- Would you guys like to buy "The Contributor"?

Only $2, folks.

I've been selling "The Contributor" for like 14 years.

Downtown, was getting tired of most of the homeless sitting around, so they thought, let's make a street paper and give the homeless a little job of their own, like a little business.

So we branched out, we buy the papers for like 50 cents a copy, and we go out and sell 'em to the public for two bucks.

- "The Contributor" is an organization.

It's really a sophisticated ecosystem that empowers our friends experiencing homelessness on their path to housing and stability.

So we provide them income opportunities, housing, resources, and most of all a community.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- A lot of the vendors who started with us in 2007 have now really aged into senior citizens.

So we have vendors who are going into hospice care or who are people who have worked their way into housing.

- [Narrator] Michael had been unhoused since 2003, but with help from "The Contributor", he'd worked his way into Section 8 housing where he stayed for the better part of two years.

- I got a full-time job.

I was working five days a week, so I wasn't home all the time besides at night.

I'm not the type that socializes.

When I get home, I wanna be left alone, calm down, cool, relax.

- [Narrator] Unfortunately, people took advantage of Michael, - The neighbors, they'd wait till I come in.

They wanted to stay over all night long and I was trying to get sleep.

And it just got to a point that they wanted to run my house instead of me trying to run it.

- [Narrator] Without help to navigate that uncertain terrain, Michael ended up back on the streets.

- So there's a group of people that permanent supportive housing is really the answer.

What it is, is you have someone in-house, they're a social worker usually, they can start seeing problems happening.

You know, even if you have no moral compunction about any of this, economically, it makes sense to keep people from becoming homeless.

Because once you're homeless for 10 years, the amount of money that has to go into permanent supportive housing and things like that is huge.

But that's the price we're gonna have to pay right now to get us back in line.

We have so many people falling into homelessness.

(cheerful music)