Sprawling Homeless Camps — Modern 'Hoovervilles' — Vex California
Charles Gibson pushes a shopping cart towards his soggy tent on a tenuous patch of a grassy drainage ditch along a bike trail in Santa Rosa, Calif. He's one of nearly 200 people living in a sprawling camp here that has sprung up along a popular recreation corridor. It's a community, Gibson says, that often feels caught between opposing forces who aren't always listening.
"I mean, they [local officials] want us to be able to govern ourselves, but they are not giving us the tools we need," Gibson says. "They don't want you hiding, but they don't want you in their face, you know?"
Across California and other parts of the country, these growing homeless encampments evocative of the shantytown "Hoovervilles" where hundreds of thousands of destitute Americans lived during the Great Depression are frustrating residents, raising health and safety fears and fueling a debate over poverty and inequality in one of the nation's wealthiest states.
The fight over the encampment in Santa Rosa in northern
