Cities Deal With a Surge in Shanty Towns

[XemaSab]

Source: NY Times

FRESNO, Calif. — As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us/26tents.html?ref=us

[EFerrari]

1. This country is wealthy?

[truthisfreedom]

2. Yes. It's wealthy. And now, apparently, it's becoming shockingly poor.

Cry.

[Hekate]

3. We should call this "Living in the Bushes" rather than Hoovervilles. God help us all. nt

[griz2008]

4. AND the TeaBaggers think

the poor Corporations can't handle a 3% tax increase-- we'll be seeing more Bushvilles until we get together and fight shouting WITH shouting.

I am going to try my best with my son to start organizing counter-protests against the Glenn Beck/Hannity whackjobs who are sending teabags to washington, FORCING security to inspect them all WASTING TAXPAYER MONEY and they say this in protest of PORK-- you know, pork projects like welfare and infrastructure spending-- the kind of spending that might be a way to EMPLOY PEOPLE.

Small Business owners in rural areas especially, can only expand so much as buying power decreases-- so how does a tax cut for them and the biggest corporate overlords equal jobs exactly, if NO ONE CAN BUY ANY of their FINE PRODUCTS.

And yes, man, even now we are the richest nation in the world.. sort of hard to grasp isn't it?

They seem to be spending all the tax revenue on killing arab kids and getting our Soldiers shot and blown up and psychologically scarred..

THAT is PORK..

sorry to digress :D

[ixion]

5. modern "Hoovervilles" == Bushvilles

It needs to stick. Don't let the MSM get away with obscuring who caused this mess.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Hoover didn't really deserve the epithet.

Bush does.

Hoover kept Europe from becoming one massive starving refugee camp in the aftermath of WWI and the Spanish Flu. He organized the Committee for the Relief of Belgium that fed half of northwestern Europe -- more's the irony of the "Hoovervilles". In the course of his pre-presidential life, he fed about one billion people in over 50 countries and twisted arms to fund enterprises and charities in most of the developing world. He was called "The Great Humanitarian", which helped him win the 1928 presidential election in a landslide.

Within a year, the world would come crashing down.

Rather than being a feckless slacker like a certain recent chief executive, Herbert Hoover was, in fact, a man who got things done, but who was fatally blinded by the economics of the previous century. (http://hoover.archives.gov/education/hooverbio.html">Click here, and scroll about 40% down.)

The http://www.hoover.org/">institution that bears his name would do well to follow his example. It is dedicated to a wide range of scholarship, but its economic mission is to follow the same economic ideology that sullied Hoover's name.

Dubya has no such record aside from a munificent bump in international AIDS funding -- after Paul Hewson (Bono) lobbied him. To call Bush the "new Hoover" is an insult to an imperfect, but otherwise remarkable statesman.

--d!

[Kolesar]

13. That was a good account, thanks for posting it. eom

[newfie11]

6. Looks like we are rushing right into being a 3rd world country.

Shanty towns and health care only for those that can afford it.

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. Intensities in Tent Cities

...

[Kolesar]

12. Incontinent in continent

[HopeHoops]

9. Bush's real legacy.

Is there anything Bush DIDN'T fuck up?

[Veruca Salt]

20. Let's see there was........

Nope, I've got nothing.

[XemaSab]

22. .

:thumbsup:

[DBoon]

10. You Republicans should be proud

You worked hard since Reagan to eliminate the welfare system including subsidized housing of any sort.

You get rid of Section 8, you get rid of public housing, you get rid of "welfare as we knew it" and here is what you have.

Are you proud to see humans living like animals?

[dana_b]

15. I think some Repubs would be shocked however

the majority wouldn't give it a second thought. Afterall those people in the shanty towns/tent cities must just be good for nothing and lazy people who don't work hard, like they do. :eyes:

There are good people who are trying to help, thank God, and I'll bet that even a few of them are(or were) Repubs. We've all got to pitch in.

[Odin2005]

11. can we call them Bushvilles? Shruburbs?

[Terry in Austin]

14. "Shruburbs" - perfect! n/t

[dana_b]

16. classic!

the "Shruburbs" of Fresno, Sacramento, Oklahoma, Olympia, WA. etc.

[XemaSab]

21. Shruburbs...

:D

[ElsewheresDaughter]

17. "shantytowns" my ass! We need to call them what they truly are....Bushtowns/villes

[KansDem]

19. Perhaps, "Bushboroughs?"

Kind of rolls off the tongue...

[KansDem]

18. In the meantime, the IRS offers clemency for wealthy American tax cheats...(nt)