Every year, I go camping with my family. I load up, and meet my parents, siblings and their families in some woodsy location and pitch a tent. Here in the U.S., living in a tent for a few days is recreation. Unfortunately, as foreclosures rise and things continue to go downhill, people in the richest country in the world are living in tents out of necessity. With foreclosures and job losses on the rise, tent cities are popping up around the country. US REO Properties reports on the advent of tent cities:

The big cities like Los Angeles and New York are one of the worst affected but the smaller towns have not been spared. Here too the people who have become unemployed and lost their houses to foreclosure are settling down in newly formed tent cities out of the sheer need to survive. The Associated Press reports that 61% of the homeless coalitions (local and state) report that there has been a sharp increase in homelessness.

Speaking to New York Times, Peter Stack the manager of homeless centre operations in Fresno said, “They just popped up about 18 months ago. One day [the railroad lot] was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

Homelessness on this scale has not been seen for decades. And, even though our economy is nowhere close to a Depression, the only comparable image involves tent cities, “Hoovervilles“, set up during the Great Depression.