In the warmer areas of the US, peo­ple find a place to sleep within tent cities set up for the home­less. Not all of the peo­ple in these cities are “bums”. Some peo­ple are end­ing up in these camps through job losses, and those have accel­er­ated dur­ing the reces­sion. Some peo­ple end up in these cities because of ill­ness, tak­ing away all of their money and their livelihood.

From this Al Jaz­erra story that we found at IPS, Rob Reynolds reporter inter­viewed a cou­ple who lives in one such city.

They call it Tor­tilla Flats — a hap­haz­ard clus­ter of tents and tarps sprawl­ing across a side­walk and a vacant lot smack in the mid­dle of Fresno, a city of 500,000 in California’s Cen­tral Valley.

The tent city, rem­i­nis­cent of the Depression-era “Hoovervilles” depicted by author John Stein­beck in his clas­sic novel “The Grapes of Wrath”, is home to a shift­ing pop­u­la­tion of about 70 home­less people.

That’s where I met a cou­ple named Kerry and John. They asked me not to use their last names. They live in a cramped two-person tent strewn with blan­kets and clothes. Both are native to the Val­ley. And both are now home­less for the first time in their lives.

Kerry was a preschool teacher until a year ago, when her world caved in. “I got sick,” she told me. “Ulcer­a­tive col­i­tis. Ended up los­ing my job, and ended up here. Ran out of health insur­ance and money and this is what happened.”

John, a shy young man who used to work as a bar­ber, told a ram­bling story about bad breaks, crooked employ­ers and jobs that didn’t pan out. Now he passes the time play­ing with two pigeons he res­cued and tamed as pets.

“Gets to the point where time does not mean much any­more,” he said. “Time is just time. We’re just wait­ing for the big break — a chance to rebuild our lives.”

Home­less camps like this one have formed in sev­eral places around Cal­i­for­nia. Peo­ple here have formed a kind of com­mu­nity, com­plete with a “town coun­cil” of elders who meet nightly.

Many of those liv­ing in the camps are chron­i­cally home­less men with men­tal health issues or drug and alco­hol prob­lems. But many oth­ers are for­mer mem­bers of the work­ing or mid­dle classes who have fallen off the eco­nomic ladder.

“It’s a real shock when you come down here,” Kerry said. “You don’t know whether peo­ple will befriend you or not. Peo­ple have, luck­ily. But there are a lot of dan­gers out here — every­where you look. Espe­cially at night.”