In California, the city of Sacramento's desire to move scores of homeless people out of a tent city is meeting some resistance.
Sacramento's tent city sits on the windy banks of the American River on the northern edge of downtown. Some residents have scrounged up scrap wood to make fences around their tents. Others, like Dave Cutch, a welder by trade, came upon an idea he found in a Louis L'Amour novel.
"Old cowboys, when they would go out into the country to get the cows, they would set up wind breaks like that — you know, with the tumbleweeds," Cutch says. "But they would go around and collect the tumbleweeds and they would stab a little stick in the ground to secure it."
Cutch came to California about seven months ago after running into a patch of bad luck in Colorado. He is one of up to 200 homeless people camped here, in his case for the past two months. He says it was quiet until the national media discovered the tent city. Now you can count Crutch among those who have had enough of the wind, the lack of sanitation and even nosey reporters.
"Tell me, what do we do?" Cutch asks. "I mean, you can go and report all this stuff and you can go back to your house, be secure, which is cool, you know you got a job. But the people who lost their homes like myself, lost my job, what do we do? What do we do?"
An excellent fucking question. Meanwhile, similar shanty towns are popping up all over the country:
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. --- “These are able-bodied folks that did day labor, at minimum wage or better, who were previously able to house themselves based on their income,” said Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group based in Washington. So you have angry, out-of-work, able-bodied people who've just been shafted by the economic wreckage gathering in central places, where the government will eventually try to push them out if they end up creating bad publicity. Meanwhile, there's rotting and abandoned housing around the country. Spark, meet gasoline.
Comments