Shanty towns spread across America

31/03/2009

New Hoovervilles spring up as repossession rates spiral

The popular term for shanties built by homeless men during the early thirties, they were named after the laissez-faire President Herbert Hoover, the man deemed responsible for letting the America slide into its greatest depression.

But as the US economy crumbles again, a series of “tent cities” are springing up on the edge of the each of metropolis. The new Hoovervilles are the last, but all-too-real resort for many of the worst-hit victims of the current downturn.

In typically American fashion, the financial crisis has happened on grander scale than anywhere elsewhere in the western world. The unemployment rate has surged 8.1 per cent – the highest for 26 years. Since December 2007, 4.4 million jobs have disappeared and 1.2 million homes have been lost to bank repossessions.

One of the biggest shanties is found a few miles from California’s state capitol building, on a pasture of Sacramento’s waste land bounded by a railroad track and the river. Though sleeping rough is illegal here (and across most of the US), hundreds of desperate people have set up tents among the area’s long-standing homeless population, without sanitation, and miles from nearest stores.

Sister Libby Fernandez, director of Sacramento homeless organisation Loaves and Fishes, believes more people are headed for the slum dwellings emerging across the country. “There is a growing number coming to tent city because they’re losing their jobs and losing their homes and have nowhere to go,” she says. “The fear is that we’re going into a time where droves of people set up new Hoovervilles across the country. It’s third world conditions.”

The stories of some of those new to Sacramento’s tent city were featured on Oprah Winfrey last month, including Tammy, a 47-year-old who has been living there less than a year with her husband, a construction worker who can’t find work. “We lost our car and our apartment,” she mourned. “We lost everything we had.”

The problem has left city authorities embarrassed and floundering for answers. Mayor Kevin Johnson has pledged to close tent city within the next few weeks and move residents on to shelters and other accommodations.

“We're not going to go in and sweep them out of there,” Johnson said at a news conference. “We've got to have tough love, but we've got to be compassionate.” The Mayor’s council meets this week to explore the possibility of setting up a legal encampment, with clean water, portacabin toilets and a garbage pick-up, as other cities such as Portland, Oregon and Phoenix, Arizona have already provided for their homeless.

But with 1,200 sleeping in tents and makeshift dwellings, and very few emergency shelter places available, Sister Fernandez is cynical about anything changing for the long-term homeless. “The authorities don’t really want people to see or think about the homeless, but all the new people have made the issue more visible, and now everyone suddenly says it’s terrible,” she explains.

“Unfortunately, we deal with homeless the United States is by telling them to move on. The mayor wants to move people out of the area, and I doubt he’ll put much energy into finding somewhere new. He has no support because no-one wants them in their neighbourhood.”

Paula Lomazzi, who works with Sacramento’s homeless-vendor magazine The Homeward Street Journal, is also pessimistic. She says she worked with local churches to get a portacabins installed at tent city but was refused permission by the city council.

“Public housing has been cut for a long time, a lot of institutions for people mentally illnesses have been closed; they’re not a lot of places for people to go,” she says. “America is in denial about its homelessness problem. It’s a sickness.”

If the economy continues its downward spiral, it may become impossible for America to ignore the hordes sleeping in the shadow of its diminishing prosperity.