Brandi Hitt, reporting from Sacramento:

There are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

Decius, reporting from the sprawling exurbs:

First world shanty towns.

Look for similar towns to spring up all along the US side of the Mexican border, as migrant workers fall out of work but are afraid to return home because the situation across the border is even more perilous.

But with so much unsold (and unsellable) housing stock in the US, there's no reason for these people to remain homeless. (See Tijuana, below.)

This situation makes "drug war" reform all the more urgent.

From 2006, John Rapley:

Kingston's gang-controlled neighbourhoods are just one result of a growing worldwide phenomenon: the rise of private "statelets" that coexist in a delicate, often symbiotic relationship with a larger state. Large sections of Colombia have gone this way, as have some of Mexico's borderlands and vast stretches of the Andes and adjoining rainforest. Nations such as Afghanistan and Somalia are more or less governed by warlords, and Pakistan's borderlands submit to Islamabad only when the state's armed forces force them to. And the list is growing.

Wandering through many cities of the developing world today, one comes up against the limits of modernity. Vast metropolises, growing so quickly their precise populations are unknown, are dotted with shantytowns and squatter camps that lack running water, are crisscrossed by open gutters of raw sewage, and are powered by stolen electricity. Developing states are constantly struggling to catch up.

In some places, they succeed, barely. In others, they are losing control of chunks of their territory.

Still, although the weakness of the state today is most pronounced in the developing world, the state's retreat is also a global phenomenon.

Also from 2006:

One of the strangest sights in Tijuana is a row of vintage California bungalows resting atop a hollow one-story steel frame. Once destined for demolition across the border, they were loaded on trucks and brought south by developers who have sold them to local residents.

To squeeze them into tight lots, many homeowners mount them on frames so they can use the space underneath for shops, car repair and the like. On one site, a pretty pink bungalow straddles a narrow driveway between two existing houses, as if a child were casually stacking toy houses.

It's not that he romanticizes poverty: he recognizes the filth and clutter, the lack of light and air, that were the main targets of Modernism nearly a century ago. But by approaching Tijuana's... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Sacramento 'Tent City'