I think we’re going to see a lot more of these*:
ONTARIO, California (Reuters) - Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits “tent city,” a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.
The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.
The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.
As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.
While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it’s just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.
“They don’t hit the streets immediately,” said activist Jane Mercer. Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets. “They only hit tent city when they really bottom out.”
The Ghost of Tom Joad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwbPqA3QhqA
Calling it a Hooverville is so 20th century. Dubyatown maybe?
Should they be named after W, or after Greenspan?
It’s a real quandary.
We see them in the public campgrounds, and of course from time to time we have been “them” — Fall and Winter of ‘06, before a reader found Eric work, and Fall of ‘07, before Eric again found work.
This is why we’ve been urging the poverty-aware candidates to include the trailer parks, the down-scale and the public and private camps.
It is also why towns and counties and states that have, essentially anti-poor rules about residency at their camps (aka “parks”) that force moves, should review such rules.
It is also why social service provisioning, from visiting nurses to visiting certified teachers, should include camps in their service model. At present, the dominant form of social service delivered by city, county, and state government to camps is armed rangers, who primarily deliver normative conformance to roles that either stigmatize long-term needs-based campers as “heavy users” (code for camping poor) or the pretence that camp use is a vacation and/or retirement activity.
[...] December 21, 2007 I’m With Susie: More Tent Cities To Come Posted by John O under Political | Tags: Economy, Suburban Guerilla, Susie Madrak, Tent cities | As someone blessed with a very good job and benefits, I’ve been pondering on the economy a lot…. [...]