“Mole People”

COLD winters. A 700-mile [1,100 km] network of subway tunnels that are at least somewhat warmer than the city outside. A growing population of homeless people​—75,000 of them, by one estimate. In New York City, U.S.A., those three factors have combined to create a disquieting urban phenomenon: tunnel dwellers, or “mole people,” as some call them. On catwalks and stairways, in abandoned supply rooms, tunnels, and other neglected nooks of this vast labyrinth, they have staked out tiny homesteads. In one long-unused Manhattan railroad tunnel, scores of them have moved into deserted concrete bunkers, alcoves, and ledges. Some have even built little shanties in the tunnel.

Tunnel life is hard, though. Rats the size of cats skitter about in the dark. Every year dozens of people are killed by the trains thundering through the tunnels and by the electrified third rail. Police scour the tracks regularly to roust the homeless. Transit workers follow, dismantling the makeshift dwellings. They drag out couches and rugs, radios and televisions, even scrape wallpaper from the walls of some tunnel hideaways.

After the police leave, the homeless return. As one police officer told The New York Times, all their efforts to remove the homeless may only shift them about briefly within the tunnel system. “This is a short-term solution,” is how he put it. But homelessness is hardly a short-term problem. According to one estimate, as many as two million are homeless in the United States alone. In just one year, their ranks swelled by an alarming 18 percent. Clearly, a long-term solution is what we need. That is what mankind’s Creator promises in the Bible​—a time when every person on earth will be able to build his own house and live in it, enjoying a life free from the grim specter of poverty and homelessness.​—Isaiah 65:21-23.