Weekend Long Read: Helping China’s Homeless Find Their Way Home

The heart of Changsha’s Wuyi Commercial Circle is a kilometer-long pedestrian street where gleaming storefronts jostle for attention and gargantuan LED screens flash nonstop advertisements. Tourists flock to snap photos with trendy backdrops, mobbing internet-famous shops.

But just a few hundred meters away lies another world. On the dimly lit Shunxingqiao Lane, behind the steel plates and wooden boards sealing the doors and windows of a partially demolished residential building, lives a community of “daliuzhe” — a local term for people with no fixed home. They slip in and out through gaps in the barricades and holes in the walls, their lives unfolding in the shadows of the bustling commercial district.