America’s Homeless Becoming “Mole People”

By James Donahue

While government statistics show a drop in the unemployed in the United States, a reality check across the land suggests that we are being lied to.

With major U.S. companies moving their operations overseas in search of cheap labor is seems clear that the drop in unemployment counting simply means that more and more workers have been out of work so long, they are dropping off the other end of unemployment benefits.

Look in just about any residential neighborhood in the country and there are countless homes up for sale. Some ominous signs proclaim bank foreclosure sales. That is a clear sign to me that people are losing their homes. And if this is happening, where are they going?

I have found many moving in with parents, relatives or friends. Some are squatting in abandoned buildings. Others are the visible homeless on the streets of major cities, sleeping on old blankets under cardboard boxes and begging for coins during the day.

But there are thousands of other homeless that have been unaccounted for. Where did they go?

An answer to this puzzle was uncovered recently in Oakland, California, when fire fighters there were called to extinguish a fire in subterranean vaults deep under the city.

As fire fighters donned oxygen masks and gear to enter the vaults, they were met by people climbing up out of them to escape the plumes of billowing smoke that were rolling out of local storm drains and sidewalk cracks.

The fire originated in some old wood inside an “underground city” of homeless people residing within vaults created by concrete retaining walls holding up 12^th Street along the south shore of Lake Merritt, said Fire Lieutenant J. P. Troy.

The people living there had used some ingenuity to tap into power lines under the street to run refrigerators, televisions, stereos and other appliances. Also found were chairs, tables and other fixings showing that the vaults were home to the homeless.

Troy said the concrete vaults measured 30 by 100 feet in size. Not all were inhabited. He said one vault had an elaborate kitchen with a butane stove, bottles of water, a table, ice chest and food.

The term “mole people” was coined by writer Jennifer Toth in her book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City.

Toth claims her book describing the lives of several dozen people living in abandoned subway and railroad tunnels under New York in the early 1990s is a true story. She said she estimated at the time there were as many as 5,000 homeless people living in what she described as a multilevel labyrinth of tunnels and dark caverns under Grand Central and Penn stations.

According to Toth, many of the residents of the tunnels lived much like the homeless seen lying under cardboard boxes on the streets of most major cities. But others, she said developed sizable communities complete with leaders or “mayors,” elaborate social structures, and even schools for the children.

Like Oakland, the “moles” of New York were tapping into electric power grids to get heat, lights and power for other purposes. They used steam from leaking pipes for heat, hot showers and even laundry. “Runners” were sent regularly to the surface to scavenge food and other supplies, but most of the residents preferred staying in the tunnels, escaping contact with the outside world.

Toth wrote about these strange underworld communities that allegedly existed in the years prior to the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington. It would be difficult to comprehend what is going on today in those same tunnels, not only under New York and Oakland, but in nearly every major city in the United States if not the rest of the world.

If somebody built a tunnel or left an underground vault under any of America’s cities, you can bet it is a shelter for some homeless soul . . . if not many souls today. Such is the state of our nation in this dark modern world.