http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/10/homeless_people_find_shelter_f.htmlHomeless people find shelter, friendship in shantytown
By Kalamazoo Gazette staff
October 19, 2009, 8:30AM
WALKER - Peering in from a railroad spur, the ramshackle lean-to built from others’ castoffs is the first sign of inhabitants on this wooded sliver between industrial sites.
About 75 feet northwest, a taut green Army-style tent sits next to a smoking fire pit. Nearby, a tarp draped over branches from two trees covers two single-sized mattresses.
A small trail through dense woods leads to a branch-built teepee partially wrapped in plastic. In another spot, an unemployed factory worker losing his home to foreclosure is building a glorified shed that may become his new house.
This is an urban shantytown, where a handful of area homeless have carved out a community near the city lines of Grand Rapids and Walker.
Three people have made this place their year-round home, though the population varies and can swell to 30 with part-time residents and visitors.
Some stay a day, others several weeks.
“My intention was not to be here this long,” said Gilbert Garcia, who has lived at the camp through below-zero temperatures and scalding summer days. “It was to get on my feet and get out of here. I don’t want to be here forever. I want to be somewhere else.”
It was here, in a pickup bed topper with a cracked window, that Garcia saw the beginning of his new home propped up on pallets and reinforced with plywood and wall paneling. Garcia framed his finds and draped them with tarps.
This is where he and his girlfriend, Julie Miller, have lived for three years.
It’s the place they shower with water from milk jugs lugged from a commercial building’s spigot a half-mile away.
It’s where they cook over a campfire, grilling on a metal grate from a broken box fan or a discarded refrigerator shelf.
And, it’s here, in jettisoned beat-up chairs, that they relax after days of odd jobs, can collecting and running errands.
Neither Garcia, 46, nor Miller, 30, have unraveled the paperwork web to obtain disability payments for his debilitating back injury or Miller’s manic depression. They subsist on monthly allotments from state-issued Bridge Cards that replaced government food stamps.
“In our situation, this is where we’re at. This is what we need to do,” Garcia said. “I don’t think any of us should be hungry or homeless. Seems like there’s enough in the world.”
Caring and sharing
On the fringe of society, many of West Michigan’s chronically homeless find shelter in any number of places, including missions, highway underpasses and couch-surfing.
But it’s the long-standing and communal nature of this encampment off Ann Street near Alpine Avenue NW that separates it from others, according to Don Tack, a homeless advocate who founded the Servants Center in downtown Grand Rapids.
The shantytown residents care for each other, sharing their few material possessions and a food pantry in an old two-drawer dresser.
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