Signs of Economic Troubles… The Rise Of The Tent City

Posted by Lorren on September 26, 2008

This recent AP article had me a little disturbed. Evidently, the recent economic troubles that this country has had has resulted in tent cities popping up all over this country, from Washington state, to California, to Ohio.

The worst thing about this is… nobody that is in a tent city today got there as a result of the most recent Wall Street turmoil. Everyone there tonight was in economic trouble before the recent string of bailouts.

If you’ve read many of my posts here, you might know that my husband lost several jobs last year. Every time he’d get hired on to a new company, the company would go bust, or lay off half of it’s employees. I know that things have been difficult, because we’ve been living it. In the first 9 months of this year, I think my husband has worked 3 of those months? Thank goodness our house caught on fire because the insurance money gave us something to live off of. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but in some aspects it’s true.

Dh is currently starting a new business. We have one small client, and are obtaining another client that will provide us with about $60,000 per year in revenue. More than likely, the company will be operating in the black by the end of the year, even with the economic downturn. Our company provides services that save small and medium-sized companies money, so until everybody and their brother starts losing their jobs, or we become another Weimar Republic, we’ll probably be okay.

It makes you wonder who these people are. I’m sure that there’s a few in there that have been homeless for quite some time… there are probably some that have substance abuse problems, or mental health problems, or other factors that typically contribute to homelessness… but probably not all of them.

I bet that there are families there… perhaps dad was working at some nice job while mom stayed home. Like many of us, they lived paycheck to paycheck, trying to make ends meet, but never being able to put away any savings after purchasing necessities. Dad loses his job. At first, they think that things would be okay… just got to find another job, right? Right now that’s not so easy. Mom starts to go look for a job too, but so is everybody else. Eventually, they can’t afford their rent or mortgage. They don’t have family that can take them in, so they end up in a tent city somewhere.

There’s probably educated people there. People with degrees. Perhaps there’s some people that at one time had a nice, stable job, but like my husband, started losing job after job because nothing is stable any more. At one point, they just gave up. Maybe slightly disabled people.

It could be me there. It could be you. Perhaps it is you, and you managed to stumble across this blog at your local library.

Jesus was homeless. He has said that whatever you do for the least of these people, you have done for me.

It’s a shame that there have been so many scammers out there in the past… homeless people who choose not to work because they can get more begging, or people that don’t want to find a real job. You don’t know who to actually help. At the moment, I don’t see a great deal of homeless people in the places that I go to, but I will say an extra prayer for those without homes tonight. The way things are going, some of us might be in that situation a year from now.