If you've been paying attention during the last month or so you know about the tent cities. But the truth is they aren't new. The truth is, they go back to the era of Reagan and "entitlement cutbacks." They're not limited to the USA; the causes are worldwide the same, though -- governments not meeting their responsibilities to ensure affordable shelter for the populace:

Tent cities have much in common with the squatter camps of the Great Depression, but to simply call them Hoover-villes is to ignore their complexity. To truly understand them, one must look at current trends in the developing world, where informal urbanism -- a form of "slum" development that takes place outside the conventions of city planning -- is now the predominant mode of city-making.

Informal urbanism, characterized by unauthorized land occupation, makeshift construction and a lack of public utilities, is how many burgeoning nations meet their housing needs. It thrives in places like Fresno, where poverty is endemic and there is a wide gap between rich and poor.

Rahul Mehrotra, a professor at the MIT Institute of Urban Studies and Planning, said there's a real kinship between Taco Flat and the squatter settlements of Mumbai, India, where he runs an architectural firm.

"It's really a reflection of the government's inability to provide housing affordably across society," Mehrotra said. Informal urbanism also thrives wherever people face exclusion from the mainstream markets for work and shelter, he added, whether for ethnic, economic or political reasons.

So, President Obama. Change has come to Washington. Will it be change that brings back jobs? Call center jobs, construction jobs, seasonal work in harvesting or planting -- like jobs generations of Americans used to pull themselves into the middle class in such industries as the telephone company, the power company, the automakers or support industry for the automakers, GE's washer-and-dryer division, Boeing, Raytheon, Convair, General Dynamics, US Steel, Maytag, AT&T, SBC -- these jobs just like the better stronger jobs they replaced in our "service economy" at the behest of the "global free market" -- are gone. The doubt that they'll return grows stronger every day. Corporations have been turning away from US labor since at least the middle of the 1980s, and consumers, lulled by the promise of "lower prices every day" and its poisonous cousin, "easy credit," have been missing the point of saving a little longer to pay for a better quality or US made or both item instead: the job you save might be your own. I'm so old I remember when in some neighborhoods in the US, buying a Toyota or a Datsun bought you a car-egging, if not a brick thru the window.

Yes, the Bushville near SoCal's Ontario airport swelled with the subprime foreclosure crash, but...it's not the only one out there.

Even Henry Ford, who was about as right-leaning as could be, understood that if you want to make money in business you have to have a product sell. If you want your product to sell, you have to pay the workers who make it for you enough so they can afford to buy it.

Ford Motor Company has, yet, not requested bailout dollars. But they have asked for a reserve to be set aside against the day they need to. FoMoCo nearly went under about five years back; new management came in and pared down most of the product lines (except the SuperDuty Trucks, which now rival the Humvee for size and gas-hoggery to go with their "tough" image), sprayed the universe with layoffs, and kept the company struggling along on life support.

Not so Daimler / Cerberus. Not so GM.

But Ford's in as much, if not more, trouble than Toyota, Honda, and Nissan; even Hyundai can't sell cars at a profit right now.

"Easy credit" has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Mr. President, we don't need to give money to banks. We need jobs. Those jobs could be in auto repair, computer repair, tech support, as well as -- and start faster than -- "green" industry. People who have built cars and computers know how to do that, and know how to repair or refurbish cars and computers. Keeping derelicts out of landfills is just one benefit of a repair/refurbish industry. Another is jobs here now. Jobs that might just help get people out of tents, tarps, and cardboard boxes.

Meanwhile, can't we put people to work creating better shelters for the homeless? I know buildings are tough to come by in many places in today's economy. I also know thousands of shipping containers are rusting away because it costs too much to reuse them in shipping -- you can find them around all the major ports, and they're sometimes seen at railway yards as well.

I propose that instead of doing the "FEMA trailer" poison-assistance, we employ people who are currently out of work in creating living quarters -- insulated living quarters with proper doors and windows and actual working plumbing -- from some of those shipping containers, and setting them up in a redevelopment plan that incorporates community gardens and public transportation for the benefit of the residents. These could indeed be temporary quarters for the newly bereft; they wouldn't be posh, but they'd beat the daylights out of a tarp, a cardboard box, and a cut-down barrel holding an open fire for heating and cooking.

Harsh, you say? Well, say I, it's the same principle as the US bases in Africa and the Middle East. But the advantage is we wouldn't have Halliburton/KBR wiring the showers to electrocute the residents.

Plus, in a manner similar to the industrial surge during World War II, we'd be putting people to work in jobs that produced tangible beneficial products right here in the USA. Crane operators, media blasters, painters, welders, carpenters, window installers, flooring and drywall work -- and yes, the use of the steel containers as shells for the buildings would make it cheaper to build longer-lasting structures. (Imagine: a house that didn't have chipboard roof decks and subfloors. Far less danger of mold, mildew, formaldehyde outgassing, etc. etc. etc.)

My point, Mr. President, is that change needs to come out of Washington into the rest of the USA. All of it. Soon.

Health care, not health insurance coverage.
Jobs, not bailouts.
Repair and replace our roads, bridges, and railway structures -- build safer, stronger, better ones. Use US labor (and yes, I'd far prefer to see that be Union Labor because in union jobs women can make wages as good as men's, whereas in nonunion jobs women make about 78 cents to the dollar men are paid).

Come on, Mr. President. You're the major beneficiary of "Yes, we Did!"
Now it's your turn. The American people need the change.