Hoovervilles Return

The reporter is missing the story.

The story is a Hooverville, the Brazilians call them Favelas, have returned, and over the past 8 years or so, the population has increased 10 fold.

Illegal squatters create new sprawl on mesa
Jeremy Jojola, Eyewitness News 4, and Kurt Christopher, KOB.com
Illegal squatters create new sprawl on mesa

No roads. No power. But that’s not stopping an explosion of illegal homes from being built just southwest of Albuquerque on Pajarito Mesa.

For years, families just outside of Albuquerque have been living in third-world conditions. Now a recent estimate by Bernalillo County officials shows a jump of illegal growth in the area that could end up costing the county big bucks to stop and clean up.

You could call it Albuquerque’s version of a shanty town. It’s where families build homes of plywood in the middle of the desert without running water or electricity.

Josefina Quesada and her family of seven have been living on the mesa for 13 years. They buy water in the city and truck it back home in barrels. Their source of power is a series of car batteries.

Every ten days the water runs out and they go back into town for more. Quesada says despite the hardships, she’d rather live here than in the city.

A recent estimate by the county shows more families like the Quesadas are moving onto the mesa. In the early 1990s, the county counted about 50 families living in the area. Today the estimate is 500 families, many of them in homes that were either built or moved to the mesa illegally.

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