Reader Tom J writes in:
My wife came home from her job in the Reston Clown Center (RTC) and said that she saw what she believes to be a shanty-town so I Googled "bum town reston" and your blog came up. It's now bookmarked and will be thoroughly read and enjoyed as I'm a native Restonite (Governor Sq./Wainwright/Lake Anne).We were skeptical, but we put on pants and hard shoes and hopped into the car to do a little of what the remaining 12 newspaper fogies still employed nationwide might call "reporting," or at least "driving by at 35 mph with a cell phone camera in case we saw something." And the story was actually true! It's actually past the Target and Sonoco in the thin strip of woods between Sunset Hills and the Toll Road (see the helpful annotated photograph above), and there's a giant tarp, surrounded by a small semicircle of one-man pup tents, and people milling about.
Anyway, if you are on Sunset Hills going from Reston Pkwy towards Target she says there is a group of tents/tarps in the woods on the left hand-side between the road and the toll road. Got any insight on this so I don't have to go over there to satisfy my curiosity?
All in all, it looked pretty much like our last campout, except that we tend to camp a bit further from major big-box retailers and limited-access highways. Reston's homeless used to hang out in the wooded area near the library, back before it was razed and turned into a fancy-pants condo with an awesome view of a parking garage. Like the deer we're required by sections 4-389 of our HOA covenants to love, they appear to have been driven to smaller and smaller wooded areas. Or maybe they just want quick access to all the fabulous low-priced crap at Target.
So in conclusion, drive by and get a glimpse of the future that awaits us all as the economy continues to flatline, the end.
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