"Sleeping In The Dirt"
Seth Doane is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.
There is no way to avoid the news of our struggling economy. For months in our series “The Other America” we’ve been chronicling the tough time that Americans are having as they try to pay their bills and juggle responsibilities. So, when our LA Bureau Chief pointed to a story about the tent city that sprung up in Reno, Nevada, we knew that it was something we should look into.
This spring, right in the middle of downtown Reno, a tent city started to crop up. It started with just a few tents scattered along the railway tracks. But as more people started to set up camp the city decided they needed to organize the tents, establish some rules, and provide what services they could. Now, roughly 170 people call this “tent city” home.
Organizers say that the people living here are a combination of the chronically homeless and the “newly” homeless. One city official suggested that it was roughly a 50-50 mix (chronically homeless vs. newly homeless) but that an exact number was hard to determine. The so-called “newly” homeless are recent casualties of this tough economy. These are folks who were living paycheck to paycheck and may have lost their jobs or had expenses that became too costly to bear. Many of the people living in tent city are looking for work but cannot find it. Others are working but not making enough to move out of a tent.
In our story on the Evening News, you'll meet ...
(CBS)
This spring, right in the middle of downtown Reno, a tent city started to crop up. It started with just a few tents scattered along the railway tracks. But as more people started to set up camp the city decided they needed to organize the tents, establish some rules, and provide what services they could. Now, roughly 170 people call this “tent city” home.
Organizers say that the people living here are a combination of the chronically homeless and the “newly” homeless. One city official suggested that it was roughly a 50-50 mix (chronically homeless vs. newly homeless) but that an exact number was hard to determine. The so-called “newly” homeless are recent casualties of this tough economy. These are folks who were living paycheck to paycheck and may have lost their jobs or had expenses that became too costly to bear. Many of the people living in tent city are looking for work but cannot find it. Others are working but not making enough to move out of a tent.
In our story on the Evening News, you'll meet ...
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