To see a slideshow of all Steve’s sketches and stories about San Diego’s homeless, click here.

And read Steve’s final essay here: What I’ve learned from drawing the homeless in San Diego

In the short year since The San Diego Union-Tribune moved its newsroom and offices to 600 B Street in Downtown San Diego, surrounded by Symphony Towers and other skyscrapers, it feels like the number of homeless people in our neighborhood has skyrocketed.

Every day, I see several homeless people on my way in and out of our building. It’s not uncommon, from 12 stories up, to hear them yelling things from the street below. Sometimes I say hi or nod as I come or go, but our connections are fleeting.

Experts say the enduring homeless crisis in San Diego is largely driven by a lack of affordable housing. Combine that with poverty, unemployment, low wages, mental illness and substance abuse, and you have an incredibly difficult problem for far too many people.

Even defining the scope of the problem is tough. When we talk about homelessness, we often speak in terms of numbers and statistics.

A regional task force’s new annual homeless count tallied 9,100 homeless people countywide. San Diego County had 17,500 people seek programmatic help in one recent 12-month period.

The issue is so big and complex, there’s no simple solution that any one person — let alone an editorial cartoonist — can propose.

But it seemed to me that it might be revealing and in some small way helpful, if a few of these poor, forgotten folks on the margins of our society could be recognized, memorialized and humanized a little through my artwork. If we could look at their individual stories instead of their collective urban blight.

On Sunday we launched a series called “Street Art: Portraits of San Diego’s Homeless.” It will feature simple sketches of San Diego’s street dwellers.

Yet the cartoons, like their subjects, will be anything but uncomplicated.

Every week, I’ll walk our streets, approach some of San Diego’s homeless residents and strike up a conversation. They’ll share a bit about themselves, and I’ll share my sketches of them with you.

We’ll post a gallery of all the sketches online and run one in print every other week on this page.

It’s so easy to see these souls as statistics instead of remembering that each of them has a name, a story and in most cases a dream of a better life.

Let’s change that.

Continue the conversation with Steve Breen on Facebook where he will be regularly answering questions about this project. Go to our Facebook Page and Like us.

You can also reach Steve Breen via email. Email him your thoughts, questions about the project or suggestions at steve.breen@sduniontribune.com