic, writers on the topic try to avoid describing a person as “homeless” and say instead that the person is “experiencing homelessness.”
In covering the City of San Francisco’s response to homelessness this year I created some cartoons – mostly satirical – to illustrate aspects of the situation on the street. One might say that it is inappropriate to use cartooning to bring focus to the tragic issues of unsheltered people living on city sidewalks, but there is a long history in political and social cartooning in the United States of doing just that. None of the drawings in this gallery are of actual people and the illustrations and text in the cartoons are mine.
About the Artist
Joe Dworetzky
Joe Dworetzky is a second career journalist at the Bay City News Foundation, covering Legal Affairs and Arts & Culture. He practiced law in Philadelphia for more than 35 years before he moved to San Francisco in 2011 and began writing fiction and pursuing a lifelong interest in cartooning. His cartooning includes political and social topics and draws on his fascination with modern culture in the Bay Area. Joe earned a Master’s in journalism from Stanford in 2020 and may well be the oldest cub reporter in the country this year.