Suitably Flip

Goin' To Tent City, Gonna Have Some Fun

Dana Ford at Guardian Unlimited glances across the pond at the Hoovervilles springing up in once thriving American suburbs and weeps for our huddled foreclosees, thrust en masse into poverty by predatory, thieving mortgage lenders.

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.

The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.

As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.

Only problem is it's straight bunk.

Once you get past those those sensational, heartstring-tugging opening paragraphs, the article sets about qualifying or refuting the claims it makes in the lines above.

While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it's just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.

Where the piece comes up short in its auto-retracting, QandO picks up the slack.

Nationally, foreclosures are at an all-time high. Filings are up nearly 100 percent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac.

In fact, per RealtyTrac, they'd up 67.82% from last year but now trending down. In fact, the numbers for this November are down 10% from last November.

The Guardian further claims:

California ranks second in the nation for foreclosure filings — one per 88 households last quarter.

Actually, the figure, per RealtyTrac is one per 325 households for California, and that is 1.9 times the national average (one per every 617).

No one is arguing that there isn't a housing crisis or that foreclosures are somehow a good thing. But this sort of slipshod and agenda driven "journalism" is just inexcusable.

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Goin' To Tent City, Gonna Have Some Fun

Dana Ford at Guardian Unlimited glances across the pond at the Hoovervilles springing up in once thriving American suburbs and weeps for our huddled foreclosees, thrust en masse into poverty by predatory, thieving mortgage lenders.

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.

The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.

As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.

Only problem is it's straight bunk.

Once you get past those those sensational, heartstring-tugging opening paragraphs, the article sets about qualifying or refuting the claims it makes in the lines above.

While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it's just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.

Where the piece comes up short in its auto-retracting, QandO picks up the slack.

Nationally, foreclosures are at an all-time high. Filings are up nearly 100 percent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac.

In fact, per RealtyTrac, they'd up 67.82% from last year but now trending down. In fact, the numbers for this November are down 10% from last November.

The Guardian further claims:

California ranks second in the nation for foreclosure filings — one per 88 households last quarter.

Actually, the figure, per RealtyTrac is one per 325 households for California, and that is 1.9 times the national average (one per every 617).

No one is arguing that there isn't a housing crisis or that foreclosures are somehow a good thing. But this sort of slipshod and agenda driven "journalism" is just inexcusable.