Foreclosures Lead To Tent Cities For The Homeless
Foreclosures have led to the sprouting of tent cities for the homeless in a place called Hillsborough. Richard Shuster is one of the inhabitants of the Hillsborough tent city. He moved in about eight months ago and terms it his “gated community”. He named it that because of the wilting gate between some thickets that leads to the site of his camp located near Interstate 75. Shuster is 59 year old and was a welder before he lost his job. At that time, he lived in a rented room and had his own car. Now he has joined many others like him in tent cities on the outskirts of Hillsborough County.
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 economic boom and the advent of foreclosures, restaurants and shops have closed their shutters and shut down. Skilled workers have been vying with each other for work in a shrinking pool of opportunities while their homes are falling prey to the foreclosure process. The landlords have also not longer been forgiving evicted tenets. The result? Single men and women forced to live in tent cities while families have been roughing it out in cars. Students somehow survive on the extra couches of friends and relatives. To many living in towns and suburbs, this group is not visible.
Karen Mynes is a counselor at Seffner McDonald Elementary School; a school that currently has ten homeless children on its list. For them, foreclosures have taken away almost everything. Karen was quoted saying that, “For these people, the usual safeguards are gone. It’s all these tiny little things where people have been cutting them slack. Nobody has anything to give to them.”
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 to wash his clothing with dishwasher detergent and a toilet plunger. His child support payments have all but 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 motivator to those who have lost everything due to foreclosures.
