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It was mid-afternoon, and a queue had formed at a mobile soup-kitchen drawn up on the road. I walked into the heart of the camp. People were busying themselves with sheets of plastic, pieces of wood. Outside some of the shelters the ground had been swept clean, and tape deployed to mark out a makeshift fence - creating a sort of parody of the suburban home. Beside one the Stars and Stripes hung upside down from a pole - the signal for distress.
David Busch was standing outside his tent; a tall, rangy man in his fifties with tangled grey hair and faraway eyes. He was wearing a cardboard sign tied around his neck that read MORE LOVE. 'I'm a Ghandian,' he said. He pulled up two chairs, reached for a jug of wine and poured it into two plastic cups. Busch described himself as a child of the suburbs. He had grown up in a middle-class family in Orange County. He had been working in the family business, wholesaleing soaps and toiletries, and when that crashed he had lost his house. That was 15 years ago, and he had been homeless ever since. In that time he had assumed the mantle of activist, organising protests, petitions and food programmes. 'Personally, I prefer wholefood.' Now he was trying to organise a newspaper for Tent City. I asked, what with? 'I've got a laptop and we can print it at the local Kinko's.'
In the Depression, the shanty-towns that sprang up to house the homeless were called 'Hoovervilles' - an ironic reference to the president of the day, Herbert Hoover. Tent City had already been described as a 'Bushville'. 'But I'd actually call it a Reaganville', Busch said. Franklin D Roosevelt's prescription for the Great Depression, the New Deal, had enshrined a progressive outlook in America, Busch went on, 'that government's better role was not just to business, but to also guarantee peoples' basic human needs, and rights'. But Ronald Reagan 'and his neo-con followers' had ended that, proclaiming that a smaller role of government in social programs would somehow magically 'lift all boats' through increased business prosperity.
'Tent City is proof that Reagan's daydream for America was wrong.'
Americans, Busch said went on, were living in 'a third world economy' with no health benefits, no unemployment benefits. 'America's focus has been on the Dow Index, rather than the human development index. How many prisons have they built in the last 25 years when they should have been building schools? To erase the poverty gap in this country would cost $150 billion - roughly one fifth of the military budget. And the American people have finally woken up from that 25 year daydream - to see bank failures, visible homelessness, home foreclosures, joblessness, lack of health-care, wars, and environmental disasters.'
Tent City was not, of course, a direct result of the mortgage crisis; its inhabitants were not refugees from suburban subdivisions - the homeless will always be with us. But its very existence at exactly the moment the tsunami of foreclosure was sweeping through the suburbs seemed a potent symbol of the ailments afflicting the American economy. A symbol, too, of how narrow the gap could be between a life of comfort and downfall. Imelda, a bright and, given her circumstances, remarkably smartly dressed woman in her early thirties, told me that until a few months ago she would never have imagined herself as one of the homeless. Then she had lost her job selling mobile homes. Unable to pay the rent, she moved in with friends. When that arrangement came to an end she found herself homeless. She had been living in Tent City for six weeks.
As we talked, a goods train slowly rattled by, laden with containers from the port at Long Beach. Tomorrow, Imelda said, she was going for a job interview. You had to live in hope. The goods train kept coming, truck after truck - it seemed like the longest train in the world. The containers bore the name China Shipping Company. A week or two after my visit to Tent City I received an email from David Busch, saying that the Ontario authorities had moved in and started to evict anybody who was not a resident of Ontario. Around 200 people had been forced to leave. Busch and a fellow activist were staging a protest march along Route 66, 'on the famous "Grapes of Wrath" route', he wrote, to draw attention to the nation's housing crisis, wearing the signs around their necks saying "More Love". The reference to The Grapes of Wrath had a particular resonance.
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