A Then and Now of Living Outside

fresnoOnce again, I had the same idea as someone else to write my blog about, and once again I got there second. This time, it’s Hoovervilles! In this section of The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads are forced to spend some time in a Hooverville. This is where Casy is sacrifices himself so that Tom can go on with his family, and Connie abandons Rose of Sharon after expressing regret for leaving Oklahoma. First, here is some background information about Hoovervilles:

Hoovervilles, also known as Shanty Towns, are basically large communities of impoverished people squatting on land that none of them own. They live in poor conditions—without sanitation, plumbing, or electrical eyes—in dwellings made from scrap material like cardboard or plywood. The term “Hooverville,” of course, comes from the President Herbert Hoover, who many American’s blamed for allowing the country to slip into the Great Depression. But these sorts of places existed outside cities before the Depression, before Hoover was President, and even way before he was born. They were originally called “shanty towns,” and the first known usage of this term was in Ohio in 1820. But while they were around for years and years before the 1930s, the Depression caused a huge increase in the number and size of Hoovevilles. In 1930, the largest Hooverville in America was located outside of St. Louis and even had its own churches and unofficial mayor. Other famous examples were present in New York City’s Central Park, a settlement of 15,000 World War I veterans in Washington DC, Brooklyn, and Seattle.

Unfortunately, this trend didn’t die with the Great Depression—in fact, it spread around the world. Today, they found in a number of developing countries and house about one billion people worldwide.

Now, the idea of Hoovervilles is coming back to America. The article in the New York Times “Cities Deal with a Surge in Shantytowns” reports a recent increase in tent cities popping up over night around the country. There are around a dozen cities nationwide with developing shanty towns—many of them were at least 18 months old when this article was written in March 2009. But instead of living in old boxcars or under old slabs of plastic, these modern residents have tents that look like they belong to some teenage frat guys who want to drink in the woods for a night. And instead of calling them Hoovevilles, they’re called Nickelsvilles (after the mayor of Seattle) or Bushburbs. And instead of John Steinbeck running around talking to these people and exposing their situation to the masses, Oprah is doing it now.

An interesting difference between the shanty towns now and the ones that the Joads lived is the in the amount of available housing in the country. The Joads came to California at a time when everyone was going to California—there were too many people and not enough space or jobs or places to stay. Hoovervilles were almost necessary simply because there was no where to put so many people. Today, there is no mass migration to one state, to one city. There were more than 18 million empty homes in the United States in April of 2008, and usually between 2 and 3.5 million people who experience homelessness in one year. That’s at least 5 empty houses for every homeless person.