Foreclosures Lead To Tent Cities For The Homeless
Foreclosures have led to the sprouting of tent cities for the homeless in Hillsborough. Richard Shuster is one of the inhabitants. He moved in here about eight months ago and terms it his “gated community”. It has been so named because of the wilting gate between some thickets that leads to the site of his camp located near Interstate 75. 59 year old was a welder when his job vanished. At that time he lived in a rented room and zoomed around in a car. Now he has joined many others like him in tents living in the outskirts of Hillsborough County in the wild.
No exact numbers are available but the numbers in Homeless Coalition has been increasing during the last few years. The homeless are being pushed more and more into the eastern fringes. It seems strange that just a couple of years ago Hillsborough was a booming town and the very centre of frenetic housing activity.
With the collapse of the boom and the advent of foreclosures, restaurants and shops downed shutters. The skilled workers vied with each other for work in a shrinking pool of opportunities. Their homes succumbed to foreclosures. The landlords no longer forgiving now ordered eviction. The result has been that men and women who are single have been living in the tent cities while families have been roughing it out in cars. Students have been somehow surviving on the extra couches of friends and relatives. To many living in the towns and suburbs this group is not visible.
Karen Mynes is a counselor at Seffner’s McDonald Elementary School that has ten homeless children on its list. For them foreclosures have left behind very little. Karn said, “For these people, the usual safeguards are gone. It’s all these tiny little things where people have been cutting them slack. Nobody has it to give anymore.”
In front of Shuster’s lakefront homeless camp the flag of America merrily flutters. He somehow manages to cook a meal on a rough improvised brick oven and completes his clothes washing with dishwasher detergent as well as toilet plunger. His child support payments have vanished. But he has accepted the situation stoically. If the mighty government cannot solve the foreclosure crisis what can he do to overcome its fallout?
The immediate cause of the number of homeless people increasing in east Hillsborough is the opening of a new soup kitchen. Hunger is a great sauce to attract those who have lost everything to foreclosures.
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