ONTARIO, Calif., Dec 21 (Reuters) - Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.
The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.
There's a narrow window in the period just after people slip through the cracks when they are seen sympathetically, as "people like us" who had bad luck. As time goes by, they fast cease to be "like us" and sympathy fades.