Running in the Shadows - For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival - Series - NYTimes.com

By IAN URBINA

Published: October 26, 2009

ASHLAND, Ore. — She ran away from her group home in Medford, Ore., and spent weeks sleeping in parks and under bridges. Finally, Nicole Clark, 14 years old, grew so desperate that she accepted a young man’s offer of a place to stay. The price would come later.

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Selling Their Bodies

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Nicole Clark, right, with Kate Baxted, an outreach worker, who is helping her piece her life back together. As a runaway, Nicole recalled, “I felt trapped in a way I can't really explain.”

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Jim Hartman, Brand Canyon Company

Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006, recalled that as a pimp, he would work to win a girl's trust: “get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted.”

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They had sex, and he soon became her boyfriend. Then one day he threatened to kick her out if she did not have sex with several of his friends in exchange for money.

She agreed, fearing she had no choice. “Where was I going to go?” said Nicole, now 17 and living here, just down the Interstate from Medford. That first exchange of money for sex led to a downward spiral of prostitution that lasted for 14 months, until she escaped last year from a pimp who she said often locked her in his garage apartment for months.

“I didn’t know the town, and the police would just send me back to the group home,” Nicole said, explaining why she did not cut off the relationship once her first boyfriend became a pimp and why she did not flee prostitution when she had the chance. “I’d also fallen for the guy. I felt trapped in a way I can’t really explain.”

Most of the estimated 1.6 million children who run away each year return home within a week. But for those who do not, the desperate struggle to survive often means selling their bodies.

Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of studies published in academic and public health journals. But this kind of dangerous barter system can quickly escalate into more formalized prostitution, when money changes hands. And then, child welfare workers and police officials say, it becomes extremely difficult to help runaways escape the streets. Many become more entangled in abusive relationships, and the law begins to view them more as teenage criminals than under-age victims.

Estimates of how many children are involved in prostitution vary wildly — ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. More solid numbers do not exist, in part because the Department of Justice has yet to study the matter even though Congress authorized it to do so in 2005 as part of a nationwide study of the illegal commercial sex industry.

But many child welfare advocates and officials in government and law enforcement say that while the data is scarce, they believe that the problem of prostituted children has grown, especially as the Internet has made finding clients easier.

“It’s definitely worsening,” said Sgt. Kelley O’Connell, a detective who until this year ran the Boston Police Department’s human-trafficking unit, echoing a sentiment conveyed in interviews with law enforcement officials from more than two dozen cities. “Gangs used to sell drugs,” she said. “Now many of them have shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky.”

Atlanta, which is one of the only cities where local officials have tried to keep data on the problem, has seen the number of teenage prostitutes working in the city grow to 334 in February from 251 in August 2007.

The barriers to rescuing these children are steep: state cuts to mental heath services, child welfare agencies incapable of preventing them from running away, a dearth of residential programs where the children can receive counseling.

After years of abuse, trauma and neglect, the children also tend to trust no one. The longer they are on the streets, experts say, the more likely they are to become involved in crime and uncooperative with the authorities.

“These kids enter prostitution and they literally disappear,” said Bradley Myles, deputy director of the Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that directly serves children involved in prostitution and other trafficking victims. “And in those rare moments that they reappear, it’s in these revolving-door situations where they’re handled by people who have no idea or training in how to help them. So the kids end up right back on the street.”

The Flip Interview

That revolving door is what an F.B.I. agent, Dan Garrabrant, desperately hoped to stop in Interview Room One at the Atlantic City Police Department on Sept. 5, 2006.

Conducting what the police call a “flip” interview, Mr. Garrabrant was trying every tactic he knew to persuade a petite 16-year-old girl named Roxanne L. from Queens, N.Y., to stop being a prostitute and to inform, or flip, on her pimp.

Sending the girl home was not the answer. Home was where her mentally ill, crack-addicted mother lived. Home was where the problems had started.

But Mr. Garrabrant also knew that she would flee if he sent her to a youth shelter. And with her would go his best chance at prosecuting the real criminal, her pimp.

A social worker for six years before joining the F.B.I. almost two decades ago, Mr. Garrabrant has been honored by anti-trafficking experts, prosecutors and the police as one of the best flip interviewers in the country.

On this day, however, he was getting nowhere, according to a recording of the interview and his notes.

While Roxanne had all the signs of being controlled by a pimp — a tattoo with initials on her neck, a rehearsed script about how she was new to the work — she adamantly denied working for anyone.

Mr. Garrabrant had only an hour before the local police would take Roxanne to a shelter. Trying to ease the mood, he started by asking her why she had run away from home. She told him she had been raped by a relative when she was 12 years old. At 14, she left home because her mother’s boyfriend had become abusive.

Soon, running out of time, he zeroed in.

“What’s the worst part about working the streets?” he asked.

“Honestly,” Roxanne said, giving him a cold stare, “having to look at the tricks and tell if they are cops or not.”

“So a pimp never approached you and tried to turn you out?” Mr. Garrabrant asked.

“Yeah, they tried, but I ran,” she said, maintaining that she was “renegading,” or working without a pimp.

Mr. Garrabrant’s task was to get Roxanne to consider leaving her pimp without forcing her to admit she had one. He needed to push hard enough to break her from her rehearsed script, without descending into a frustrating game of wits, a contest in liar’s poker. And he had to do all this at exactly the wrong time and place — at the police station after an arrest for solicitation, when the girl felt most panicked and most angry about being treated like a criminal.

“Look, I want to help you,” he said, after several failed attempts to get her to acknowledge her pimp. He told her that he might be able to enter her into a residential program in California that offered counseling and classes to girls leaving prostitution.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, as she looked down and pensively picked at her nails.

“Give me some time,” Mr. Garrabrant pleaded as he handed her a card and asked her to keep it handy. With no time left, he released Roxanne back to the local police, who took her to the youth shelter.

Four hours later, she disappeared. Seventeen days after that, according to the F.B.I, she was found stabbed to death by the pimp she had so adamantly denied existed.

In one of her pockets she had Mr. Garrabrant’s card.

“Two days, that’s all I needed to get her to stay away from her pimp and I think things would’ve ended up differently,” said Mr. Garrabrant, shaking his head in frustration. “I still don’t understand how these guys loop these girls in so far.”

A Dangerous Dependency

A runaway’s relationship with a pimp does not occur by accident. It takes work.

After using court records to compile a database of over a hundred convicted pimps and where each is incarcerated, The New York Times wrote letters to each more than two years ago. In the ensuing interviews by phone and in letters, more than two dozen convicted and still incarcerated pimps described the complicated roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior sexual experience and a lack of options.

“With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they’ll follow you to hell,” said Harvey Washington, a pimp who began serving a four-year sentence in Arizona in 2005 for pandering a 17-year-old and three adult prostitutes. “It all depends on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me.”

While most of the pimps said they prefer adult women because teenage runaways involve more legal risks, they added that juveniles fetch higher prices from clients and are far easier to manipulate.

Virtually all the juveniles who become involved in prostitution are runaways and become pimp-controlled, according to law enforcement officials and social workers. Built of desperation and fear, the bonds they form with their pimps are difficult to break. Some girls continue working for pimps even after the pimps are incarcerated.

“The problem is that there is no methadone for a bad relationship,” said Rachel Lloyd, a former child prostitute and the director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a program in New York that helps girls escape and stay away from prostitution.

The pimps view themselves as talent managers, not exploiters.

“My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted,” said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. “But I keep the money.”

Wayne Banks Jr., a pimp serving at least 40 years in Hazelton, W. Va., for the sex trafficking of a minor and related charges, wrote that the girls have to be convinced that the pimp is best equipped to handle their clients and finances.

“Seems more despicable to me to give something so valuable away as opposed to selling it,” he wrote, describing his pitch to persuade girls that prostitution was a smart business decision.

When recruiting, some pimps said they prowled homeless shelters, bus stations and shopping malls or posed in newspaper advertisements as photographers and talent scouts. Others said they worked Internet chat rooms and phone-sex lines.

“I’ll look for a younger female with a backpack,” said Mr. Thurman, describing how he used to drive near schools after hours. “I’m thinking she’s leaving home, she’s leaving for a reason, she had a fight with her parents or she just wants to leave home.”

Mr. Banks wrote that he preferred using “finders’ fees”: $100 to anyone who sent a prospect his way. His only condition was that the girl had to be told up front that he was a pimp.

Runaways are especially attractive recruits because most are already engaging in survival sex for a place to stay, said Evelyn Diaz, who is serving a nine-year sentence in a federal prison in Connecticut for three counts of sex trafficking of minors.

“Some become very loyal to you since you take them under your wing,” she wrote.

Controlling girls through beatings or threats was common, but coercion was not an effective basis for a lasting relationship, most pimps emphasized.

“Everything about the game is by choice, not by force,” said Bryant Bell, who is serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence in Georgia after pleading guilty in 2002 to helping run a prostitution ring that involved girls as young as 10 years old.

For those girls not already engaged in survival sex, the grooming process was gradual and calculated. At first, the sex is consensual. Before long, the girl is asked to turn occasional tricks to help pay bills.

“I might start by asking her to help me by sleeping with a friend,” Mr. Washington said in a telephone interview. “Then I push her from there.”

A Better System

Ten years ago, the Dallas Police Department found an average of fewer than 10 minors working as prostitutes every year, along with one pimp working with them. In 2007, the department found 119 girls involved in prostitution and arrested 44 pimps.

The city’s child prostitution problem has grown over time. But the bigger reason for the change is how the department handles the cases, using a special unit and some unusual techniques.

Previously, said Sgt. Byron A. Fassett, who leads the department’s effort, girls working as prostitutes were handled as perpetrators rather than sexual assault victims. If a 45-year-old man had sex with a 14-year-old girl and no money changed hands, she was likely to get counseling and he was likely to get jail time for statutory rape, Sergeant Fassett said. If the same man left $80 on the table after having sex with her, she would probably be locked up for prostitution and he would probably go home with a fine as a john.

The department’s flip interviews almost always failed, and even if they worked, there was no place to put the girls to receive treatment. Officers resisted investigating what they viewed as a nuisance, not a crime. Prosecutors regularly refused the cases against pimps because the girls made for shaky witnesses and unsympathetic plaintiffs.

Frustrated with this system, Sergeant Fassett started combing through old case files, looking for patterns. One stuck out: 80 percent of the prostituted children the department had handled had run away from home at least four or more times a year.

“It dawned on me, if you want to effectively deal with teen prostitutes, you need to look for repeat runaways,” he said.

In 2005, Sergeant Fassett created the “High Risk Victim” unit in the Dallas Police Department, which flags any juvenile in the city who runs away from home four or more times in a given year. About 200 juveniles per year fit that description. If one of those children is picked up by the police anywhere in the country, the child is directed back to Sergeant Fassett’s unit, which immediately begins investigating the juvenile’s background.

The unit’s strength is timing. If the girls are arrested for prostitution, they are at their least cooperative. So the unit instead targets them for such minor offenses as truancy or picks them up as high-risk victims, speaking to them when their guard is down. Only later, as trust builds, do officers and social workers move into discussions of prostitution.

Repeat runaways are not put in juvenile detention but in a special city shelter for up to a month, receiving counseling.

Three quarters of the girls who get treatment do not return to prostitution.

The results of the Dallas system are clear: in the past five years, the Dallas County district attorney’s office has on average indicted and convicted or won guilty pleas from over 90 percent of the pimps arrested. In virtually all of those cases, the children involved in the prostitution testified against their pimps, according to the prosecutor’s office. Over half of those convictions started as cases involving girls who were picked up by the police not for prostitution but simply as repeat runaways.

In 2007, Congress nearly approved a proposal to spend more than $55 million for cities to create pilot programs across the country modeled on the Dallas system. But after a dispute with President George W. Bush over the larger federal budget, the plan was dropped and Congress never appropriated the money.

Running in the Shadows - Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways - Series - NYTimes.com

By IAN URBINA

Published: October 25, 2009

MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.

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Nikki Hall, 16, in her parents' foreclosed home in Medford, Ore., where she has been squatting in order to finish the year at her school.

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Betty Snyder, 14, right, with her friend, Christian Height, 14, at Hawthorne Park, a gathering place for local runaways, in Medford, Ore. Christian is not a runaway.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

A billboard in the Port Authority Youth Services office in Manhattan with fliers for missing children.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

Officer Martin Jaycard tracks runaways in his job with the Port Authority Youth Services Unit.

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Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.

The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for harboring a fugitive.

“We keep running into this,” said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children — some as young as 12 — and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find food.

“We always first try to send them home,” said Clinton, who himself ran away from home at 12. “But a lot of times they won’t go, because things are really bad there. We basically become their new family.”

Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.

Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.

The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)

Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974. Legitimate employment was hard to find in the summer of 2009; the Labor Department said fewer than 30 percent of teenagers had jobs.

In more than 50 interviews over 11 months, teenagers living on their own in eight states told of a harrowing existence that in many cases involved sleeping in abandoned buildings, couch-surfing among friends and relatives or camping on riverbanks and in parks after fleeing or being kicked out by families in financial crisis.

The runaways spend much of their time avoiding the authorities because they assume the officials are trying to send them home. But most often the police are not looking for them as missing-person cases at all, just responding to complaints about loitering or menacing. In fact, federal data indicate that usually no one is looking for the runaways, either because parents have not reported them missing or the police have mishandled the reports.

In Adrian, Mich., near Detroit, a 16-year-old boy was secretly living alone in his mother’s apartment, though all the utilities had been turned off after she was arrested and jailed for violating her parole by bouncing a check at a grocery store.

In Huntington, W.Va., Steven White, 15, said that after casing a 24-hour Wal-Mart to see what time each night the cleaning crew finished its rounds, he began sleeping in a store restroom.

“You’re basically on the lam,” said Steven, who said he had left home because of physical abuse that increased after his father lost his job this year. “But you’re a kid, so it’s pretty hard to hide.”

Between Legal and Illegal

Survival on the streets of Medford, a city of 76,000 in southwest Oregon, requires runaways to walk a fine line between legal and illegal activity, as a few days with a group of them showed. Even as they sought help from social service organizations, they guarded their freedom jealously.

Petulant and street savvy, they were children nonetheless. One girl said she used a butter knife and a library card to break into vacant houses. But after she began living in one of them, she ate dry cereal for dinner for weeks because she did not realize that she could use the microwave to boil water for Ramen noodles. Another girl was childlike enough to suck her thumb, but dangerous enough to carry a switchblade.

They camped in restricted areas, occasionally shoplifted and regularly smoked marijuana. But they stayed away from harder drugs or drug dealing, and the older teenagers fiercely protected the younger runaways from sexual or other physical threats.

In waking hours, members of the group split their time among a park, a pool hall and a video-game arcade, sharing cigarettes. When in need, they sometimes barter: a sleeveless jacket for a blanket, peanut butter for extra lighter fluid to start campfires on soggy nights.

Betty Snyder, the newcomer in the park, said she had bitten her mother in a recent fight. She said she often refused to do household chores, which prompted heated arguments.

“I’m just tired of it all, and I don’t want to be in my house anymore,” she said, explaining why she had run away. “One month there is money, and the next month there is none. One day, she is taking it out on me and hitting me, and the next day she is ignoring me. It’s more stable out here.”

Members of the group said they sometimes made money by picking parking meters or sitting in front of parking lots, pretending to be the attendant after the real one leaves. When things get really desperate, they said, they climb into public fountains to fish out coins late at night. On cold nights, they hide in public libraries or schools after closing time to sleep.

Many of the runaways said they had fled family conflicts or the strain of their parents’ alcohol or drug abuse. Others said they left simply because they did not want to go to school or live by their parents’ rules.

“I can survive fine out here,” Betty said as she brandished a switchblade she pulled from her dirty sweatshirt pocket. At a nearby picnic table was part of the world she and the others were trying to avoid: a man with swastikas tattooed on his neck and an older homeless woman with rotted teeth, holding a pit bull named Diablo.

But Betty and another 14-year-old, seeming not to notice, went off to play on a park swing.

Around the country, outreach workers and city officials say they have been overwhelmed with requests for help from young people in desperate straits.

In Berks County, Pa., the shortage of beds for runaways has led county officials to consider paying stipends to families willing to offer their couches. At drop-in centers across the country, social workers describe how runaways regularly line up when they know the food pantry is being restocked.

In Chicago, city transit workers will soon be trained to help the runaways and other young people they have been finding in increasing numbers, trying to escape the cold or heat by riding endlessly on buses and trains.

“Several times a month we’re seeing kids being left by parents who say they can’t afford them anymore,” said Mary Ferrell, director of the Maslow Project, a resource center for homeless children and families in Medford. With fewer jobs available, teenagers are less able to help their families financially. Relatives and family friends are less likely to take them in.

While federal officials say homelessness over all is expected to rise 10 percent to 20 percent this year, a federal survey of schools showed a 40 percent increase in the number of juveniles living on their own last year, more than double the number in 2003.

At the same time, however, many financially troubled states began sharply cutting social services last year. Though President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package includes $1.5 billion to address the problem of homelessness, state officials and youth advocates say that almost all of that money will go toward homeless families, not unaccompanied youths.

“As a society, we can pay a dollar to deal with these kids when they first run away, or 20 times that in a matter of years when they become the adult homeless or incarcerated population,” said Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.

‘You Traveling Alone?’

Maureen Blaha, executive director of the National Runaway Switchboard, said that while most runaways, like those in Medford, opt to stay in their hometowns, some venture farther away and face greater dangers. The farther they get from home and the longer they stay out, the less money they have and the more likely they are to take risks with people they have just met, Ms. Blaha said.

“A lot of small-town kids figure they can go to Chicago, San Francisco or New York because they can disappear there,” she said.

Martin Jaycard, a Port Authority police officer in New York, sees himself as a last line of defense in preventing that from happening.

Dressed in scraggly blue jeans and an untucked open-collar shirt, Officer Jaycard, a seven-year police veteran, is part of the Port Authority’s Youth Services Unit. His job is to catch runaways as they pass through the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the nation’s busiest.

“You’re the last person these kids want to see,” he said, estimating that his three-officer unit stops at least one runaway a day at the terminal.

Pausing to look at a girl waiting for a bus to Salt Lake City, Officer Jaycard noticed a nervous look on her face and the overstuffed suitcases that hinted more at a life change than a brief stay.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he said to the girl, gently, as he pulled a badge hanging around his neck from under his shirt. “You traveling alone?”

“Yes,” she replied, without a glimmer of nervousness. “I’m 18,” she quickly added before being asked.

But the girl carried no identification. The only phone number she could produce for someone who could verify her age was disconnected. And after noticing that the last name she gave was different from the one on her bags, the officer took her upstairs to the police station.

When she arrived, she burst into tears.

“Please, I’m begging you not to send me home,” she pleaded as she sobbed into her hands. While listening, Officer Jaycard and the social worker on duty began contacting city officials to investigate her situation, and found her a place at a city shelter. “You have no idea what my father will do to me for having tried to run away,” she said, describing severe beatings at home and threats to kill her if she ever tried to leave.

The girl turned out to be 14 years old, from Queens. Shaking her head in frustration, she added, “I should have just waited outside the terminal and no one would have known I was missing.”

In all likelihood, she was right.

Invisible Names

Lacking the training or the expertise to spot runaways, most police officers would not have stopped the girl waiting for the bus. Even if they had, her name probably would not have been listed in the federal database called the National Crime Information Center, or N.C.I.C., which among other things tracks missing people.

Federal statistics indicate that in more than three-quarters of runaway cases, parents or caretakers have not reported the child missing, often because they are angry about a fight or would simply prefer to see a problem child leave the house. Experts say some parents fear that involving the police will get them or their children into trouble or put their custody at risk.

And in 16 percent of cases, the local police failed to enter the information into the federal database, as required under federal law, according to a review of federal data by The New York Times.

Among the 61,452 names that were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from January 2004 to January 2009, there were about 9,625 instances involving children whose missing-persons reports were not entered into the N.C.I.C., according to the review by The Times. If the names are not in the national database, then only local police agencies know whom to look for.

Police officials give various reasons for not entering the data. The software is old and cumbersome, they say, or they have limited resources and need to prioritize their time. In many cases, the police said, they do not take runaway reports as seriously as abductions, in part because runaways are often fleeing family problems. The police also say that entering every report into the federal database could make a city’s situation appear to be more of a problem than it is.

But in 267 of the cases around the nation for which the police did not enter a report into the database, the children remain missing. In 58, they were found dead.

“If no one knows they’re gone, who is going to look for them?” said Tray Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Child Services, whose job it was to take care of 17-year-old Cleveland Randall.

On Feb. 6, Cleveland ran away from his foster care center in New Orleans and took a bus to Mississippi. His social workers reported him missing, but the New Orleans police failed to enter the report into the N.C.I.C. Ten days later, Cleveland was found shot to death in Avondale, La.

“These kids might as well be invisible if they aren’t in N.C.I.C.,” said Ernie Allen, the director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Paradise by Interstate 5

Invisibility, many of the runaways in Medford say, is just what they want.

By midnight, the group decided it was late enough for them to leave the pool hall and to move around the city discreetly. So they went their separate ways.

Alex Molnar, 18, took the back alleys to a 24-hour laundry to sleep under the folding tables. If people were still using the machines, he planned on locking himself in the restroom, placing a sign on the front saying “Out of Service.”

On the other side of the city, Alex Hughes, 16, took side streets to a secret clearing along Interstate 5.

On colder nights, he and Clinton Anchors have built a fire in a long shallow trench, eventually covering it with dirt to create a heated mound where they could put their blankets.

Building a lean-to with a tarp and sticks, Clinton lifted his voice above the roar of the tractor-trailers barreling by just feet away. He said they called the spot “paradise” because the police rarely checked for them there.

“Even if they do, Betty is not with us, so that’s good,” he added, explaining that she had found a friend willing to lend her couch for the night. “One less thing to worry about.”

BBC - Delays hit Aboriginal homes plan

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By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney

A report into an ambitious housing scheme for Australia's Aboriginals has found that not one dwelling has been built in the year since it began.

The A$660m (US$562m; £342m) scheme is designed to address chronic housing problems in Aboriginal communities.

The project aims to construct 750 homes in the Northern Territory and refurbish hundreds of others.

Officials blamed "administration problems" for the delays - which prompted one minister to quit.

The slow pace of this ambitious programme to help Aboriginal families almost brought down the Northern Territory government when a former minister quit in disgust at the lack of progress.

A review has recommended that federal agencies take more control of the scheme and that administration costs be reduced.

“ Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house ”
Nigel Scullion Senator

It has all been an embarrassment to the government of Kevin Rudd in Canberra and his indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, who has insisted that the building work will be completed within budget and on time by 2013.

Critics, though, are not convinced.

Nigel Scullion, a conservative senator for the Northern Territory, says the whole affair has been a disaster.

"The minister has taken absolutely no responsibility for this.

"This was a fundamental of Kevin Rudd's undertaking and promises to indigenous people of Australia and he has failed and it has failed under the leadership of Jenny Macklin.

"And I cannot understand why Mr Rudd would allow her to stay and preside over the second stage of this complete and unmitigated disaster.

"Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house."

The delays mean that the amount of money earmarked for each new dwelling has been cut by 20%.

For generations, poor housing has blighted many Aboriginal communities.

Australia's original inhabitants often suffer squalid and over-cramped living conditions which contribute to the 17-year gap in life expectancy between them and their non-indigenous counterparts.

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U.S. GAO - Fair Lending: Data Limitations and the Fragmented U.S. Financial Regulatory Structure Challenge Federal Oversight and Enforcement Efforts

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GAO-09-704 July 15, 2009
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Summary The Fair Housing Act (FHA) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA)--the "fair lending laws"--prohibit discrimination in lending. Responsibility for their oversight is shared among three enforcement agencies--the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Department of Justice (DOJ)--and five depository institution regulators--the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve), National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). This report examines (1) data used by agencies and the public to detect potential violations and options to enhance the data, (2) federal oversight of lenders that are identified as at heightened risk of violating the fair lending laws, and (3) recent cases involving fair lending laws and associated enforcement challenges. GAO analyzed fair lending laws, relevant research, and interviewed agency officials, lenders, and consumer groups. GAO also reviewed 152 depository institution fair lending examination files. Depending upon file availability by regulator, GAO reviewed all relevant files or a random sample as appropriate. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires certain lenders to collect and publicly report data on the race, national origin, and sex of mortgage loan borrowers. Enforcement agencies and depository institution regulators use HMDA data to identify outliers--lenders that may have violated fair lending laws--and focus their investigations and examinations accordingly. But, HMDA data also have limitations; they do not include information on the credit risks of mortgage borrowers, which may limit regulators' and the public's capacity to identify lenders most likely to be engaged in discriminatory practices without first conducting labor-intensive reviews. Another data limitation is that lenders are not required to report data on the race, ethnicity, and sex of nonmortgage loan borrowers--such as small businesses, which limits oversight of such lending. While requiring lenders to report additional data would impose costs on them, particularly smaller institutions, options exist to mitigate such costs to some degree, such as limiting the reporting requirements to larger institutions. Without additional data, agencies' and regulators' capacity to identify potential lending discrimination is limited. GAO identified the following limitations in the consistency and effectiveness of fair lending oversight that are largely attributable to the fragmented U.S. financial regulatory system: (1) Federal oversight of lenders that may represent heightened risks of fair lending law violations is limited. For example, the enforcement agencies are responsible for monitoring independent mortgage lenders' compliance with the fair lending laws. Such lenders have been large originators of subprime mortgage loans in recent years and have more frequently been identified through analysis of HMDA data as outliers than depository institutions, such as banks. Depository institution regulators are more likely to assess the activities of outliers and, unlike enforcement agencies, they routinely assess the compliance of lenders that are not outliers. As a result, many fair lending violations at independent lenders may go undetected, and efforts to deter potential violations may be ineffective. (2) Although depository institution regulators' fair lending oversight efforts may be more comprehensive, the division of responsibility among multiple agencies raises questions about the consistency and effectiveness of their efforts. For example, each regulator uses a different approach to analyze HMDA data to identify outliers and examination documentation varies. Moreover, since 2005, OTS, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC have referred more than 100 lenders to DOJ for further investigations of potential fair lending violations, as required by ECOA, while OCC made one referral and NCUA none. Enforcement agencies have settled relatively few (eight) fair lending cases since 2005. Agencies identified several enforcement challenges, including the complexity of fair lending cases, difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, and the constraints of ECOA's 2-year statute of limitations. Recommendations Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work. Director: Team: Phone: Orice Williams Brown Government Accountability Office: Financial Markets and Community Investment (202) 512-5837 Matters for Congressional Consideration Recommendation: To facilitate the capacity of federal enforcement agencies and depository institution regulators as well as independent researchers to identify lenders that may be engaged in discriminatory practices in violation of the fair lending laws, Congress may wish to consider the merits of additional data collection and reporting options. These varying options pertain to obtaining key underwriting data for mortgage loans, such as credit scores as well as LTV and DTI ratios, and personal characteristic (such as race, ethnicity and sex) and relevant underwriting data for nonmortgage loans. Status: In process Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information. Recommendation: To help ensure that all potential risks for fair lending violations are thoroughly investigated and sufficient time is available to do so, Congress may wish to consider extending the statute of limitations on ECOA violations. Status: In process Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information. Recommendation: As Congress debates the reform of the financial regulatory system, it may wish to take steps to help ensure that consumers are adequately protected, that laws such as the fair lending laws are comprehensive and consistently applied, and that oversight is efficient and effective. Any new structure should address gaps and inconsistencies in the oversight of independent mortgage brokers and nonbank subsidiaries, as well as address the potentially inconsistent oversight provided by depository institution regulators. Status: In process Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information. Recommendations for Executive Action Recommendation: To help strengthen fair lending oversight and enforcement, DOJ, FDIC, Federal Reserve, FTC, HUD, NCUA, OCC, and OTS should work collaboratively to identify approaches to better assess the potential risk for discrimination during the preapplication phase of mortgage lending. For example, the agencies and depository institution regulators could further consider the use of testers, perhaps on a pilot basis, as well as surveys of mortgage loan borrowers and applicants or alternative means to better assess the potential risk for discrimination during this critical phase of the mortgage lending process. Agency Affected: Department of Housing and Urban Development Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Department of Justice Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Department of the Treasury: Office of Thrift Supervision Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Department of the Treasury: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Federal Reserve System Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Federal Trade Commission Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: National Credit Union Administration Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Charities, Shelters See Wave of Homeless Families

By Alexi Mostrous
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 15, 2009

PONTIAC, Mich. -- The lowest point in Lawanda Madden's life came in February, when she woke up on the floor of her friend's run-down house in this city battered by recession. She was shivering with cold. She remembers turning to her 8-year-old son, Jovon, and thinking: "How did this happen to us? How did we become homeless?"

Only 15 months before, Madden, 39, had a $35,000-a-year job, a two-bedroom apartment and a car. She was far from rich, but she could treat Jovon to the movies. She occasionally visited her sister in Chicago and bowled in a local league. She dreamed of going to law school. Then she was laid off and lost everything.

"I've had a job since I was 19," she recalled. "I never imagined I would be without a home. You think it's going to get better -- that it's just temporary -- and then six months goes by, and you wonder, 'Wait a minute -- this might be it.' "

With neat hair and clean clothes, a college education and stable job history, Madden represents the new face of American homelessness.

Across the country, community housing networks, charities and emergency shelters are seeing a flood of people like her -- mothers driven out of their homes by the economic collapse. Even as the economy shows signs of improving, the number of homeless families keeps going up. In more and more cases, these people have never been homeless before.

More than half a million family members used an emergency shelter or transitional housing between Oct. 1, 2007, and Oct. 1, 2008, the latest figures available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The number of homeless families rose 9 percent, and in rural and suburban areas by 56 percent. Women make up 81 percent of adults in homeless families, and tend to be younger than 30 with children younger than 5.

In some areas of the country, family homelessness has almost tripled since 2007, new figures obtained by The Washington Post show. Formerly prosperous areas such as Bergen County, N.J., and Hillsboro, Ore., have been particularly affected, with increases of 161 percent and 194 percent, respectively. Oakland County, where Madden lives, has experienced a 111 percent jump in the number of families seeking shelter or emergency housing since 2007.

"And it's going to get worse," said Marc Craig, president of the Community Housing Network in Oakland County. "Thousands of people here will lose their unemployment benefit in the next few months. Many of them will become homeless."

The Obama administration announced last month a $1.5 billion package focused on tackling first-time and family homelessness. The funding, which lasts for three years, represents a change from President George W. Bush's approach, which limited most HUD funding to the chronically homeless with substance-abuse or mental-health problems.

"There's been a funding gap for a long time," Craig said. "It's good there's been a change in approach, but the new money is just a Band-Aid. It's got to continue."

The shift is also evidenced in the District, where the number of homeless families is listed as 703, a 20 percent increase over last year. But these figures -- like the HUD statistics -- heavily underestimate the number of homeless families, experts say, as they do not count those who cram themselves and their children into friends' houses, "couch surf," or sleep four to a bed in cheap motel rooms built for single occupancy.

"Families, especially, are likely to explore every option before they stay in a shelter," said Jill Shoemaker, who collects homelessness data for the Community Housing Network in Oakland County. "We just have no way of counting them at the moment."

Madden stays day-to-day at the half-finished home of friend Frankie Johnson in a dilapidated suburb of Pontiac. Layers of drywall are stacked on the floor next to giant bales of insulation. There are holes in the wall, and the one bathroom that works leaks. More pressingly, the three-bedroom house is also occupied by Johnson and seven children.

"It's tight," Madden said stoically, sitting on the bare bed she shares with her son. "But at least it's not winter anymore. When we moved in, in February, we didn't have a bed. For a week, there was no heating. The gas people hadn't turned up. Even with jackets, coats and two pairs of socks on, the cold was indescribable."

In a city with unemployment at almost 20 percent, it is perhaps unsurprising that Madden is still without work, 20 months after being laid off from a laboratory testing firm where she worked as a biller. From earning a middle-class wage, she now survives on $118 a week in child support.

"Whenever I see a job come up I apply, but I don't get replies," she said. "I go to the job center three or four times a week." Madden also enrolled in a No Worker Left Behind program, under which she hopes to complete her bachelor's degree in criminal justice. "But a degree is no good if you can't get a job," she said.

And with no job, "there's no mortgage, no savings -- definitely no house."

In Royal Oak, Mich., Kevin Roach is a front-line witness to this paradigm shift. "We've seen a dramatic increase in women and children seeking help," said Roach, executive director of South Oakland Shelter, which provides 30 beds to homeless people in Oakland County. In October, he turned away 770 people, more than half of them from families. "We turned down 320 children. That's a number that's burned in my head."

Even a year ago, Roach said, he would have described a "prototypical" homeless person as middle-aged, male, with mental-health or drug issues. "But in the last months, we've had a teacher and a banker in our program," he said. "A third of our clients once had a steady income." Two months ago, he added, the number of clients with bachelor's degrees overtook those with mental-health problems.

Roach's clients are sheltered by a rotating list of churches and community groups that take them in for a week each. Last week it was the turn of First Baptist Church of Detroit. Over a plate of lasagna cooked by church volunteers, a mother of two, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told a familiar story. "I moved into my mother's after I was evicted," she said. "But we argued. I think she expected Molly the Maid service. Sometimes you want someone else to load the dishwasher, you know?"

That night, the church's volunteers give the sheltered women makeovers, using make-up scrounged from local stores. "It's amazing how much our guests have changed," said Myrtice Batty, a college professor who has been involved in the church's shelter program for 15 years. "When I first started, there were many more men. Now families are about 50 percent."

The new wave of HUD funding will benefit groups such as South Oakland Shelter, which has just secured a $300,000 grant to provide rental and utility assistance to struggling families. Roach hopes that a concerted outreach effort will reach women like Veronica, 47, a former Ford worker who lives with her 11-year-old son in a tiny motel room near Royal Oak. She declined to give her full name in an interview.

"I remember in June 2008, Ford called a meeting for me and 20 other employees," she explained. "They got us all up and said, 'This is your last day.' I was like 'Whoa.' I knew straight away I couldn't cover $650 a month. We left quietly as we didn't want to be evicted -- you're already embarrassed enough."

After moving between friends and family five times in less than a year, and applying unsuccessfully for 65 jobs, Veronica moved into a $110-a-week motel; her son sleeps on an air mattress at the foot of her bed. "There are so many moments where I don't feel like getting up and putting on clothes, but you do, for him," she said, nodding at John, who wants to be a chemist when he grows up. "And he supports me, too. Sometimes he tells me, 'Don't doubt, believe.' We support each other."

There are thousands of children like John in Oakland County. "This year, the number of students we served was up by a third," said Susan Benson, director of the Oakland Schools Homeless Student Education Program, which advocates for homeless children. Benson estimates the number of homeless students in the county at 4,000 to 10,000. "The average age of a homeless person in Oakland County is just under 9," she said. "Most are doubled up, living with friends, hours away from their schools."

Back on North Johnson Road in Pontiac, Madden finds it difficult to adjust. She used the last of her unemployment benefit to buy a $2,000 car in January -- allowing her to take Jovon to baseball practice and herself to the job center. The car uses up $60 a week in gas, but still providing activities for her son is a priority.

"Entertainment doesn't happen too often," she said. "In 2007, I couldn't buy Jovon Christmas presents. Sometimes I take him to his grandma's because I find it hard to feed him. I want to keep him here, but it's more stable there. Sometimes he screams, 'Don't leave!' "

New Report Documents 10 Years of Anti-Homeless Violence

Source: National Coalition for the Homeless

Today the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) released the 2008 numbers of hate crimes and violent attacks against people experiencing homelessness. The numbers are from a new report entitled Hate, Violence, And Death on Main Street USA, 2008.

Key findings include:

• The total number of attacks for 2008: 106.
• The number of fatal attacks is the second highest since 2001: 27 deaths.
• 73 percent of the attacks were committed by individuals who were ages 25 and younger.
• Florida ranked #1 for the fourth year in a row for most attacks, California was second.

“Those experiencing homelessness are often ignored or misunderstood by society. If these brutal attacks were committed against any other religious or minority group to the same degree, there would be a national outcry and call for governmental action,” said Michael Stoops, executive director of NCH. “We must respond to this dehumanization and protect homeless persons against hate crimes and violence.”

The 42 percent of homeless people who are unsheltered are the most vulnerable to these attacks. Because crimes committed against homeless persons often go unreported, the actual numbers of non-lethal attacks may be much higher. While the motive for an attack is often unclear, some of the attackers said they committed the crime out of “boredom,” or for a “thrill” or “fun.”

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Churches Look to Residential Real Estate Development to Support Congregations

By Ovetta Wiggins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 2009

The new apartments in Landover have all the features one expects to find in a luxury complex. There's a state-of-the-art fitness center, a quiet courtyard, nine-foot ceilings and oversize windows.

Residents can use a theater, a barbershop, a beauty salon -- even a chapel.

Yes, a chapel.

The small church, with its plush blue seats, ornate fixtures and pulpit, was included in the architectural plans at the request of the developer: Jericho City of Praise, a 19,000-member congregation in Landover.

"There is just so much to do here, so many amenities," said Eugene Selden, 67, who moved June 16 with his wife, Olivia, to Jericho Residences near FedEx Field.

For years, the faith community has been a driving force in building affordable housing such as the unit where the Seldens live. And despite the recession and the accompanying risk of attempting a project now, Jericho and some other Washington area churches have recently taken their involvement a step further, purchasing properties and partnering with developers or builders to construct communities that can include subsidized units, full-price residences and even commercial space.

Churches have a steady income from weekly donations to spend in a depressed real estate market and to qualify for financing. The churches say their goal is to diversify revenue streams so that, among other things, they can expand their community service projects to support growing congregations. And the developers can get tax benefits.

The churches acknowledge the financial risks, said Midgett Parker, an attorney who represents about 80 churches in Prince George's County. An oversupply of housing units and tightening credit markets have affected them, Parker said.

"The contract could fall through; the market could fall apart," he said. Churches "manage the risk," he said, by including clauses in contracts with developers that allow them to reclaim their property if a developer abandons a project.

Parker said many churches are counting on a turnaround in the real estate market. Plans for their projects are being drafted and are moving through the planning and zoning process so they will be well positioned when the market rebounds.

Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, a consortium of 43 churches and synagogues in the District, said the move is part of "a new economic reality" for churches that need money to "maintain a large vibrant congregation." Churches have to meet their social missions, and as memberships expand, the demand for services grows -- even beyond what they might be able to support with member donations, Lynch said. "You have to be savvy in how to pay for extended ministries," he said. "How do you offer substance abuse programs, food banks and other programs without reliable funding? On top of that, they are paying for utilities, youth ministries, educational facilities. . . . It's very daunting."

Jericho Senior Pastor Betty P. Peebles said the decision to build Jericho Residences, a 270-unit independent-living facility for seniors that opened in June, has been part of the church's vision since it moved from the District to Prince George's in 1997. Today, 130 residents live at the apartment complex.

"We've always wanted to serve the whole man," said Peebles, who moved the church to larger quarters where it could be closer to its congregants and expand its ministries. The apartment complex, which includes 110 affordable-housing units, complements the church's Christian training center, elementary school and youth center, she said.

Jericho, which paid off its mortgage in seven years, purchased the property for the apartment complex in 2007 for about $4 million, according to land records. It took out a mortgage on the property for $3.6 million.

Evangel Cathedral, another megachurch in Prince George's, with a membership of about 4,200, is seeking approval of a detailed site plan for a more expansive project. It would include 640 townhouses and multifamily units and 3,000 square feet of retail space on about 50 acres. Known as the Moore property, the site is in an unincorporated, rural area north of Route 4 just outside the District. The Evangel project is part of a larger 534-acre mixed-use development known as Westphalia, which would include 15,000 homes and about 6 million square feet of retail and commercial space, hotels and restaurants and a half-dozen schools.

The United House of Prayer in the District, which has built hundreds of apartments in the Shaw neighborhood, filed an application in March with the Zoning Commission to rezone property the church owns off Rhode Island Avenue NW, between Sixth and Seventh streets. The application to rezone the building for 16 apartments is scheduled to be reviewed Sept. 10 by the commission.

Parker, who is general counsel for Greater Morning Star Apostolic Ministries, said the church bought 50 acres off Ritchie-Marlboro Road in Largo when it moved from Northeast Washington in the mid-1980s. The church planned to build its sanctuary on the top of a hill and leave the rest of the property vacant but recently decided to bring in housing developer Trammel Crow Residential to plan a project on 15 acres there.

Like all of the other church developments, the Trammel Crow project is intended to appeal to many buyers but will provide congregants the opportunity to live within walking distance of their church.

The Prince George's District Council, which is made up of the County Council and reviews zoning cases, granted conditional approval of the project last year. Trammel Crow is preparing its detailed site plan.

"People are still working projects through the approval process on the assumption that financing will be available a year or two from now," said Tom Bozzuto, chief executive officer at Greenbelt-based Bozzuto Group, a construction and management firm that has worked on numerous church projects. "But in terms of actual starts, it's tougher to get financing than it was a year ago."

Patrick Ricker, a broker and developer who is working on the Moore property project with Bishop Don Meares, senior pastor of Evangel, said he will begin negotiations to sell the 375 lots to builders after the detailed site plans are approved. The plans have been filed, but it is not clear how long approval will take, said Ricker, who is not a member of Evangel.

"From a church standpoint, it's smart" to diversify, Ricker said. "It's just like any other investment, like buying a CD or buying stock." The Moore property is not Evangel's first real estate investment. Several years ago, the church sold land next to its sanctuary on Route 214 to a builder to construct an active-adult complex. Cameron Grove has 735 homes, including single-family houses, duplexes and condominiums.

For the developers, one advantage is that they can get tax credits for agreeing to work with nonprofit groups. Tax credits vary based on the project's location.

Bozzuto Group first began partnering with churches in 1994, when the company worked with Reston Interfaith Housing to build 48 apartments in Reston's North Point neighborhood. The units are for working families who pay below-market rents. Since then, Bozzuto has seen an increase in the number of churches becoming involved in housing developments.

The company is discussing housing developments with about three churches. "That would not have been happening years ago," said Bozzuto, who is not a member of Jericho. "I think there are more churches that define their ministries more broadly than they had years ago."

Jericho Residences is one of Bozzuto's most recent projects.

Olivia Selden, 67, who is a diabetic, has lost six pounds since she and her husband moved there, thanks to her exercise routine in the gym and her occasional walks around the hallways.

And, they are saving $546 a month in rent because they meet Jericho Residences' affordable-housing requirements.

"This place has just been a blessing all the way around," Olivia Selden said.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Tales of Tent City

by Ben Ehrenreich

"This is the bigger picture," said John Kraintz, with a sweep of his arm, indicating the roughly two dozen remaining tents pitched around him on a muddy, pockmarked field between the city dump and the slow green waters of the American River. Kraintz is a thin man of 57, a former electrician who had lived in Sacramento's parks and riverside lots for seven years. His home had been right here--in Tent City.

Kraintz had relocated to Tent City's outer boroughs. Its downtown, which briefly attracted camera crews from all over the world--a Third World shantytown in the capital of the richest state in the richest country!--was a couple of hundred yards away. Depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 150 and 300 people lived in Tent City between November and April. But by the third week in April, when I visited, most had already packed up. Some had migrated to this spot to avoid police attention. But the cops came, handing out notices announcing, "It is unlawful to camp in the City of Sacramento" and giving people two days to leave. ("This is not camping--we're living!" yelled one of Kraintz's neighbors.) By the end of the week, everyone had left. Tent City, for that moment at least, had disappeared.

Few people there, though, doubted that it would be back. Tent City is less a single location than a nomadic but constant phenomenon, a shifting blue-tarped shadow to the glass and steel American metropolis. In good times and bad, Tent City comes and goes, forms and scatters and takes shape again. Despite its momentary dispersal in Sacramento, it is still out there--in Seattle, Portland, Reno, Providence, Fresno, even in the sprawling exurbs of southern California in the small city of Ontario. Tent City existed at the height of the real estate boom too, hidden in plain view, an omen for anyone willing to look.

While recent media accounts portrayed Tent City's incarnations as creatures of the recession--reborn Hoovervilles for the laid off and the foreclosed--shantytowns have been a periodic but permanent feature of American urban life for at least the past two decades. They are what connects us to São Paulo, Lagos and Mumbai, physical manifestations of our growing inequality and societal neglect. Seattle saw its first Tent City in 1990. The area now boasts three, one dating back to 2000, another to 2004. Portland's Tent City ("Dignity Village") has been around since 2001. No one living there, says resident Gaye Reyes, is recently homeless. In California's San Joaquin Valley, the City of Fresno last fall began distributing a $2.3 million settlement to homeless people whose property was destroyed when the city repeatedly razed its Tent City between 2004 and 2006, at the apex of the economic boom.

As early as 1989, dozens of homeless were pitching tents on the precise site of this year's Tent City in Sacramento. They called their community, without irony, "Camp Hope." Since then, other tent cities have sprung up there for a few weeks or months. It's hardly an idyllic spot--no sanitary facilities, few trees, no shelter from the wind or rain--but it's out of sight and a short walk to Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that provides free meals and other services.

This latest Tent City was notable mainly for its density, a product of increased enforcement of anti-camping ordinances in the city's parkland, where Sacramento's homeless were once able to spread out unmolested. In November police broke up a camp of more than 100 people on the sidewalk outside the Union Gospel Mission. Police officers instructed them, Tent City residents said, to resettle here. The Sacramento Bee first reported on the newest Tent City in December. Oprah Winfrey sent a correspondent in February. After that, said Tent City resident Danny Valadez, "It went like a cyclone," buzzing with journalists and new arrivals. Most reporters focused exclusively on the few Tent City residents whose predicaments could be linked directly to the economic collapse. "They were all looking for Henry Fonda [in The Grapes of Wrath]," laughs Paul Boden, director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project.

The rise of Tent City, though, says John Foley, director of the nonprofit Sacramento Self-Help Housing, had "almost nothing to do with the recession." But the recession has made poverty visible again, and Tent City tells the grueling backstory to the current recession--nearly thirty years of cuts in social services to the poor and mentally ill, the decimation of the industrial economy and the cruel underside of the housing boom. Kraintz, despite his soil-caked clothes and matted hair, summarized that narrative with more precision than most white-shirted economists can manage: "We've seen falling wages and rising rents. The two finally collided."

The economic collapse has without question pushed people out of their homes. The National Alliance to End Homelessness warns that 1.5 million Americans could be thrown into homelessness over the next two years. In Sacramento, homelessness has jumped 14 percent since 2007, even though the population categorized as "chronically homeless"--the disabled and mentally ill--has fallen by 35 percent. Sacramento was hit particularly hard by the mortgage crisis--the city had the third-highest foreclosure rate in the country in 2007--and folks who have recently seen their incomes disappear are finding themselves with nowhere to turn.

California's ongoing budget crisis hasn't helped. Last year Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger slashed the state's already meager funding for emergency shelters. The year before, he vetoed a $55 million program that would have provided housing for 5,000 people with mental illness. His most recent budget proposal slashes nearly all the services that aid the growing ranks of the poor--cutting eligibility for Social Security and disability and eliminating what's left of the state's welfare system, as well as its entire health insurance program for children. The governor plans to borrow $2 billion from cities and counties, which will mean severely reduced funds on the local level. All of this likely will throw more people onto the streets.

But Tent City, says Joan Burke, advocacy director of Loaves and Fishes, "is the least desirable place to be homeless," and the last place the newly homeless are likely to end up. They stay with friends and relatives until those relationships fray, then in motels, cars and finally shelters. Thus, only a very few of Tent City's inhabitants could pin their plight on the recession.

Karen Hersh, 53, her skin red and peeling from poison oak, attributed the failure of her trucking company to rising fuel prices. She lived in her truck when she lost her home and stayed with friends when she lost her truck. Eventually, Hersh ended up in a shelter--"I didn't like it one bit. They steal from you. They gang up on you"--and finally in Tent City.

Fred and Linda, a Latino couple in their early 50s who preferred to keep their surnames to themselves, have been homeless for a year and a half. Fred worked as a mason until he burned his arm in an accident. He took time off to recover, but "when I went back to work, there wasn't a job for me." Construction had ground to a halt. Linda, a sometime warehouse worker, was out of work too. After they lost their apartment, no landlords would consider them. "If you're not employed," said Linda, "it's no go." They had come to Tent City in the hope that the media attention would mean a better chance of finding housing. So far, it hadn't. But Fred's unemployment payments hadn't run out yet, and the pair had rigged makeshift trailers to their bicycles to tow their belongings. If the police push them out, said Fred, "it ain't no big deal. We have three places we're thinking about."

Most of Tent City's residents, though, have been homeless for years. The original causes of their homelessness--an illness or injury, addiction, some life-shattering tragedy--blurred out in the distant past. "But on a structural, societal level," says Burke, the causes of homelessness are far from hazy: "It's the lack of housing that people can afford."

"I used to be a Republican. I voted for Ronald Reagan," a man who identified himself only as Tom M. told me, laughing. But it was Reagan who in his first year as president halved the budget for public housing. Over the course of his first term, more than half a million people were thrown off the disability rolls. "Until then," says Tim Brown, director of Sacramento County's Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative, "basically there was no homelessness." Since then, neither the disability nor the housing budget has come close to recovering. Clinton-era welfare reforms cut all but the last remaining threads of the Great Society safety net.

Meanwhile, the real estate boom led to a drastic reduction in affordable housing. Through the 1980s and even into the '90s, says Sacramento Self-Help Housing's Foley, the city had no shortage of housing options for the poor: rooming houses, single-room-occupancy hotels, motel-like labor camps for cannery workers. "Almost all of that's gone," he says, victims of the insatiable housing market. Gone also are the vast majority of the unionized cannery and food processing jobs that for decades made it possible for workers here to become homeowners. Tent City sprawled just across the railroad tracks from one of the few major food processing facilities left in the city: the nonunion Blue Diamond almond plant.

Since 1996, the federal government has budgeted precisely zero dollars for new public housing. The waiting lists in Sacramento for Section 8 and public housing are five digits deep. Between 2001 and '09, however, the monthly income required to rent an "affordable" studio apartment here jumped from $1,025 to $1,433, "and wages have not gone up proportionally," Foley says. Working full time at minimum wage in California gets you just $1,280 a month. "It takes two people to rent an apartment," said Tent City resident Jessica McFarlin, "one to pay the bills and one to pay the rent, if you want to have food."

In Sacramento, some subsidized housing options remain for those with disabilities. "If you're disabled," says Brown, "your chances [of finding housing] aren't too bad in the next year." But as to the swelling ranks who are not disabled but simply can't find work--or who have jobs but still can't make their rent--Brown says, "they're shit out of luck."

For Tom M., the math was simple. He fell out of the corporate world several years ago and lived in his van until January, when he could no longer afford to keep it registered. He is 56, with high blood pressure, a heart condition and, he said, "the mental thing"--he's convinced he's being stalked. "It gets pretty intense sometimes," he said. But he has been unable to qualify for disability, which left him with what little money he could earn recycling cans and a monthly county General Relief check for just over $200.

The day before I met him, Tom M. had left Tent City to apply for subsidized housing. His experience, he said, was typical: "I was in line for hours and never got to see them. There's so many people," he shrugged, "and only so much resources."

In the end, Sacramento dealt with its Tent City with more compassion than can usually be expected. "If they had a great big rug they could sweep us under somewhere, they would," predicted Karen Hersh, and she was right. The broom, fortunately, came in the form of temporary fixes, not arrests. The city scrambled to raise money for forty additional units of subsidized housing (few of which were ready before Tent City was cleared) and fifty additional shelter beds, which quickly filled. Local advocates for the homeless had vowed civil disobedience if any arrests were made, so to avoid an embarrassing confrontation, the city came up with motel vouchers for the last few dozen holdouts. "The bulk of the people," though, said Loaves and Fishes' Joan Burke, "just dispersed to more hidden camps." By April 20, everyone was gone.

No one pretended the problem had been solved. Renting hotel rooms for the homeless, said Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Mayor Kevin Johnson, "is obviously not sustainable in the long term," particularly with homelessness on the rise. For now, the newly homeless, whose predicaments are directly related to the recession, are not yet desperate enough to camp in blighted fields. They look less like John Kraintz and Tom M. and more like 38-year-old Kysia Bell, a clear-eyed home healthcare worker and mother of two who lost the home she was renting when her landlord fell into foreclosure.

"I didn't know that the owner wasn't paying the mortgage," she said. "We got a note on the door that we had to vacate within two weeks." At the same time, her hours were cut, making it impossible to come up with the deposit for a new apartment. She and her daughters stayed with relatives as long as they could, then with friends and finally in her car until they found beds at St. John's, Sacramento's largest shelter for women and children. Bell was lucky: in 2007, St. John's was forced to turn away about twenty people a day. So far this year, that number is up to 300.

Nearly 400 miles south, in Ontario, California, Tent City hides behind a bureaucratic mask. City officials call it the Temporary Homeless Services Area, or THSA, but until March 2008, it was just Tent City. About nine months earlier, local police began directing everyone they found sleeping in parks and alleys to an empty field near the city's airport. Word got around that you could camp there unharassed, and the new encampment quickly grew.

As in Sacramento, the Ontario Tent City's inhabitants were victims not of the immediate recession but of older, less dramatic economic shifts. Take the white-bearded man who identified himself only as Cowboy. He was a long-distance truck driver until a stroke slurred his speech and paralyzed his right arm. The $900 in veterans' benefits and SSI he receives each month might pay for a small apartment but would leave nothing for food, so Cowboy lived with his mother until she died, then with cousins, then on the streets and finally, at age 57, in Tent City.

In March, after herding the local homeless population to Tent City, police and code enforcement officers descended on the encampment and required its inhabitants to prove they were residents of Ontario. Those who could not--all but 127--were evicted. The city bulldozed and graded the field, erected orderly rows of matching green tents, issued ID cards to those who remained, fenced the encampment and posted a list of rules: no re-entry after 10 pm, no alcohol, no pets, no minors, no visitors. Now private security guards patrol the THSA's perimeters, ejecting anyone who doesn't have permission to be there, including reporters.

None of the Tent City residents I interviewed from just outside the fence complained much. They were fed three meals a day and were otherwise left alone. The rules were infantilizing, but the people largely shrugged them off. Still, more than a third of those permitted to stay in the THSA have left for good. No new arrivals have been admitted. Isaac Jackson, coordinator of the county's Office of Homeless Services, credited Ontario with doing "a great job" of reducing Tent City's population. Neither city nor county officials, though, knew if any of those who have left Tent City have found a better source of shelter than a tent.

It seems unlikely. The federal stimulus package will give California $189 million in homelessness prevention funding and another $100 million in community service block grants that local governments can use for homeless services. The Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act, passed in May, authorizes another $2.2 billion nationwide. But as the feds give with one hand, the state takes away with the other, and no one at any level of government is attempting to tackle the systemic roots of homelessness, or to reconsider housing as something more vital to human dignity than market forces allow. For now, Cowboy and his neighbors are unaware of any resources available for more permanent lodging than a tent in a fenced-off field.

In April I asked Brenda Hill, who had been there from the start, if she knew where she'd go if Sacramento closed Tent City. She shook her head sadly. "Nope," she said. "Nowhere."

About Ben Ehrenreich

Ben Ehrenreich, a journalist and novelist based in Los Angeles, is the author of The Suitors.