ON A patch of land between the American River and a bike path on one side and the pylons of a power company on the other, about a half-hour's walk from California's state capitol in Sacramento, men in orange suits have been clearing out the tarps, tents, mattresses, used needles and the other leavings of some 150 homeless people. On April 16th the Golden State's most notorious tent city was at last closed, and its inhabitants moved to rather more salubrious shelters.

The camp shot to national and international fame earlier in the year, when a camera team from the Oprah Winfrey Show arrived. A television audience with a grisly eagerness for depression stories was meant to conclude that California's middle class, being foreclosed upon en masse, was now living in shantytowns. It was Great Depression 2.0, with new “Hoovervilles”—the name given by 1930s Democrats to the shantytowns that sprang up on the Republican President Herbert Hoover's watch—apparently back in evidence. Many other press teams, American and foreign alike, arrived to record their sequels to Steinbeck's “The Grapes of Wrath”.

Kevin Johnson, a former basketball star and now Sacramento's first black mayor, found himself on CNN speaking to national audiences, secure in the knowledge that he could not be blamed: in Sacramento, it is the city manager, not the mayor, who wields the main administrative power. Even the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, dropped in for a surprise walk-through. After all this attention, action became inevitable.

The funny thing, though, is that the tent city had actually been around for close to a decade. There may have been a foreclosed homeowner or two among its denizens, but Justin Wandro, the office manager at nearby Loaves and Fishes, a food bank where the homeless can eat and shower, says that almost all of the people there have problems with mental health, drug abuse or both. Sacramento has about 1,400 homeless people in shelters, and another 1,200 or so on the streets, he says. For some reason, America notices only when they're on Oprah, or from the middle class.