Tent Cities and Slums: Their Organic Evolution as times get Worse

With USA hitting a 50 year poverty record, scenes that used to be common only in Latin countries may eventually become part of the American skyline. As of today there’s 46 million Americans that classify as “poor”, that’s 15% of the population. Of them tens of thousands have no home and live either in their car or tent towns. Tent cities are growing across America from California to Florida. Places like “Dignity Village” in Oregon are becoming more common each day.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14903732

http://endtimeinfo.com/2011/07/outcasts/

Watching some of the pictures was a bit of a déjà vu because it reminded me so much of a shanty town I saw grow from its origins, Villa Ingeniero Bunge. The place used to be a two square kilometer empty lot of land in an industrial district of the southern city suburbs. Once the political decision was made and the word got out that it was ok to squat the land, within hours people started showing up setting up tents. By the next day the 2 square kilometers where full of tents. When you drove by after the sun went down you could see the different fires people made to cook and stay warm. A month later most had already starting building shacks with corrugated metal, plywood, plastic sheet and cardboard, the late comers being some of the few still living in tents. They would illegally connect to the electric grid, so you could see thousands of light bulbs all over the area. A year later most people had managed to build brick and mortar structures, just a room or two, and they soon demanded to have sewers and water connections. The fact that they built on floodable ground that was never meant for housing just made conditions more miserable. more