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During the Great Depression, the largest Hooverville towns were in New York's Central Park with other famous one in Cleveland and Circleville, Ohio. Today, major cities like Fesno, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Tampa Bay, Florida; Seattle, WA; New Orleans, LA; Atlanta, GA; and the state of Washington. Huge numbers of homeless people find themselves in a situation where they have no shelter, no jobs, no food, no medical assistance, and very little support from city or government officials.   Homelessness is not a new thing, increasing in the past 20 years due to lack of affordable housing and a high increase in poverty, with an increase in poverty due to the fewer employment opportunities for the workforce and declining availability and value of public assistance.    

Basically, poor people do not have adequate finances to pay for their housing, food, health care, education or childcare which force impossible choices to be made when an accident occurs, illness or just one paycheck away from unable to pay the bills. When this happens, many cannot find any help. One of the first things dropped is housing as compared to food and eating.   Today, the disparity between the rich and poor is increasing, as in the Great Depression, with low-wage workers being rapidly left behind. 

In the United States, today 38,231,521 people are surviving in poverty with a 12.5 percent increase in 2003 alone. Of this statistic, 36 percent were children under 18 years of age. Many reasons have risen for the lack of employment for the poor and low-income:

• Severe drop in the number of unionized workers
• Lessening bargaining power of unionized workers
• Lessening of the value of the minimum wage
• Decline in manufacturing jobs
• Expansion of low-paying service-sector employment
• Globalization
• Increase in non-standard work (temporary or part-time employment)

Because of these reasons, working alone does not allow people to rise above poverty as the economic growth benefits are not equally distributed. Who are benefiting are the rich, with the wealth concentrating at the top of the income pile, forcing many people to hit the streets to stay alive.  

Today, volunteer census-takers are attempting to count the homeless population in major cities across the United States. Unfortunately, it will not count the ones who been forced out of a particular homeless camp due to police sweeps or those who are on the verge of going to the streets.  

There are a series of steps involved from losing your home to living on the streets. The first stop is losing a home due to losing a job or savings, forcing the individual and or family to downsize or move in with family or friends. If this is not available, the person will eventually move into an RV or some temporary camper in a state campground. The final straw is when an average working person has to go to a shelter or the street as a final resort. In the newly developing recession, with over 850,000 homes having been lost with over 2 million jobs, the word homelessness has taken on a whole new meaning in a time when homeless funding is almost non-existent.