SACRAMENTO — The capital's tent city sprawls messily on a grassed-over landfill beneath power lines, home to some 200 men and women with nowhere else to go. It has been here for more than a year, but in the last three weeks it has transformed into a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to most Americans.
The Depression had Hoovervilles. The energy crisis had snaking gas lines. The state's droughts have empty reservoirs and brown lawns. But today's deep recession is largely about disappearing wealth -- painful, yes, but difficult to see.
Then this tattered encampment along the American River began showing up on Oprah Winfrey, Al Jazeera and other news outlets around the world. On Thursday, city officials announced that they will shut it down within a month.
"We're finding other places to go," said Steven Maviglio, a spokesman for Sacramento's mayor. The camp is "not safe. It's not humane. But we're not going in with a bulldozer."
The ragtag community captured the collective imagination through a powerful combination of geography, celebrity and journalistic convenience.
"This is the state capital of the seventh-largest economy in the world, with a movie-star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and an NBA pro athlete for a new mayor, Kevin Johnson," said Barbara O'Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento. And the camp "is a wonderful visual for TV journalists."
On a recent chilly morning in the tent city, it is not yet sunrise. A Fox News van is parked nearby. A flashlight illuminates the inside of a dome tent. Traffic whines along the adjacent freeway. Cats criss-cross the encampment, eyes glowing.
As the sky slowly lightens, shadowy figures emerge and head for the bushes along the riverbank. There are no portable toilets. The dumpster is a new arrival, a donation that followed the flood of news reports.
Jim Gibson heads to a neighboring tent, where two of his friends -- an unemployed car salesman married to a onetime truck driver -- are brewing coffee on a propane stove.
Gibson looks like anybody's sunburned suburban dad, all jeans, polar fleece and sleepy eyes, his neatly trimmed hair covered by a ball cap. Seven months ago, the 50-year-old contractor had a job and an apartment in Sacramento. Today, he struggles to stay clean and fed.
A former owner of the American dream, he is living the American nightmare.
