When the stock market crashed in 1929, it wiped out businesses and life savings nearly overnight. Business laid off workers; homeowners could not pay their taxes or mortgages; renters fell behind on rent and were evicted. Those who did not have relatives they could move in with were forced to find other lodging. By 1931, Seattle had eight shantytowns nicknamed Hooverville, a mocking reference to the unpopular president Herbert Hoover under whose watch the Great Depression began.
Although Seattle’s Hooverville was one of many from coast-to-coast, it became one of the largest, longest-lasting and best-documented shantytowns in the U. S. Read more about the plight of the homeless and what life was like in the Hoovervilles of the 1930s in my recently published feature on HistoryLink.