Set up along a frontage road, an off-ramp, an underpass. Any liminal space of indecisive jurisdiction, where cities merge with their interconnections.
The encampments. Hoovervilles par excellence. Of tents, tarps, pallets, and plywood. Their orderliness inverse to their longevity. Whereupon piles of dubious possessions are strewn over the curb and into the right lane. Just as you get on the freeway. Or immediately as you get off.
To create by all accounts a vexing user interface. Where the infrastructure of commerce merges with the structures of homelessness. And each navigates the thing like an obstacle. However fleeting.
An experience so commonplace you might not see its sudden absence. On this or that leg of the workaday procession.
One day on a lunch break in the City I took a walk near the interchange. Along jagged pavement with disused rails, flat rate lots with chain link fences. Beneath the 101, on the base of a support pillar someone had scrawled:
“NeiL, The Cops Came & Took everyones stuff Sorry”
It was neither here nor there.