"Imagine if you had never been homeless before and you'd just lost your job and you lost your home. What would you do? Would you immediately go begging or knocking on a door? No, you would downsize, move into cheaper accommodations, if that did not work you'd move in with friends or relatives and then you'd move into a cheap motel and then ... where would you want to go before winding up at a shelter door? You would much prefer to live at a park with your family and your dog." ... "In just about every major city, there are tent cities. Unfortunately, we're in a growth industry and the numbers are going to continue." -- Michael Stoop, a community organizer for the
National Coalition for the Homeless, explaining that the
surge in American tent city shantytowns, first highlighted on MeFi in 2008/09:
1,
2,
3, has not slowed.
The Great Recession: Life in Tent City, Lakewood NJ /
Photo Gallery /
Video.
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posted by zarq
on Nov 10, 2011 -
40 comments
Safe Ground is an organization of Sacramento's homeless population to claim a secure location in order to live decently. While resistance to tent cities (
previously,
2,
3) has largely been due to political expediency (criminalizing homelessness is easier than ending it),
a spot on Oprah brought media attention to the plight of the homeless and made it more difficult for police to bully them from place to place with the threat of jail. In response to this,
Costa Mantis(of
He Knows You're Alone fame [uncredited on the wiki]) started filming the personal stories of the homeless along the American River in Sacramento. This led to
Searching for Safe Ground, a miniseries concerning the struggle of Sacramento's homeless for a place to exist.
Incidentally, a federal jury ruled tonight that the city of Sacramento has been violating homeless people's constitutional rights by moving them from public property and confiscating their property.
Stay tuned.
posted by Wyatt
on May 24, 2011 -
15 comments
As forclosures rise, so do tent cities filled with Americans. Across the country, tent cities are rising everywhere. From
California, where foreclosures are taking over 60,000 homes per month, to
Vegas, where hungry children sleep in the glittered dust of the wealthy, to St. Petersburg, Florida where
the cops are destroying the tents of the homeless to make them leave the city, to the
suburbs,
homelessness, hunger, and
poverty are on the rise. The government's response?
Change how "homeless" is defined, so that the numbers appear to be decreasing at the same time that tents are springing up all over the country.
[more inside]
posted by dejah420
on Nov 7, 2008 -
135 comments
