Obamavilles? Shantytowns Pop Up Around Nation?

While some folks don't think that this is a mirage and that some cities have faced this situation for years at a time, it is undeniable that many of these cities have encouraged homelessness and sport unemployment figures that are twice the national average even in good times.

Reports about how these shantytowns have sprung up are creeping into news reports, including the New York Times.

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. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

In Seattle, homeless residents in the city’s 100-person encampment call it Nickelsville, an unflattering reference to the mayor, Greg Nickels. A tent city in Sacramento prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce a plan Wednesday to shift the entire 125-person encampment to a nearby fairground. That came after a recent visit by “The Oprah Winfrey Show” set off such a news media stampede that some fed-up homeless people complained of overexposure and said they just wanted to be left alone.

The problem in Fresno is different in that it is both chronic and largely outside the national limelight. Homelessness here has long been fed by the ups and downs in seasonal and subsistence jobs in agriculture, but now the recession has cast a wider net and drawn in hundreds of the newly homeless — from hitchhikers to truck drivers to electricians.

“These are able-bodied folks that did day labor, at minimum wage or better, who were previously able to house themselves based on their income,” said Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group based in Washington.

The surging number of homeless people in Fresno, a city of 500,000 people, has been a surprise. City officials say they have three major encampments near downtown and smaller settlements along two highways. All told, as many 2,000 people are homeless here, according to Gregory Barfield, the city’s homeless prevention and policy manager, who said that drug use, prostitution and violence were all too common in the encampments.

It shouldn't come as a surprise in places like Fresno. The homelessness issue is one that is the result of political choices made by the local governments that encourage homelessness through the economic policies and practices. That speaks volumes over the political choices made by the elected leaders. Increasing the minimum wage has meant that people who were formerly employed in those jobs may now face loss of their jobs because their employers can't afford to pay the higher wages, increased taxes, and maintain the same staffing levels. Higher unemployment rates can be traced to the higher minimum wages.

Gov. Schwarzenegger, instead of taking a zero tolerance approach and demanding that these people be placed in shelters, is setting the stage to making the situation permanent by allowing the group to take up residence on the state fairgrounds. How is that a solution to the problem? He's just shuffling these people around.

Meanwhile, the situation in places like San Francisco and Seattle are the result of government policies that tolerate homelessness and encourage homeless people from other jurisdictions to come. My own experience in Seattle finds that quite a few of these homeless are mentally ill and unstable and need medical care, rather than being on the streets where they can menace people and cause harm to themselves or others (particularly around Pioneer Square). The policies by the local governments are anything but humane and just; they're tolerating lawlessness and do not address the core reasons why these people are on the street in the first place. Unaffordable housing as a result of government policies that restrict construction of housing and pushing to expand lending to those who are incapable of repaying their obligations means that prices rose unnaturally.

It's all about the unintended consequences.

Writing of unintended consequences, there's this: registry requirements for sex offenders that leads those offenders to conclude that going homeless is a way to avoid ostracism and may actually make communities less safe.

Nice.