The Big Read: In a wealthy US suburb, they sleep in a parking lot
It's almost bedtime. John Baird Jr., 47, smokes on the hood of his 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis sedan , his plaid sleeping bag neatly tucked in the trunk. Kathleen McDermott , 81, slouches in the driver's seat of her 2002 Ford Focus station wagon . Two angel statuettes stare from her dashboard into clothes and clutter behind her. Scott Downey, 52, works a crossword puzzle on his phone inside a 2006 Chrysler Town & Country van that smells faintly like cats. Clothes hang on hooks in the back, and emergency supplies of ramen noodles and Vienna sausages sit out of plain view. Advertisement They are in a Home Depot parking lot , largely invisible among the subdivisions and sprawl of Northern Virginia's Fairfax County , the nation's second-wealthiest community. Sleeping in their cars, they are homeless but sort of not, a subset of a population officially classified as "unsheltered" and slowly shrinking in these suburbs of Washington, even as the nu...