How can People end up Living at Airports for Months or Years?
In January, local authorities arrested a 36-year-old man named Aditya Singh after he had spent three months living at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Since October, he had been staying in the secure side of the airport, relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food, sleeping in the terminals and using the many bathroom facilities. After more than two decades studying the history of airports, I’ve come across stories about individuals who have managed to take up residence in terminals for weeks, months and sometimes years. It wasn’t until an airport employee asked to see his ID that the jig was up. Singh, however, is far from the first to pull off an extended stay.
He soon became an international hot potato as his case bounced back and forth among officials in England, France and Belgium. And so he stayed at Charles de Gaulle Airport for nearly 18 years. At one point French authorities offered to allow him to reside in France, but Nasseri turned down the offer, reportedly because he wanted to get to his original destination, England. He left only in 2006, when his declining health required hospitalization.
These circumstances seldom result in more than a day or two’s residency at an airport. Without his papers, he could not board his plane for England. Then there are those who unwittingly find themselves in an extended, indefinite stay. Perhaps the most famous involuntary long-term airport resident was Mehran Karimi Nasseri, whose story reportedly inspired the movie “The Terminal,” starring Tom Hanks. Nasseri, an Iranian refugee, was en route to England via Belgium and France in 1988 when he lost the papers that verified his refugee status. Nor was he permitted to leave the Paris airport and enter France.
For the most part, airport officials have tried to provide aid to these voluntary residents. At Los Angeles International Airport, for example, officials have deployed crisis intervention teams to work to connect the homeless to housing and other services. You can find the original article here. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Janet Bednarek is a professor of history at the University of Dayton. But it’s also clear that most airport officials would prefer a solution where airports no longer operated as homeless shelters.
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