Twenty-first century Teepees

A native American tent like the one above is being sold on Etsy for $160. You could go camping in one of these to "de-stress".

But for many tent-living is not simply a recreational interlude; it's a necessity as the video on Fresno's "tent city" shows.

I watched this video on the heels of reading Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities, a ethnographic study of the world's "squatter cities."

There aren't any squatters in the U.S. as codified property/ownership rights prohibit the building of homes on land that one doesn't own and have a title deed for. But on account of the recession combined with high cost of renting and foreclosures, many mow-income Americans have been forced to live inside tents on land that is in a liminal zone between being owned and not owned.

What emerges from the video is a spirit--of positivity and responsibility. Just as squatter city residents demonstrate a high degree of self-reliance, so do the residents of tent cities: they have a history, they have lives and they even double up as sanitation workers.

The woman in the video speaks of Mark Twain, who had to leave home in rural Mississippi because his parents couldn't afford to feed their children, became great in a milieu akin to that of a tent city. The woman has hopes for her son, whom she calls "brilliant," and perhaps imagines a Twain-like greatness for him.