America may have to accept shantytowns

The government of Virginia destroyed a town Friday morning. It wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

The town wasn’t on any maps, and it didn’t have a mayor, but it was a town. For its 80-some residents, it was home. The problem: The town was made up tents, and was lived-in by people who would otherwise be homeless. It was, for all intents and purposes, a shantytown.

When Virginia State Police cleared out the town at the request of VDOT and State Delegate Scott Lingamfelter (R-Prince William), it did so ostensibly to improve safety, since the town was near a highway. In so doing, Northern Virginia becomes merely the latest example of a widespread trend where shantytowns pop up, and the government clears them out.

Since, naturally, that solves the problem of homelessness.

It seems clear that shantytowns like these are here to stay. We’ve made a social decision in this country that low taxes are more important than an adequate social safety net. That decision has consequences, one of which is that people who fall through the cracks will naturally find non-traditional ways to provide for themselves and their kin. That was the idea, after all; let the poor pick themselves up by their bootstraps, if enough of them fall off the grid, let them start their own. Well, it’s working! Poor people are taking care of themselves. Shantytowns are a natural byproduct.

So no matter how many of these things state governments destroy to keep whitebread constituents from facing dirty reality, more and more are likely to spring up, and eventually some will start to take on the trappings of more permanent towns. The dirty reality exists, in part because we have adopted policies to create it, and the problem seems likely to get bigger as the economy stumbles along.

America may soon be a nation with shantytowns again, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.