Thread: NYT; Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns

FRESNO, Calif. — As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless
here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen
before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The
next day, there were people living there.”

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu:
the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are
reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us...ts.html?_r=WRH