Through 10,000 free haircuts under the El, a barber finds peace in Kensington

A white Kia sedan pulls up next to a trash-strewn lot beneath the El. Out steps a husky, bearded man in sweats, who pulls from his backseat a salon chair that he plants on the pavement. He pops his trunk and with surgical care lays out a set of clipping shears and straight razors.

The barbershop is open, but not for business.

When a prospective customer walks by and offers cash for a cut, Josh Santiago rebuffs him with a four-letter word.

“Free?” the man repeats back. “I’m tryin’ to pay someone for a haircut.”

Santiago tests a spray bottle filled with a pricey hair product.

“I don’t know what to tell you, bro,” Santiago says. “I’m not the man for you if you’re trying to pay.”

For nine years now, Santiago, 33, has been running this thrice-weekly mobile barbershop on the streets of his old neighborhood. Through his one-man nonprofit, Empowering Cuts, the Northeast Philly resident gives free haircuts throughout the Philly region and even tours the country with a mobile barber van. But he estimates that 90% of the 12,000 free cuts he’s given in the last decade have been right here in Kensington, where he grew up — in the center of Philadelphia’s drug trade.

The wails of ambulances and firetrucks provide his shop’s soundtrack. A dirty sidewalk is his waiting room. His customer base is the Avenue’s homeless, addicted, and down-and-out.

“The most beautifulest people that you ever met your entire life,” he calls them. Through their stories, he says, he has gained more than a $5 cut could ever buy: peace, purpose — and forgiveness.

“I’ve been on probation for 21 years,” he says.

By age 12, Santiago was hustling on the streets, building a rap sheet for drug dealing that would put him in and out of the criminal justice system through his adult life. Both of his parents struggled with substance abuse.

First client on a recent Friday shift is Phil Matthews. Santiago knows what the man wants without asking: a blowout, a fade, and a sharp shape-up on the sides.

“He’s somebody who actually cares,” Matthews says, as Santiago works a razor around his customer’s ears. “It’s cold out here, and I don’t mean the weather. I mean, like, a cold world, man.”

Next up: a beard trim for a Bucks County native who tells of enlisting in the Army after his brother died on 9/11. Home after two tours in Iraq, the man who gives his name only as Zack turned to opioids to sleep at night.

As Santiago works his scissors, passersby shout out praise like real-time Yelp reviewers.

“One day he took me from looking crazy to looking like a million dollars,” says a man with a boom box strapped to his hip. “I got on the train and everybody was like, ‘Damn! Who did that?’”

A passing sedan beeps and through a window a woman blows him a kiss. Another fan? Sort of, Santiago says. “That’s my cousin.”

A decade ago, he put hustling behind him and enrolled in barber school. One day, his instructor took the apprentice stylists to a homeless shelter to practice, and there the idea for Santiago’s free service took root.

During his first pop-up sessions in Kensington, he began to understand what drove his mother to use. He asked questions. Every client who sat before him was a learning opportunity.

“It gave me comfort when it came to her,” he says. “I have a better understanding of what she does. And I love her dearly now, compared to when I was a kid, because I understand what addiction is.”

Officers from the 24th District roll up in an SUV and tell the crowd across the street from Santiago to disperse. Sometimes police tell Santiago to pack up his shop, too, he says. Some cops have accused him of enabling the homeless community, but others have been cool about it.

On this Friday afternoon, the officers leave him alone as he tends to his chaotic waiting room, where six men are now queued for their glow-up. “Nah, nah,” he snaps at a man trying to cut the line. “There’s three people in front of you, bro.”

Santiago keeps the sign-up sheet in his head. Customers bounce too often to keep a written list. When a nearby drug crew offers free samples, he says, the line drops from 10 to none in seconds.

Word spreads that there’s free pizza on the Ave, and Santiago excuses a client mid-cut. Another man who has been waiting asks if he can get a quick touch-up in the interim. Santiago refuses.

“I’m not trying to rush you out the chair,” he says. “I’m trying to give you a nice [hair]line, you feel me?”

Empowering Cuts’ operational costs run about $75,000 a year, with little left for Santiago to take a salary, he says. He relies on support from family to sustain his mission, and hopes to start securing grants. Through his 275,000 followers on Instagram and 318,000 followers on TikTok, he raised six figures to buy a mobile barbershop, which he’s driven to economically depressed neighborhoods from Georgia to California.

He cut hair for three days in the underground homeless city beneath the Las Vegas Strip, where hundreds live in flood-prone tunnels. Santiago says he was amazed how the people there learned to navigate the darkness.

His cross-country travels have only solidified his view that there’s no place quite like Kensington.

Over the last decade, he’s seen the steady decline. The Kensington Avenue of his youth — the sneaker stores, the retail chains, the food spots and $5 barber shops from Tioga down to the Huntington stops — is a faded memory now.

By late afternoon, the crowd grows to dozens on Cambria Street and conversation bounces between topics around his chair.

Some men share trauma and loss. To a client whose mother recently died, Santiago offers a solemn condolence as he buzzes his sideburns. Another man fears for the life of a cousin who has been MIA for weeks: “I don’t want to put him on no T-shirt, you know what I mean? I got too many T-shirts.”

They crack jokes. They laugh. They talk about the drugs, but also relationships (“Love keeps us together”), religion (“You believe in God, Josh?”), and the mayor’s proposed crackdown in Kensington (“They need trash cans out here”).

If City Hall wants to fix the neighborhood, the barber says, take down the barriers people face trying to get into treatment.

Santiago gives out his cell number freely. Because what he gives is more than a haircut, he says. And when his phone blows up at night with someone telling him they’re ready to get help, he hops in his car and heads for the Ave.

There are ample detox facilities nearby, but he prefers to drive two hours to a clinic outside Reading. “If they were out here running and gunning for years, they’re not going to be able to focus on their treatment at Tulip and Allegheny,” he says.

His first client on this Friday, Phil, recently confided that he was growing tired of life on the streets. It may be a few more haircuts before he’s ready, but Santiago assured him he was waiting on standby.

The window of opportunity is small, he says.

“When somebody needs help, you gotta react on that fast,” he said, “because the last thing you want is for that individual to change their mind.”