Three Months in an Oakland Homeless Encampment

Tuesday morning, my colleagues Thomas Fuller and Josh Haner published a piece they’ve been working on for months . It’s an expansive, visual portrait of a sprawling homeless encampment in Oakland.

Fuller wrote this dispatch about one of the people he met:

Of the dozens of people we interviewed at an Oakland homeless camp over the three months I spent getting to know its residents, Gilberto Gonzalez Rojas stood out for his sartorial selections.

As we discuss in the article about the camp, which was published Tuesday, conditions are tough. Yet every time I saw Gonzalez, he was wearing a tuxedo or a suit.

“I am poor but I want people to say, ‘He’s in the streets, but he hasn’t let himself go,’” Gonzalez said.

In all of the reporting I’ve done on homelessness in recent years the notion of dignity has been paramount.

Gonzalez, a former construction worker, nearly died in a traffic accident more than two decades ago. It derailed his life.

The Oakland camp, where he has lived for the past six years, has no running water, nowhere to shower, no flush toilet and only rudimentary kitchen facilities.

Sometimes when Gonzalez joins volunteers in Oakland to clean the streets people tell him to go home and change out of his suit. He politely declines.

He keeps his suits in his shack built from recycled materials.

“I want to walk with my head up,” Gonzalez said. “We are homeless. It’s not a crime.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .