The fire department won't investigate, :: because this was an illegal homestead, so they don't much care :: about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most :: of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire :: department wouldn't fight the fire at first, because someone at :: city hall said that the land's owner wouldn't let them on the :: property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land :: between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is :: unknown -- a decades-old dispute over title has left it in legal :: limbo that let the squatters settle there. It's suspicious all :: right -- various entities had tried to evict the squatters :: before, but the legal hassles left them in happy limbo. What the :: law couldn't accomplish, the fire did. :: :: The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters :: into their factory, and now they have "live-work" condos that :: look like something Dr Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the :: Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they :: were "constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind :: that had been drinking," as a press account of the day had it. :: :: Last year, the city completed a new housing project nearby to :: here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get :: them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. The :: shantytowners wouldn't go: "It was too expensive," said Mrs X, :: who doesn't want her family back in Oklahoma to know she's :: squatting with her husband and their young daughter. "We can't :: afford *any* rent, not if we want to put food on the table on :: what we earn." :: :: She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban :: renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of :: place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order :: in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to :: keep any cash around. :: :: The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was :: a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing :: that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they're :: inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and :: homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology :: inside them] The response was enormous and passionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she'd been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She'd expected that -- she'd felt that way herself, when she'd first walked past the shantytown. But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and emails from homeless people who'd been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you'd think that half her readership was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners.