'Tent cities' of homeless on the rise across the US

Homeless encampments dubbed "tent cities" are springing up across the US, partly in response to soaring numbers of home repossessions, the credit crunch and rising unemployment, according to a report.

Homelessness, car camps and tent cities are certainly not new, but they are growing rapidly.

In Reno, Nevada, the state with the nation's highest repossessions rate, a tent city recently sprung up on the city's outskirts and quickly filled up with about 150 people. Many, such as Sylvia Flynn, 51, who came from northern California, ended up homeless after losing their jobs and home.

Officials say they do not know how many homeless the city has. "But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember," Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city's redevelopment agency director, said.

In California, the upmarket city of Santa Barbara is housing homeless people who live in their cars in city car parks while Fresno, has several tent cities. Others have sprung up in Portland in Oregon, and Seattle, where homeless activists have set up mock tent cities at city hall to draw attention to the problem.

Meanwhile, new encampments have appeared, or existing ones grown, in San Diego, Chattanooga in Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio.<Story>

Some quick internet searching uncovered many others, in Dallas, Olympia, L.A., Athens, Georgia, Columbus. Others, like Tenessee and St. Petersburg have been shut down.

MSNBC has a photo essay on a large tent city in Sacramento, juxtaposing it with the Sacramento tent city of the Great Depression.

There are homes sitting empty, while people have no place to live. Excess supply coexisting with excess demand. The invisible hand has failed these people.

Call for Submissions to Briarpatch

I like this magazine and it seems they are looking for submissions for their upcoming edition "How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession"

What if the economic recession we're presently experiencing
is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending
march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a
painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back
our footprint to a more sustainable level?

How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens
are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing
our society and economy around conservation and community
well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit?

The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental
transformation in every aspect of our lives -- our jobs, our
homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc.
It's certainly beyond the scope of a single issue of Briarpatch
to describe, but in our July/August 2009 issue, we hope to
sketch out some of the broad contours and specific
opportunities so our readers can get to work on the rest.

What principles should guide our efforts to reorganize our
lives and communities on a human scale? What initiatives
already underway deserve to be profiled, celebrated, and
imitated? What can we learn from what other people are doing
in other parts of the world? What books and films shed light
on the key issues and should be reviewed? How can our
efforts to cope with the global recession pave the way to
a more stable and sustainable future?

If you've got something to contribute to this discussion,
then we want to hear from you. We are looking for articles,
essays, investigative reportage, news briefs, project profiles,
interviews with luminary thinkers, reviews, poetry, humour,
artwork & photography that explore how we can unplug
from the growth machine and cope with the global recession.

We seek to cast a broad net in our approach, profiling
initiatives in energy alternatives, housing and urban
planning, transportation, job (re)training, ecological
economics and much more -- this is not an exhaustive list!

Queries are due by March 23, 2009. If your query is
accepted, first drafts are due by May 1, 2009. Your query
should outline what ground your contribution will cover and
include an estimated word count and a short writing sample.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting
your query. Send your queries to:
editor AT briarpatchmagazine DOT com.

We reserve the right to edit your work (with your active
involvement) and cannot guarantee publication. Briarpatch
pays $0.05/word. http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

Some of my blogging friends (and the non-bloggy ones too) have certainly been opining on exactly this topic - perhaps one of you wants to submit something. If I can get my act together, I just might as well.

Gender, Jobs, Recession... and bad math

Usually the Toronto Star has pretty decent writing, but this was one of the poorest pieces I've seen in a while. There are some good points made, but the headline ("In shrinking workforce, women may surpass men") is misleading, and the writing jumps around without leading to any reasonable conclusion.

Perhaps this is nitpicky, but there is some sloppy math here. The article claims "there's a possibility women will soon outnumber men in the job force." The numbers quoted in the same article don't really bear that out, unless you define "soon" as "probably never".

According to StatsCan, there were 7,295,900 men with full-time jobs in January 2005 and 6,297,400 women working full-time.

By January 2008, that number had dropped to 7,186,800 for men and to 5,339,200 for women. And as of last month, it fell further, to 7,095,000 full-time jobs for men and slightly for women, to 5,339,000 full-time positions.

So the trend shows in the longer term women losing significantly more full-time jobs than men (from 2005-2009, men lost 200,000 while women lost 958,400 jobs, or put another way men lost 2.7% of their full-time jobs while women lost 15.2%). From 2008-2009, men lost 91,800 jobs and women lost only 200. Now there are 1,756,000 more men than women employed full-time. If this trend were to continue, exactly as is, it would take over 19 years for the number of men and women employed full time to equalize. I don't know about you, but I don't consider 19 years as "soon". In addition, most stimulus money is targeted to male-dominated industries, so if the stimulus package has any effect, traditionally masculine industries will see a boost, slowing or reversing this trend.

If they had included part-time work as well, maybe the conclusion would be justified (women's part-time job participation is about three times that of men). Here's the most recent Statcan numbers.

If it were true that women were surpassing men in the full-time paid workforce, why is this a problem? Aren't we supposed to be living in the land of equality?

One reason this is indeed a problem is that women still make less money than men, partly because pink-collar jobs typically offer lower pay and fewer benefits. Women-headed households are on average much poorer, even when there are two parents.

Economists also point out that men have lost high-paying jobs with health care and pensions but women are supporting families with jobs that are not necessarily as good.

The article also points out:

This trend can also mean a shift in family dynamics. "If more men find themselves home, that has important implications for the way families operate," said Julie McCarthy, assistant professor at Rotman School of Management. "It's not a bad thing – most men are amazing parents but traditionally, it's not their primary role. Perhaps this trend will facilitate that."

Why shouldn't men stay home and watch the kids half the time? Many men I know would love to have more time with their kids. And most kids would love to have their fathers around more.

Wouldn't it be nice if mommy's salary was enough to support the family while daddy took care of the cooking, cleaning and kids. Or perhaps, his EI benefits could help the family pay the bills (except that like Diane Finley said, "We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it, not when we have significant skills shortages in many parts of the country." This government wanted to make it easier for women to stay at home, but I guess the same doesn't apply to men.) Or perhaps a decent subsidized daycare system could help out when both mommy and daddy need their crappy minimum wage jobs, or when mommy is single.

Then I don't think we would worry so much about equal job participation rate among men and women.