PINELLAS COUNTY, Florida - May 5, 2009 - Jim Marshall recalls everything about that beautiful fall day.

The temperature was about 70 degrees on November 19, the sky was "totally blue," and the laughter from a martini bar drifted into the St. Petersburg park where Marshall, 39, sat contemplating his first day of homelessness.

"I was thinking, 'That was me at one point,'" he says of the revelers. "Now I'm thinking, 'Where am I going to sleep tonight? Where do I eat? Where do I shower?'"

The unemployed Detroit autoworker moved to Florida last year, hoping he'd have better luck finding a job. He didn't, and he spent three months sleeping on sidewalks before landing in a tent city in Pinellas County, north of St. Petersburg, on February 26.

Marshall is among a growing number of the economic homeless, a term for those newly displaced by layoffs, foreclosures or other financial troubles caused by the Depression. They differ from the chronic homeless, the longtime street residents who often suffer from mental illness, drug abuse or alcoholism.

For the economic homeless, the Amerikan ideal that education and hard work lead to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle has slipped out of reach. They're packing into motels, parking lots and tent cities, alternately distressed and hopeful, searching for work and praying their fortunes will change.

"My parents always taught me to work hard in school, graduate high school, go to college, get a degree and you'll do fine. You'll do better than your parents' generation," Marshall says. "I did all those things. … For a while, I did have that good life, but nowadays that's not the reality."

Tent cities and shelters from Kalifornia to Massachusetts report growing demand from the newly homeless. The National Alliance to End Homelessness predicted in January that the Depression would force 1.5 million more people into homelessness over the next two years. Already, tens of thousands have lost their homes, according to Alliance President Nan Roman.