Just like during the last economic crisis, homeless encampments are popping up all over the nation as poverty grows at a very alarming rate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half a million people are homeless in America right now, but that figure is increasing by the day. And it isn’t just adults that we are talking about. It has been reported that that the number of homeless children in this country has risen by 60 percent since the last recession, and Poverty USA says that a total of 1.6 million children slept either in a homeless shelter or in some other form of emergency housing at some point last year. Yes, the stock market may have been experiencing a temporary boom for the last couple of years, but for those on the low end of the economic scale things have just continued to deteriorate.
Tonight, countless numbers of homeless people will try to make it through another chilly night in large tent cities that have been established in the heart of major cities such as Seattle, Washington, D.C. and St. Louis. Homelessness has gotten so bad in California that the L.A. City Council has formally asked Governor Jerry Brown to officially declare a state of emergency. And in Portland the city has extended their “homeless emergency” for yet another year, and city officials are really struggling with how to deal with the booming tent cities that have sprung up…
There have always been homeless people in Portland, but last summer Michelle Cardinal noticed a change outside her office doors.
Almost overnight, it seemed, tents popped up in the park that runs like a green carpet past the offices of her national advertising business. She saw assaults, drug deals and prostitution. Every morning, she said, she cleaned human feces off the doorstep and picked up used needles.
“It started in June and by July it was full-blown. The park was mobbed,” she said. “We’ve got a problem here and the question is how we’re going to deal with it.”
But of course it isn’t just Portland that is experiencing this. The following list of major tent cities that have become so well-known and established that they have been given names comes from Wikipedia…
- Camp Hope, Las Cruces, New Mexico [1]
- Camp Quixote, Olympia, Washington State[2]
- Camp Take Notice, Ann Arbor, Michigan[3]
- Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon
- Opportunity Village, Eugene, Oregon
- Maricopa County Sheriff’s Tent City, Phoenix, Arizona
- New Jack City and Little Tijuana, Fresno, California[2]
- Nickelsville, located in Seattle[2][4]
- Right 2 Dream Too, Portland, Oregon[5]
- River Haven,[6] Ventura County, California[7][8]
- Safe Ground, Sacramento, California[2]
- The Jungle, San Jose, California[2]
- Temporary Homeless Service Area (THSA), Ontario, California[2]
- Tent City (100+ residents) of Lakewood, New Jersey[9][10]
- Tent City, Avenue A and 13th Street, Lubbock, Texas[11]
- Tent City, New Jersey forest[12]
- Tent City, Bernalillo County, New Mexico[13]
- Tent City, banks of the American River, Sacramento, California[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]
- Tent City 3, Seattle
- Tent City, Chicago, Illinois [1]
- Tent City 4, eastern King County outside of Seattle
- The Point, where the Gunnison River and Colorado River meet[23]
- The Village of Hope and Community of Hope, Fresno, California[2]
- Transition Park, Camden, New Jersey
- Tent City, Fayette County, Tennessee, [2]
- Camp Unity Eastside, Woodinville, WA [3]
- China Hat Road, Bend, Oregon
Most of the time, those who establish tent cities do not want to be discovered because local authorities have a nasty habit of shutting them down and forcing homeless people out of the area. For example, check out what just happened in Elkhart, Indiana…
A group of homeless people in Elkhart has been asked to leave the place they call home. For the last time, residents of ‘Tent City’ packed up camp.
City officials gave residents just over a month to vacate the wooded area; Wednesday being the last day to do so.
The property has been on Mayor Tim Neese’s radar since he took office in January, calling it both a safety and health hazard to its residents and nearby pedestrian traffic.
“This has been their home but you can’t live on public property,” said Mayor Tim Neese, Elkhart.
If they can’t live on “public property,” where are they supposed to go?
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They certainly can’t live on somebody’s “private property.”
This is the problem – people don’t want to deal with the human feces, the needles, the crime and the other problems that homeless people often bring with them. So the instinct is often to kick them out and send them away.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t fix the problem. It just passes it on to someone else.
As this new economic downturn continues to accelerate, our homelessness boom is going to spiral out of control. Pretty soon, there will be tent cities in virtually every community in America.
In fact, there are people that are living comfortable middle-class lifestyles right at this moment who will end up in tents. We saw this during the last economic crisis, and it will be even worse as this next one unfolds.
Just like last time around, the signs that the middle class is really struggling can be subtle at first, but when you learn to take note of them you will notice that they are all around you. The following comes from an excellent article in the New York Post…
Do you see grocery stores closing? Do you see other retailers, like clothing stores and department stores, going out of business?
Are there shuttered storefronts along your Main Street shopping district, where you bought a tool from the hardware store or dropped off your dry cleaning or bought fruits and vegetables?
Are you making as much money annually as you did 10 years ago?
Do you see homes in neighborhoods becoming run down as the residents either were foreclosed upon, or the owner lost his or her job so he or she can’t afford to cut the grass or paint the house?
Did that same house where the Joneses once lived now become a rental property, where new people come to live every few months?
Do you know one or two people who are looking for work? Maybe professionals, who you thought were safe in their jobs?
Don’t look down on those who are living in tents, because the truth is that many “middle class Americans” will ultimately end up joining them.
The correct response to those who are hurting is love and compassion. We all need help at some point in our lives, and I know that I am certainly grateful to those who have given me a helping hand at various points along my journey.
Sadly, hearts are growing cold all over the nation, and the weather is only going to get colder over the months ahead. Let us pray for health and safety for the hundreds of thousands of Americans that will be sleeping in tents and on the streets this winter.
Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
The ramifications of this are truly frightening. America will wish it had dealt with the issue of the Fed and corporations destroying our nation when we had the opportunity to do it peacefully.
Very true and it appears the bankers are about to become even more powerful (see my post). We’re losing what little was left of our representation in economic decisions.
JFK was about to
I would think the very next blade across our throats will be dual citizen – ordered Judas Class carried out theft of assets – as with (un)civil forfeiture, it will be THE LAW and will probably do one or more of the following;
Change our currency and force their beloved citizens to “trade” a lesser amount of “new currency” for a larger amount of “old”.
demand we spend a percentage of our private retirement accounts on useless FED RES bonds/notes.
This will include the pittance they give us from the bled-dry Social (in)security.
Increase taxes and/or the percentage on existing taxes.
Through the propaganda machine called kosher media, they’ll tell us it’s China’s fault – THEY did it to us! Let’s GET THEM! – China did nothing wrong…. The JUDAS CLASS working for their dual citizens threw open the doors to our assets and smiling sweetly, stepped aside.
The price of a DUI after getting stopped for a shabby car with one of many bulbs/lights not working, and after consuming 3 beers after work, can financially finish off any already struggling citizen, and it could make one homeless. The cost of a DUI for someone with a $12,000 annual income is devastating compared to a DUI for someone who earns $50k, or even less, the higher your income, not even mentioning that ones chances of getting stopped go way down if you are driving a nice new(expensive) car with no problems, like even a light not working.
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, they can barely afford high insurance deductibles in the event of a medical catastrophe. I saw yesterday the price of heating our homes this winter will likely be a lot higher, natural gas rates have gone up as much as 75% in the US – – – it’s all going towards hand-to-mouth with more people dependent on govt subsidies to get by.
mark my words, the culling will begin in our lifetimes.
oh yes, we are on the start line now in the best case scenario..
Maybe it’s already here in the form of the soft kill…moving on the mandatory CDC injections to sterilize the masses.
A fairly radical plan is in the works to slow or arrest the debt / consumer contraction in the west – it primarily involves central planners in Japan/US/Europe stoking inflation. This is an open TRANSFER of economic policy from elected politicians to central banksters (beyond QE). WSJ 9/11/16: “Helicopter money…takes central banks beyond their traditional realm of influencing the price and volume of credit to determining how public money is spent—the domain of elected politicians.”
>This week Trump has said interest rates need to be higher and the current Fed policy is creating a “false stock market”
>>WSJ: Central Bank “independence could be hampering their ability to combat the current era’s problem: inflation that’s too low”…WSJ bemoans low interest rates and goes on to discuss options to pump inflation either though higher taxes to increase govt spending and / or to use helicopter money.
>>>Larry Summers is arguing for more entitlement spending, creating [artificial] scarcity to drive up prices, new govt policies to drive inflation, etc.
Regarding homelessness, the overall rate in the US has been declining, including the stats for 2015 falling from 18.3 in 2014 to 17.7 per 100K; the majority of states had decreases in every major subpopulation.
Perhaps the rate of increase of homeless children cited in this article is due to some communities incentivized to count more kids in their stats given HUD funding for homeless initiatives in each community (totaling billions) is determined by the number of homeless persons.
It’s still a travesty in a wealthy nation where banksters get $125M bonuses – just don’t get caught up in the extreme doomer view and lose sight of the roll out of a subservient public dependent on helicopter money.
All that planning from 50 years ago is beginning to pan out for the unholy unfed zentral bank vampires.
No one will own anything except them and they will say who gets water and where to fight the endless war of the military industrial complex, which brings misery and death to those crazy enough to volunteer.
Get you vaccines with the nagalase human immune system stoppers.
Eat your gmo kiddies, even monsatino will not allow their lab rat food in their cafeterias.
They are living off of the stolen wealth of the world whilst these tent folks struggle day to day.
I’m sure the police will be forced to bust heads and move them along, after all, it’s their ‘job’.
Central Banksters create electronic money from thin air using a few keystrokes. Their relatives, friends and cronies present newly created worthless bonds to Central Bank windows and receive electronic cash in return which they then use to buy assets like real estate, gold, yachts, Caribbean islands, etc.
Pretty soon, they own everything and we own nothing. This is the plan and so far it’s working because most Americans remain mesmerized by sports, Hollywood entertainment, cheap beer and Cheetos. The 2% of Zios are running us 98% into the ground and we just can’t get enough of it.
Tent City in Phoenix, Az is NOT a homeless shelter. It is Sheriff Joe Arpiehole’s gulag in which inmates, who are mostly people who don’t have the money to post out on bail. Arpiehiole brags that this place is a hellhole and that he is ‘teaching people a lesson.’. As if he is some Moral Authority! Temperatures here get into the triple digits on a regular basis and people have died of heatstroke and other medical issues in there. There are millions in lawsuits against this guy over the 20+ years he has been in office.