Do You Know What A “Tent City” Is?
Posted by yannick on March 20, 2008
I’d never heard of one, until seeing this fairly shocking video from the BBC: (found via Joel Burslem)
Turns out there’s a Wikipedia entry for “Tent City“, which makes it sound almost quasi-legitimate, like in a natural disaster or military context. But really, we’re talking about another form of shantytown or favela.
The video is emotionally impressive, but it’s hard to tell whether this is balanced reporting on a real, worrying trend, or just sensationalist journalism. Somehow I got skeptical about the piece when seeing an image of an American flag in big focus, almost like the journalist was trying to make some political statement…was that really necessary?
Another thing that doesn’t make much sense to me: if you lose your house because the payments went up and became unaffordable, presumably you would simply go from homeowner to homerenter. For you to become outright homeless, you’d have to lose your job. So we’re talking about two separate problems, foreclosures lowering the American home ownership rate, and rising unemployment making more Americans homeless. Somehow, this news piece mixes both issues when it might have made more sense to consider them separately.
March 24, 2008 at 6:28 pm
The Subprime Crisis is Just Starting
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/amerman/2008/0320.html
March 26, 2008 at 9:20 pm
from a renter in Orange County in Southern California, U.S.A.: no tent cities in my hood yet, though this area has a high foreclosure rate. What *is* happening is that rents are going so high so fast that I’m losing renting neighbors who can’t keep up any longer. Our monthly rent for a one bedroom apartment exceeds my sister/brother-in-law’s mortgage payments per month for their five-bedroom house less than a mile away. No kidding.
U.S. media I’ve been exposed to (no TV, sorry — don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse here) seems more defensive, more concerned with who is ultimately responsible for the bad loans, and what an appropriate response to the crisis might be. I haven’t heard any compassionate or dramatic coverage of families going homeless because of this. There may be some embarrassment here.
March 30, 2008 at 5:23 pm
That’s surreal- apparently the same has been happening in the UK- people putting off buying or selling high in order to rent are spiking demand for rental properties and sending rents soaring.
Not a great situation…