“I’m still financially challenged; I’m still close to homelessness myself,” Mark Horvath says, just a couple of hours after he’s met with Mayor Dan Sullivan and broadcast his interview live on the internet. Horvath works at a nonprofit in Los Angeles as a case manager, but, he says, he still has to choose between paying the bills and buying food, so he eats at the shelter.

Nonetheless, Horvath sees himself a homelessness success story. In 1995 he was living on the streets of Hollywood, addicted to heroin and alcohol. He’d once made a six-figure salary working in media, but his addictions landed him on the streets. A faith-based nonprofit, the Dream Center, helped him beat his addictions. He regained employment making faith-based outreach videos and working in marketing, and eventually rebuilt his life, buying a house in St. Louis, Missouri. Then he lost his job due to the economic recession. He maxed out his credit cards, and lost his house.

On the verge of being homeless again, Horvath decided he needed to do something to expose the pervasiveness of the problem—to put faces to it. So in 2008 he launched invisiblepeople.tv, where he posts films of homeless people telling their stories. He started traveling to different cities to document the street people, with the support of corporate sponsors, and incorporated social media to get these stories out to the public. Now, besides invisiblepeople.tv, Horvath writes a blog at hardlynormal.com, documents his travels over Twitter and Facebook, and broadcasts live interviews, like the one with Mayor Sullivan, over the web. This past week Horvath came to Anchorage, and besides examining the political side of efforts to fix our homeless problem, he’s been out on the streets meeting the people who make their lives outside, even in the Alaska winter.

“The most important thing that I’ve seen was when we went to a park last night and there were a couple of Native Alaskans, one lady was in a wheelchair, and an older gentleman, probably both in their 50s, and they’re out on the streets eleven years now,” Horvath says. “While I was talking to them, another homeless man pointed out another Native Alaskan, weaving side to side, walking down the street, and he could hardly walk. There was a van; I was looking and he walked behind the van and he didn’t come out the other side. I went over there and he’s in the snowbank. I was with Ed O’Neill [former Brown Jug owner and now homelessness activist], and he called 911. Between the time we first asked him if he needed help and the police arrived, he got up and tried to walk again, and of course fell down. If we weren’t there he would have died. That’s all I needed to see. I didn’t get much sleep last night because of that.”

O’Neill, who heads the Anchorage Responsible Beverage Retailers Association, which organizes clean-up campaigns of homeless camps, had taken Horvath around town looking at camps (all of which were empty) and parks on Monday to meet some of Anchorage’s street people. Before that, Horvath had visited the Anchorage Rescue Mission (there’s video of Horvath interviewing David Williams, the rescue mission’s program director, on his website), and visited Bean’s Café briefly.

Tuesday Horvath interviewed the mayor about the city’s ideas for tackling Anchorage’s homelessness issue, including the “wet housing” proposal (see “The assembly gets wet,” in Flashlight for news of recent assembly action on that matter), then observed a meeting of the Mayor’s Homeless Leadership team, a task force that Sullivan organized last year to address the issue after 14 homeless people died over the summer.

At the task force meeting, Horvath Tweeted, “Imagine all of Los Angeles homeless service providers in one room working together to find a real solution. Almost in tears thinking abt it.”

“In Los Angeles you have a city and a county, and they don’t get along, and you have all these service providers—basically it’s ground zero for homelessness—and none of us communicate, much less get along,” Horvath says. “What I saw [at the Anchorage task force meeting] was very promising to me. That’s what you need; you need a ringleader, somebody to come in and manage it and grab all the nonprofits and service providers and faith-based organizations. You’ve got to have buy-in by the community otherwise it’s not going to stick and you’re not going to have the real impact.”

Horvath never expected to come to Alaska. He’s from upstate New York and moved to Los Angeles 26 years ago because he hates the snow and cold, he says. So when a supporter of his activism named Ann Glenn started emailing him stories about the homeless deaths up here, he didn’t pay much attention. “There was no way I was gonna go,” he says.

Coming here didn’t make any sense, he says, but most of his trips don’t. In this case, Hertz, the car rental company, contacted him and told him the company would like to help his endeavors. “Hertz basically paid for this trip,” Horvath says, “but they didn’t say, ‘oh, you have to do this, you have to talk about us.’ They just said, ‘go do what you’ve got to do; we believe in your mission.”

So Horvath made his way up here courtesy of Hertz, and he says he’s encouraged by community’s efforts to take on the homeless problem. “Communities do one of two things—they either bulldoze and hide the situation or address it, so what I see happening different here is that they’re actually trying to take some positive action.”

Horvath is supportive of Housing First, the “wet housing” concept that’s been prominently discussed in Anchorage, as well as legal tent cities, something that—during his interview with Horvath—Mayor Sullivan agreed should be discussed more than it has been.

Horvath says opposition to legal tent cities springs from misguided NIMBY-ism. “No matter where you are, it’s in your front yard,” Horvath says. “It really is, and you’re going to have tent cities, so to me it’s kind of ignorant outlawing them because you’re going to have them. It’s much better to create a community so that maybe you can help them get out of that situation.”

On Horvath’s last day, he’s out with his video camera getting people’s stories for his website—or just making new friends. “The couple with the woman in the wheelchair, they didn’t want to be on tape,” he says. “But I’m really trying to make friends. If I don’t get a story, so what?”

bjk@anchoragepress.com