US tent cities highlight new realities as recession wears on

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/26/tent-city-california-recession-economy

Oliver Burkeman in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 March 2009 19.18 GMT

For years, Joan Burke has had to battle the fact that homelessness, for most Americans, is an invisible scourge. Recently, however, invisibility hasn't exactly been the problem.

Ten minutes' walk from where she works, at the homelessness charity Loaves and Fishes, in Sacramento, California, lies an all-too-visible "tent city" - a shanty town, built on wasteground beside railway tracks, that has become one of the most prominent symbols of the recession.

Tent cities reminiscent of the "Hoovervilles" of the Great Depression have been springing up in cities across the United States - from Reno in Nevada to Tampa in Florida - as foreclosures and redundancies force middle-class families from their homes.

"Where the tent city is now is literally a toxic waste dump, it's unsafe, but these people are very resourceful," Burke said. "Some people are living in squalor, with just a tarp tied to a chainlink fence. But then you'll see someone with several tents: The tent they live in, plus some outbuilding tents. And they couldn't be more neat and more tidy. They're working hard to create a sense of home."

Many of the 200 residents of Sacramento's Tent City, as with those around the country, are not recent victims of the downturn: They are the chronically homeless, some of them mentally ill. But the encampment seized national attention after Oprah Winfrey featured it on her daytime television show, part of a series of reports she has been running on the "new faces" of homelessness.

Embarrassed by an influx of television crews, Arnold Schwarzenegger this week announced plans to house the tent-dwellers in a nearby convention centre until a $1m (£690,000) plan for more permanent shelter can be implemented.

The California governor told reporters he had "personally delivered a letter to President Barack Obama last week, to request that economic stimulus funds for the homeless be fast-tracked".

Obama grappled with the phenomenon on Tuesday, when a reporter at his primetime news conference asked him about the "tent cities sprouting up across the country". The president said he was "heartbroken that any child in America is homeless", adding: "The most important thing I can do on their behalf is to make sure their parents have a job."

In both the number and types of inhabitants, the new tent cities do not equate to the homelessness of the 1930s. But the symbolism is powerful, and may have significant political consequences. It was not all that far from Sacramento, or from Fresno - home to another Californian tent city - that the celebrated Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange took her haunting photos of families living in makeshift camps, forced west by the collapsed economy and the Dust Bowl further east.

"We all take care of each other," Michelle Holbrook, a 34-year-old resident of the Sacramento camp who lost her job as a carer, told the San Jose Mercury News. "I've become the camp mother: I do most of the cooking, and make hot water for coffee." A resident of Reno's tent city, Tammy, said: "We eat things that other people throw out, or whatever ... It's really embarrassing to say, but that's the way it sometimes is out here." Another Reno tent-dweller, Jim, told one of Oprah's reporters it was "like learning how to live all over again".


----- (skipping)

..