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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46r4yxttThw
Comments? This is right here in Sacramento, there are several of these
tent cities here, as well as in other places around the western US. In
Las Vegas the homeless live in stormwater drain channels under the city.
Pezar
Hi Pezar, that’s painfully familiar. Life in USA will sure be changing, and the homeless people is just the beginning. Such a similar picture to what we saw in 2001. It’s almost 2010 and we still see new shanty towns popping all over the country.
FerFAL
3 comments:
From what I've seen, here in the Midwest US, the officials eventually tear down any shanty town construction they find (some amazingly well built ones too) and offer/force them into homeless shelters they control.
Tents must be in offical camp sites at parks which cost around ten Dollars per night and are often limited to just a few weeks at a time, sometimes less.
It would be close to impossible to live in a tent here in the Winter like they are doing in warm California without the right gear and a heat source of some kind.
I don't know where people who live in their cars sleep, I don't go everywhere so perhaps there is a hidden place, but how would the homeless find it if it's hidden? The cops used to let them sleep in the parks but I don't see that anymore so I think cops run them off or harrass them, even if they park for a short time in a Walmart parking lot or somehing like that. That must be what all the city-wide CCTV cameras are for?
It's what I've seen and noticed anyway.
Did the attitude of the officials and the cops change much over time towards this group down there?
Anon 11:59: This video was made last spring, since it mentions that the mayor was just elected. I believe that eventually this tent city was broken up. The cops are chasing people from encampment to encampment, and it turns out that the mayor has little control over his own cops, he told them not to but they do it anyway.
A lawyer who owns property in the river district set up a regulated tent city, but the cops forcibly shut it down and literally dragged everybody away. I wrote on Minion that cops are starting to realize that they're outnumbered, and they're starting to let the tent people be.
In Reno people were camping in tents by the Truckee River in subfreezing (10 F) conditions, I saw a photo of "Tarp City" covered in snow, people said that water bottles froze solid, although I never heard of people freezing solid.
Anon, on the west coast and east coast of the US, tent cities are a reality.
Local governments attempt to regulate them, control them, but there are so many that have been around for years in, for example, the Seattle area, that they just accept them and try to regulate them.
There are charities that cycle the tent cities through various church parking lots in the Seattle area. There are also several areas of town - greenbelts, parks and interstitial woods running along forests on steep slopes - where tent cities will be tolerated for months or even years until a major crime takes place there or can be traced to a "resident" of the tent city. The cops will go in and roust everybody, and either drive them out or just do checks on the people living there.
Regarding hidden places where the homeless go - the homeless do little more than search out hidden places. It's a matter of survival. You wouldn't believe the places where they sleep. You'd be surprised.
When the charities and "social justice" groups get involved, the media gets involved, and it makes life more difficult for the police and local residents, because that usually means that the tent city will persist that much longer.
Where do people who live in their cars sleep? In their cars. Vans and buses are very, very commonly used for this. Smaller cars are also extremely common, but would be much more difficult to deal with.
Any decent-sized city or town along the Pacific coast - particularly if the weather is clement - has a goodly number of people living in their cars / vans / hippie buses. They are primarily focused around neighborhoods where they will be ignored - like I noted above, interstitial parts of town, particularly around highways, college campuses, parks, more run-down neighborhoods, etc. This is nothing new, but is spreading like crazy.
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