Being homeless on Cape Cod is no picnic

The first homeless person I ever met on Cape Cod was more than 15 years ago, when my daughters and I were camping at Nickerson State Park. He was on crutches, a carpenter hurt on the job, and he and his wife had been moving from campsite to campsite.

"I'm not really homeless," he told me. "Nine months of the year I rent a house in Orleans. But the other three months we have to go somewhere else, because my landlord can get in one week what I pay her a month."

Back in 1990, Nickerson's was first-come, first-served; there was a two week maximum on how long campers could stay. But in this family's case, the rangers looked the other way when they'd re-register and move their tent and gear to another site. To me it seemed tedious but doable.

Fifteen years later homelessness on Cape Cod has gotten bad enough that rancor runs high between the business community and the homeless and providers. A public hearing in Hyannis earlier this week resulted in some name-calling, with Cynthia Cole, the head of the Businesss Improvement District shouting, ""Why don't you go back to work?" at a homeless woman, and a homeless man telling a homeowner whose house had been broken into (she assumes by a homeless person) to "Take a valium." Cape Cod Times. Other residents consider the homeless to be "washashore" people attracted by a Field of Dreams-- the "if you built it, they will come" state of being that can only be ended by eliminating services for homeless people.

Homeless providers say the shelters in Hyannis are very low-key and that shelters are not the problem. Indeed, it seems to be a small number of street people, maybe twenty, on whom complaints most focus. Homeless single people with severe mental health or addiction prolems are not welcome at most shelters. But shelters are full and many people on the street just have nowhere to go. The Leadership Council to End Homelessness on Cape Cod and the Islands has counted 43 family members and 64 individuals living who are homeless and unsheltered.

Hyannis businesspeople want homeless services "decentralized," saying Hyannis bears a disproportionate share of the responsibility. Of course this is the mantra of every metropolitan area, many of whose citizens seem to think that if the shelters disappeared, homeless people would disappear also.

Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, who was in Hyannis yesterday to announce a $2 million, five year grant to assist the region with its Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, suggested cooperation rather than conflict might serve the region better. Mangano's focus for the last six years has been on "Housing First"-- get the chronic users of homeless services into housing and provide supportive services to help keep them stabilized. A few communities, like my home city Springfield, MA, have started working to integrate "crisis" homelessness into their "chronic" homelessness plan. All possible successes, however, begin with a supply of affordable housing, scarce everythere but rare on Cape Cod.

Joe Burns, a columnist with the Bourne Courier, remembers growing up a in working class neighborhood of storefront businesses with apartments upstairs, row housing and railroad flats It was a real neighborhood and it was affordable for regular people. But those neighborhoods are gone, and the mention of affordable housing sends ripples of fear through the homeowning community. That fear is built on on the grey, sprawling, almost prison-style affordable housing that was the federal model for so many years. Burns calls for a "back to square one" approach that uses what would now be called "smart growth" to build affordable housing and community at the same time.

Affordable housing is housing that has a realistic relationship with the average family income in a given area, something that even within the current downturn in property values is not often found on the market. Affordable housing is the foundation of our economic pyramid, one that is straining as a result of the economic imbalance at the top

In the past 25 years housing prices have increased tenfold. Family incomes haven’t come close to keeping pace. And as incomes shrink as the result of inflation, salary freezes and unemployment, the disparity grows greater. And as it does it’s becoming increasingly clear that there that there is no “them” there’s only “us”— the seniors on fixed incomes and shrinking retirement funds, the families trying to meet mortgage payments while the value of the earnings and their home decreases, the single parent trying to rent a house with financial assistance that pays only a pittance of the actual cost, the growing number of jobless and homeless. Every man, woman and child hurt by years of corporate greed and federal incompetence and irresponsibility. It’s you and me drowning in a sea of unaffordability.

Photo from Cape Cod Cyclist's photostream at Flickr.

Is homelessness really down? You be the judge

Is homelessness decreasing? The Department of Housing and Urban Development says so; this week HUD announced that chronic homelessness decreased by 30 percent between 2005 and 2007, resulting in 52,000 people who used to be homeless now housed..

The credit goes largely to the Interagency Council on Homelessness, headed by Philip Mangano, which has involved hundreds of cities in developing ten year plans to end chronic homelessness. We've certainly needed a national strategy on homelessness, and Mangano is a sincere guy. Still, he's working in the middle of an federal administration that not only has not produced new affordable housing, but whose less than benign neglect of the Federal Reserve, Wall St. and housing speculators has lead to an unprecedented foreclosure crisis. What's wrong with this picture?

So how did we get this reduction in homelessness? At least part of the reason is that HUD has changed its definition of homelessness! This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. I remember when it was standard operating procedure in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to generate regulations limiting eligibility for family shelter. Then, the commonwealth could claim that family homelessness was down and they actually closed some shelters! The author of Blog de Ford has participated in HUD's annual homeless count and decries the surveying method.

Much of the Interagency's strategy for reducing homelessness is built around the concept of Housing First. Ironically, that's what homeless advocates from Mitch Snyder's day onward have been saying. But we meant new housing, not just shuffling poor people around. Joel John Roberts at LA's Homeless Blog has this to say:

Logic tells us that the only way to truly reduce the number of people who are homeless on the streets is to place them in permanent housing—preferably “Permanent Supportive Housing”, housing linked to support services.

So did Los Angeles build 17,000 Permanent Supportive Housing units in two years? Give me a break. With the loss of existing low income housing (converted to market rate housing) and the building of new affordable housing units, LA barely broke even. And this was for low-income housing, not housing for the homeless.

Philadelphia bucked the purported national trend; homelessness increased. Mayor Nutter plans to spend $8.3 million to create 200 units of new housing for those "hardest to reach," but then plans to use 500 public housing units for other homeless, putting them ahead of desperately poor people who are trying to avoid homelessness by getting into affordable housing.
Ventura County, CA hasn't seen a decrease in homelessness. Utah's numbers are actually going up. Numbers are down on Long Island but Connie Lassandro, Nassau County's director of housing and homeless services, says

"The numbers are down ... because there were restrictions put on us....Obviously [HUD] is thrilled because they see the number is down. It's all about funding. If the numbers are down, they can say the need's not there."

Asked about the change yesterday, Johnston said interviews were not required. He said the decreases came as thousands of HUD-funded housing for the homeless became available. "We really believe these numbers," he said.

A HUD slide show on conducting the 2007 counts said interviews were "preferable" and instructed counters to "always ask about homelessness." Guidelines HUD sent out said: "Without interview information, communities will not be able to accomplish several things that HUD is requiring."

Long Island homeless advocates said HUD declined to tell them, in writing, that interviews were not required.Newsday.

I've worked with homeless people for many years and been homeless myself. I'm more likely to believe that fewer people are homeless when we have more jobs and more affordable housing. Still waiting.

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News roundup from homeless and poverty blogs

New Orleans: The 13th Juror reports that Phil Mangano, executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, is not happy with Mayor Nagle's plan relocating homeless people from under a bridge into a large, barracks-like tent, and would prefer him to focus on long-term solutions...wonder why he was so quiet when the decision was made to tear down hundred of units of public housing. Tulane students are tracking new in New Orleans at their blog, Homeless of New Orleans. I got an email this week from the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. Their national coordinator Cheri Honkala (I should say "our" national coordinator, seeing as Arise is a part of PPEHRC) had charges of impersonating an officer dismissed in court this week; fellow PPEHRC organizer JR Fleming, Chicago Coalition to Protect Public Housing, still has charges pending.

Nashvillian Kevin Barbieux' site The Homeless Guy is running a survey on whether liquor stores should sell alcohol to alcoholics. Stop in and vote. At Humanity for Homeless, you can sign a petition protesting the City of Santa Cruz CA's new 15 minute parking lot law. Lots of good organizing going on in Santa Cruz.Text from the petition:

• Anyone who remains in a Public Santa Cruz parking lot for longer than fifteen minutes, regardless if you have a car or bike on premises is in violation of the new Parking Lot Trespass law and is guilty of trespassing, punishable as an infraction with a fine ranging from $100-$200.
• This means no napping or reading in your car, no resting while your other half shops, no sleeping off too much to drink. No associating with others on land we all collectively own. This stifles free speech and assembly rights and is unconstitutional in nature.
• These types of laws lead to "No speech zones" with small inadequate "Free Speech Zones" nearby -- in a Country where Free Speech is supposed to be a basic right human right we all equally share.

Over at Chosen Fast, Guilford County North Carolina's Point in Time Count shows the homeless population was 981, a drop of 33 people over last year's 1014-- but a real decrease in the number of people going unsheltered.
Cleveland Homeless reports homeless folks not faring too well: "The FAA and Department of Homeland Security closed Aviation High School as the Overflow Shelter for homeless men in Cleveland on February 1, 2008. With the snow and the cold this week, how have homeless people faired since this decision was implemented? 2100 Lakeside shelter is bursting at the seams, and on Thursday February 21, 2008, 25 guys waited throughout the night for a bed to open."

I'll save more news for another post, but there's a blog really worth checking out and reading regularly: Save Feral Human Habitat. This blog from British Columbia is " about what’s happening, what we’re doing and what we could be doing. It’s about freedom of speech and the decriminalization of dissent. It’s about our right to eat and our right to sleep. It’s about the struggles right here in our communities to protect the land we live on and to protect the basic human rights of the people in our community. among other things " Treesitter photo from their site.
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Whose regional homeless plan is it, anyway?

Springfield, Holyoke and Northampton MA mayors will be presenting their "Pioneer Valley Plan to End Homelessness: All Roads Lead Home" on Friday, February 29 at the Holyoke Community College, 9:30 - 12:30 in the Peoples Bank room at the Kittridge Center. "Legislators, State and Local agencies, service and housing providers, community groups, business leaders and the faith community are encouraged to attend," according to an email I got.

No mention of homeless people, of course, but that's par for the course.

Our old friend Phil Mangano, Executive Director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness will be the keynote speaker-- the same guy who promotes Ten Year Plans without ever mentioning that the man he works for, George Bush, continues to decimate housing opportunities. Will he change his tune now that the Presidential election is approaching, and actually say we need more housing?

I'm trying not to be cynical, here-- communities working together to end homelessness is a brand new phenomenon in this region-- but will we be skating on thin ice or really plumbing the depths of this crisis?

Another homeless death-- while vouchers cut and the Governor plans shelter closings

40 year old Timothy Curtiss was found dead in Springfield, Massachusetts this morning by the banks of the Connecticut River-- a not uncommon place in this city for homeless people to die. Mr. Curtiss had most recently stayed at the Springfield Rescue Mission, but left the shelter last evening and didn't return, according to Gerry McCafferty, Deputy Director of Housing, in an email this afternoon. The police say his death appears to be from natural causes.

Just how natural can the death of a homeless person be?

It was lousy weather yesterday-- cold and it rained all day and the ground was saturated-- not the kind of night that a homeless person might choose to spend outside instead of in a shelter.

Was Mr. Curtiss intoxicated? If so, he would have had to leave the Rescue Mission-- you have to be sober to stay there. Was he too tired and cold to walk up the hill to Worthington St. Shelter, or had he been banned? If so, he was out of luck and out of shelter options and his life dwindled down to a matter of hours.

I was writing earlier this week about the decline in homelessness in Springfield-- two fewer people this year than in 2006. Today, reading about Mr. Curtiss, it hit me that if a couple of dozen homeless people hadn't died in the last two years, we would have seen an increase, not a decrease. If only Mr. Curtiss had been accommodating enough to die 30 days earlier, he would have been one less homeless person to be counted in the Annual Point-in-Time count.

The craziness of our strategies for solving homelessness continue to blow me away. Springfield gets its model of ending homelessness from Phil Mangano, head of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and flunky for the Bush Administration. When Mangano was in Springfield talking about how wonderful our Ten Year Plan for Ending Homelessness is, he neglected to mention how Bush had slashed funding for affordable housing. Because Springfield has chosen to focus on those so-called 10% who are "chronically homeless," that is, those people who have multiple issues playing into their homelessness-- the real lack of affordable housing in Springfield hasn't yet been a stumbling block for the Ten Year Plan. Twenty-two homeless people have been placed into housing, with plans for more-- don't remember the exact number.

But what happens to the other 90% of homeless people who need help?

Governor Patrick is out with a "Five Year" plan to end homelessness in the Commonwealth. He will start by decommissioning 20% of the shelter beds in the first year, and using the saved money to help people retain the housing they're in or find other affordable housing. Sounds good, doesn't it? Yet my experience tells me that as the state and the city move toward tighter control of homeless services, statistics and strategies, the real truth of the situation, the real solutions, will be buried under the muck of rhetoric and self-congratulation.

Photo from Stoneth at Flickr

What's wrong with Springfield's homeless plans

I don't usually reprint an entire article, but this one is just too good...really puts a finger on the flaws in Phil Mangano's plans to end homelessness.

I will never forget sitting at the back of the room at Mayor Ryan's press conference about Springfield's ten year plan, and listening to Bush appointee Phil Mangano congratulate the city. The irony of a guy representing an administration that has decimated housing opportunities talking about ending chronic homelessness seemed to be lost on our public officials.

Seems they forgot the reason it’s called home-less-ness

By Paul Boden, Contributing columnist

The Republicans may have lost control of Congress, but they still maintain a tight rein on homeless policy and the public perception of homelessness. The House and Senate can change and change again, but thanks to the tireless efforts of the White House, Department of Housing and Urban Development and National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), the acknowledged “experts” on homelessness still are Phil Mangano with his traveling minstrel show, HUD with their federally funded studies, and White House award winning NAEH with their compassionate conservative approach to “ending homelessness.”

Immediately after last November’s elections, NAEH and Mangano (head of Bush’s Interagency Council on Homelessness) embarked upon editorial board tours around the country, to ensure that the administration’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness initiative would continue to be perceived as the One True Way to address homelessness. Their message is clear — that homelessness as we know it today is not caused by the lack of affordable housing, but by the failures of a few bottom-feeding individuals and emergency service programs.

They steer clear of the federal government’s refusal to preserve and promote affordable housing. Instead, they promote yet another set of plans to be created by communities already in competition with each other over scraps from their HUD master’s table. There are more than 470 Homeless Planning Boards as well as more than 200 10-Year Plans already in place, all competing for the biggest piece of the less than $1.4 billion HUD is allocated to dole out for homelessness assistance.

“$100 million has been added to homeless assistance!” they say, “George Bush cares, he really do.”

They don’t mention the $290 million cut from public housing operating expenses, or the thousands of security and maintenance workers laid-off from Public Housing Authorities, or the vacant units being sold off rather than renovated and rented to poor people. They don’t talk about the 100,000 public housing units lost between 1996 and 2005 nationwide. They certainly don’t talk about the zero funding for new public housing since 1996, and they are a bit reticent about the 4,000 undamaged public housing units being demolished in New Orleans along with those that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Chronic homelessness, they say, is the problem. Worry not, because once we solve that, we’ll get back to the other 90 percent of you poor schmucks without housing.

In the meantime, what we need are more plans in place to deal with us poor schmucks when we become chronic. And, they have even thoughtfully provided a step-by-step guide to writing effective 10-Year Plans, to help plan writers secure funds to alleviate the “visible impact” of “chronic homelessness” on their “community’s safety and attractiveness.” And in the meantime, the thousands of poor people and families losing their housing every year should just tough it out, (or perhaps chill out and smoke some “chronic”) until the chronics are under control.

In the meantime, housing subsidies are better directed toward mortgage lenders and wealthier households, to the tune of $122 billion a year; those pesky poor people looking for a place to rent can make do with the less than $30 billion, and decreasing, allocated to HUD.

Besides, housing has nothing to do with homelessness. HUD pays experts to write reports proving conclusively that what homeless people really need is biometric tracking, life skills training and leased single resident occupancy rooms with case managers in the front office, and they need 10-Year Plans to be written for them.

It’s funny that once upon a time, our federal government created HUD, a Social Security system, and the Works Progress Administration — all without having to write a single 10-Year Plan, and these programs actually worked!

2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the federal government’s primary response to contemporary homelessness, the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. The money provided by this act has become the lifeblood of National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Interagency Council on Homelessness as they promote the chronic homeless initiative and mobilize a policy movement in support of itself. After 20 years of writing plan after plan after plan on how “best” to spend McKinney money and “end homelessness,” there hasn’t been one damn plan to restore the cuts to federal funding for affordable housing, which is, after all, what got us here in the first place.

Tell Congress, tell the White House, tell your mama and your papa too. Say it to anyone who will listen and write it to those who won't. Nothing ends homelessness like a home.

Paul Boden is director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), based in San Francisco, and a leading activist against homelessness.

WRAP is a collaboration between six community organizations in California, Oregon and Washington, and the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness.

WRAP’s members recently released an 88-page illustrated report titled “Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures.” A PDF file of the report can be downloaded for free at wraphome.org. From Street Roots.

A different take on Phil Mangano

Bush's "Homeless Czar" tours Canada

Philip Mangano's remedies sound positive but are punitive in practice.

Dateline: Tuesday, June 19, 2007

by Cathy Crowe

Philip Mangano, appointed by President George Bush in 2002 as the Executive Director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, is not content to contain his work to the United States' problems of epidemic levels of homelessness; instead he is spending an unusual amount of time in Canada promoting the American method of dealing with the "chronic homeless". Mr Mangano has recently been in Vancouver, Calgary (three times since winter), Red Deer, Toronto, Ottawa (he's returning in August) and Montreal, preaching the notion of a "Ten Year" plan to end homelessness with the seemingly positive message of "housing first." The underlying principles of "housing first" however, are ensuring a reduction in reliance and dependence on shelters and emergency services, targeting the "chronics", and creating a business plan with measurable and cost-effective outcomes.

In response to my February 2007 Newsletter entitled Dismantling Downtown, Mr Mangano sent me an email where he modestly noted, "Your recent reference to my potential impact in Toronto, I fear, is a bit exaggerated. While I have spoken there and met briefly with the Mayor, as of this date I am unaware of any jurisdictionally led, community based ten year planning effort there". He went on to say, "I am sorry that apparently your city, like Los Angeles, has not yet adopted a Ten Year Plan or engaged in Project Homeless Connect which are the innovative initiatives that we have disseminated across our country."

Mangano's policies involve "Weapons of Mass Displacement" that sweep homeless people out of sight.

Mr Mangano shouldn't be so modest. He recently spoke to 2,000 people in attendance at the Big City Mayors Caucus (BCMC) of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. BCMC member cities include Vancouver, Surrey, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Brampton, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, Mississauga, Ottawa, Windsor, Toronto, Gatineau, Montréal, Laval, Québec, Longueuil, Halifax and St John's. The City of Toronto has just announced it is developing a 10-year Affordable Housing Action Framework: 2008 - 2018.

Michael Shapcott and I had a chance to hear Mr Mangano in Calgary earlier in May. He really is a remarkable speaker — you could almost say evangelical — preaching the issues of health, economics and the social evils of homelessness. The trouble is that the American approach is obviously not working. It's a game of smoke and mirrors. So why on earth are our municipal and national leaders looking to the United States for solutions on homelessness?

As Michael Shapcott explains: "So, what's wrong with this picture? While Mangano has been piling up frequent flier points visiting every part of the US to convince state and local governments that they need to take up the responsibility for a "housing first" policy for the homeless, his political boss — President Bush — has been gutting the US federal government's funding for housing. This year alone, there are massive cuts to seniors' supportive housing and disabled housing funding. The US federal housing program for people with AIDS will help about 67,000 people this year — yet an estimated 500,000 people living with HIV / AIDS desperately need housing help.

The problem is so bad that even the rather staid Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University has proclaimed in its latest annual State of the Nation's Housing that affordable housing and homelessness have reached their worst levels ever, and funding cuts by the federal government are the chief culprit.

While Canadian cities are looking at the Bush administration's approach to homelessness, the fact that the Bush administration is cutting funding to housing seems lost on Mangano's Canadian hosts. American homeless advocacy organizations in the US such as the National Coalition for the Homeless report this decade as being worse than the Great Depression for homeless people. In addition, the United States is increasingly relying on what has been dubbed "Weapons of Mass Displacement" — policies and funding decisions that limit necessary life-saving supports and spaces for people who are homeless. For example "no-feeding laws" in some American parks, increased policing and ticketing measures in downtown cores, street sweeps, removing public benches, closing public parks at night, using public works trucks to hose sleeping people down, fingerprinting homeless people who use certain shelters, all practices that create further hardships and worsen displacement.

As my friend, and documentary filmmaker Laura Sky notes, "Mangano is charismatic and compelling in naming our own collective wish — a home for every resident. At the same time, his solutions are part and parcel of the conservative federal, provincial and municipal policies that brought us the problems we're experiencing right now. The mantra of those policies is: cut services, they're inefficient; cut supports, they're too expensive; eliminate shelters, they're a blight on our cities. We need housing instead, the argument goes — at the expense of support for those who will be swept into that housing. All this without addressing the economic and social conditions, which create the need for shelters.

In Canada it's the same thing. We are witnessing an almost fetishized emphasis on research, including street counts and investigations into panhandlers' needs, new by-laws against panhandling and by-laws restricting where homeless people can sleep, reduction of funding to programs that do outreach to people who are homeless, and a withdrawal of funding for emergency day and night shelters. Toronto alone has lost over 300 shelter beds just this past winter and it continues to rely on its Streets to Homes program as an answer to visible street homelessness. There are many reports that people who are housed through this program suffer greatly from hunger and isolation and remain at great risk of becoming or do become homeless again.

The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee recently held a press conference to release new findings on Toronto's Streets to Homes program including the findings of their investigative trip to New York City, which was hosted by the National Coalition for the Homeless. Excerpts from the press conference can be downloaded here courtesy of John Bonnar.

Journalist Linda McQuaig, in a recent Toronto Star article titled "Wrong way to end homelessness", compared the Bush-Mangano model of weaning people who are homeless off temporary shelter and food supports and moving them into housing to Toronto's Streets to Homes program which emphasizes focusing energies on the visible street homeless without the supports to make the housing work.

For more on Mangano and the US housing scene, check out the Wellesley Institute backgrounder posted in the housing and homelessness section at the web site below.

Cathy Crowe, Street Nurse, is co-founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee and is currently a citizen member of the Toronto Board of Health. She is a recent recipient of the Atkinson Economic Justice Fellowship.

Related addresses:

URL 1: www.wellesleyinstitute.com
URL 2: tdrc.net/index.php?page=cathy-crowe

Gainseville Tent City - guess who said this?

llenge for cities around our country has been to capture the [sense of] community and the camaraderie that often occurs in a tent city, that self-organizing principle that takes place. We need to ensure that we keep a good grip on ... the effectiveness of organizing that the homeless people themselves have done, but to then transfer that to housing that provides security they need."

It's Phil Mangano, executive director of the federal Interagency Office on Homelessness, and promoter of the Ten Year Plans to end homelessness that some 300 cities are now in various stages of designing and implementing. His statement is right on target with what I saw at Springfield's Sanctuary City. Thanks to the 13th Juror for finding this quote. Phil Mangano, in his trip to Springfield for our plan's kick-off, said we had one of the best plans he'd seen. Of course, I'll bet he says that to all the cities.

I talked to Gerry McCafferty today about the 100 vouchers (starting to take on a mythical nature, like the Hundred Blows or the Hundred Year War) that are supposed to make a serious dent in our homeless population and make the Warming Place shelter unnecessary.. Thirteen apartments will be ready to rent in July and another 30 are supposed to be ready between July and September. So we are way behind.

On the good side, Gerry says the city will now be looking for service providers willing to buy small buildings-- 6 to 8 units-- to provide both housing and services to the homeless folks who occupy them. The best thing about this is not the idea per se (great in theory, devil in the details) but that the city is willing to develop new strategies where older one haven't fit the bill.

Back to tent city-- The Gainseville Sun has done two excellent articles about why homeless people form tent cities, what they get out of it, their impact on the broader community and their future. Redjenny has a post about Edmunton, Alberta's homeless encampments. The photo is from her site.