These photos show painted cardboard shelters in the homeless city that took root in the underground sprawl of Shinjuku station’s western wing in the mid-1990s. A deadly fire swept through the community in February 1998, forcing the inhabitants out and conveniently allowing the city to proceed with long-awaited plans to construct the moving walkway that now exists there. The paintings were also lost in the fire.

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The first time I heard anything about people in the sewers in Colombia was back at the beginning of the 90s when ABC Primetime Live did a piece about all the children living down there. It became a fairly big humanitarian story in the media for a while, with other networks in America and Europe sending in crews to cover it and folks setting up charities abroad. And rightfully so—the situation at the time was a complete fucking nightmare. The sewers were filled with packs of kids living waist-deep in shit and taking in copious amounts of glue and crack in order to cope.

This was at the height of Colombia's "Dirty War", and the whole reason the street kids had gone down into the sewers in the first place was to get away from the violence. But then the paramilitary death squads who had chased them off the street started to come into the pipes and shoot them or douse them in gasoline or rape them. Ten-year-old girls were giving birth and trying to raise babies in the middle of sewage (the early onset of puberty having been brought on by the constant molestation by adults and older kids as well as the general stress on their bodies). It was about as fucked as things get.

Downtown Los Angeles is the epicenter of the largest homeless population in the United States.

The Downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map takes raw data about those sleeping on the streets and transforms it into a visual tool for understanding the situation.
Always Changing:

The sequence shows a slice of the map and how population shifts over a ten week period.

audio + images in a new york times profile of rural homesless in colorado

She was stereotyped by the students as the "duck lady" on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania where I served my first congregation right out of Princeton Seminary. Everywhere the duck lady went she seemed to broadcast her presence with a loud squawking that truly sounded like Donald Duck,
"Squzzzzz, Squazzzzz, Squzzzz, Squawzzz."
One day I was riding the bus down Chestnut Street. About a block before my stop the Duck Lady got on squawking away,
"Squazzzz, Squizzzz”.
She didn't pay the fare and the bus driver didn't challenge her. She headed right toward me! Stopped directly in front of me and in a clear voice said,
"Excuse me, may I sit there, I am very handicapped”.

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The growing focus on housing the chronically homeless was driven, many officials said, by a study in 1998 by Prof. Dennis P. Culhane, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Culhane showed that a vast majority of people staying in shelters did so briefly and got on with their lives and that 10 percent were in and out repeatedly for years, accounting for half of total bed use.

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