Tent city populations are blossoming across America. Areas that have had particularly high foreclosure rates and job losses, such as Sacramento, California, where the ‘newly homeless’ rate rose 15% from 2007 to 2008, offer the most dramatic views.

The tent city along the American River in Sacramento is not new. Two years ago the population averaged about thirty chronically homeless individuals. Today residents of the makeshift city, also known as a shanty town, report that anywhere between 20 to 50 newly homeless people are showing up every week.

The reported total number of people living in Sacramento’s tent city has fluctuated between 200 and 500 Californians with a steady influx of new residents. Initial reports of its population are now known to be inaccurate and inflated.

Volunteers and workers at Loaves and Fishes, a local faith-based charity, have also noticed an increase in the number of newly homeless as well. Social worker Jim Peth explains that “you can tell because they’re much better dressed. They’re disoriented; they don’t know where to go. So they’re easy to spot.”

Former members of the middle class who come to tent city all have similar stories. The majority arrive after a lifetime of work in the construction industry and lost their job and home as a result of the crisis. They would lose their car, begin selling possessions, then soon were unable to pay their mortgage or rent and were either foreclosed on or evicted.

One of the tent city residents, also named Jim, is a father of five grown children and still looks like he belongs in a working-middle class suburb. He is a lifelong construction worker whose job in the trade, like so many others, completely evaporated because of the state of the economy.

Being homeless for the first time, he says, was “like learning to live all over again.”

He added, “I’m used to having a roof over my head, electricity, my own bathroom, a TV to watch news. It’s not like you can get up here and there’s a nice hot shower, there’s not a stove or a refrigerator you can store food in.”

One woman has found a solution to this storage problem. Explaining that food cannot be kept in the tent due to “dog sized” river rats, she has taken to keeping it in covered shopping carts outside her tent. Another woman reluctantly admits that she and her husband “get food that other people throw out or whatever.” She adds, “That’s just, that’s just the way it is sometimes out here.”

Most of the recession victims living in the tent city, a man who wishes to remain anonymous says, “go look for work at least three or four days a week, but everybody just keeps saying the same thing, ‘we’re not hiring right now.’” He has also discovered an additional obstacle, claiming that “they ask me, ‘Where do you live at?’ And I go, ‘Actually, I don’t have a place to live. I’m homeless.’ That’s it. They don’t hire me.”

In terms of family, Jim, the life-long construction worker, explains a common situation, “I have a mother and a stepfather in Arizona and I have 5 children. There’s only one of my children that know I’m homeless.”

He is not the only one who has kept his living situation a secret. One woman, a former commercial truck driver, admits she has a 35 year old son who doesn’t know that she and her husband, a former car salesman, recently became homeless after both were laid off. She explains, “I don’t want to worry him. I don’t want to ask him [for help]. I don’t want to make his life harder.”

There are, of course, people who have been living here for years by choice or due to alcoholism, drug addiction or mental illness, leading to a social segregation that could be likened to a tented urban sprawl.

The city is spread out along the river in separated clusters of tents known as ‘neighborhoods.’ The chronically homeless form the largest single group, composed of about 65-70 tents and is the closest to the street. Theirs is the neighborhood known throughout the shanty town and to local homeowners as the most rowdy.

The attention focused on the tent city’s deteriorating condition has spurred the mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to publicly pledge to improve the lives of these residents. On March 26, Gov. Schwarzenegger announced a plan to move the entire tent city to the Cal-Expo State fairgrounds for three months while Sacramento uses the $880,000, approved by the City Council last week, to expand homeless services.

Together with the local government and volunteers, we are taking a first step to ensure the people living in tent city have a safe place to stay, with fresh water, healthy conditions and access to the services they need,” Schwarzenegger said in a public statement. “And I am committed to working with Mayor Johnson to find a permanent solution for those living in tent city.”

The cost of this current proposal is estimated to be about $1 million.

Schwarzenegger has also announced that two weeks ago he personally asked President Barack Obama to speed up the delivery of money from the federal stimulus package to California so that it can have the resources to deal with its growing homeless population. He estimates the state will receive $180 million for this purpose, and promises that $2.4 million of it will go directly to Sacramento.

Yet there is another barrier between the California Capitol and the stimulus package. Mayor Johnson, due to accusations that a nonprofit he founded misused government money in the past, is on the list of officials forbidden to receive federal funds.

No explanation of how the money could bypass this ban and be distributed to Johnson has been given.

Sacramento, however, is far from the only tent city. The situation in Fresno, California is much worse, home to three major tent cities in the downtown area and several smaller ones along highways. An estimated 2,000 homeless people reside in these communities.

Los Angeles has always had shanty towns, but emerging ones in cities such as Nashville, Tenn., Olympia, Wash. and St. Petersburg, Flordia, among other American cities, is tragically alarming — resembling Depression-era Hoovervilles.

None of these tent cities have reached the level of destitution found in similar settlements during the Depression, but they are becoming eerily comparable. There are Sacramento residents who say “never even in their wildest dreams” thought they’d end up here.

“Prepare!” one homeless man warned America’s middle-class, “Don’t turn your back on us today, because tomorrow, you’ll be living next to us.”

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