Coleman is the nation's new largest homebuilder

It's finally happened. Americans reduced en masse to living in tents? No, the New York Times finally got around to doing a story on people affected by the economy who weren't fired bankers, gold digging girlfriends hitting the hard times, millionaires having to pay for their own lunch, or hedge fund managers who were rally regretting leasing that second Humvee for the use of their maid staff.

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

Herbert Hoover has been dead for nearly 50 years and we still have to name our shanty cities after him? Dear God, hasn't he suffered enough? This one wasn't even his fault. At least the good people of Seattle have named their tent city Nickelsville in an attempt to blame the local mayor for a national crisis. We need a name more reflective of the times. Bushvilles? Cassanotowns? Grammburghs? Paulsenhausen? Surely we cannot keep tying Hoover to this.

Maybe we should sell the naming rights to corporations, get enough money to pay for running water. AIG presents Shame City. Cititentcity. It's best we get these people up and funded, they are building and founding the new cities we'll all be living in. We'll want the infrastructure and hobo hierarchy figured out by the time we get there. There aren't enough state fairgrounds for all of us.

It must make those tent dwellers warm inside that the debate over money to corporations is over how large and how soon, the debate over money to people affected by the crisis and programs that help those people are over whether the money is needed at all. Hopefully that warmth is enough to sustain them on cold nights.