Tent Cities and the Homeless

I just saw a story, in the June 1 issue of Newsweek which just hit the stands, about the increase in the number of "tent cities" where homeless people live as an alternative to living in shelters. The article stated that something like an additional 1 million homeless people are anticipated in the near future.

Here's a link to another story on that topic.

If you look into America's distant past, you'll see that there was a time in our nation's history when people often lived in tents or lean-tos which weren't much better than tents. They weren't called bums then. They were called "pioneers". They helped to build this country so that people might one day aspire to live in much nicer homes. And it wasn't just during the 1800s that such people existed. During the great Depression, Chicago's parks were filled with people who slept outdoors because they'd lost their homes. (I learned that last fact while glancing through a recently published book containing excerpts from a jazz-era magazine which was modeled after the New Yorker, called the Chicagoan.)

It's a shame that we now live in a world in which the option of living in a tent or something comparable is frequently available only to people who are willing to break the law because they really have no other viable options. Why should it be illegal to do what was once done by people such as Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson and others?