Patrik Jonsson writes at The Christian Science Monitor:
For more hard-pressed Americans, a campsite is home
As cities from Sacramento, Calif., to Tampa, Fla., debate the merits of tent cities to house newly homeless people (many of them young families), this recession is starting to yield scenes that evoke the Great Depression, especially at places like Timberline Campground in Lebanon, Tenn.
Living in well-worn campers and tent compounds overstretched with 20-foot-long tarps, 85 percent of residents here are permanent, a good chunk of them "economic refugees." It’s an increasingly familiar scene across the country as campgrounds, RV parks, national parks, and city-owned pockets become inundated with permanent campers, and as entire tent cities spring up and expand, with some hinting at permanence by voting on village bylaws.
"It’s not quite Hoovervilles, but it’s getting there," says Leonard Heumann, a housing policy professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, referencing the massive tent cities and shantytowns erected during the Great Depression. ...
The National Alliance to Prevent Homelessness (NAPH) estimates that this recession will create 1.5 million new homeless – nearly double the current number. Half of those people will exist outside the shelter system – in cars, tents, campers, or sleeping bags under highway overpasses.
There is good reason to believe that the foreclosure wave still sweeping the nation will get deeper and wider over the next few months. In the 2nd quarter ending in June, one of every three foreclosures was tied to a prime, fixed-rate loan. For the same quarter of 2008, it was one of five. With unemployment still rising, hundreds of thousands more Americans may soon find themselves camping out. And not because they enjoy a good picnic. Under traditional definitions, the recession may well be technically over, but practically speaking, for millions of Americans, the worst is yet to come.