NEW DELHI, India - Every day on my way to and from work I pass a community that exists on the side of the road in the dirtiest of conditions.

Homeless children play outside their destroyed huts.

Out in the open tiny children use the bathroom just outside their huts on sheets of newspaper, men wash themselves with a pail of water and women prepare breakfast on tin plates on the ground.

It's sometimes too much to behold. Seeing it makes me feel a sense of guilt for having so much and not doing enough coupled with a sense of curiosity about how they survive day in and day out.

But over the days and months that I have been watching another feeling has surfaced, a sense of amazement.

No matter where these families are tossed they somehow manage to form a real working neighborhood of their own.

Children play with jumps ropes made of rags, families keep pets (I see a great Dane tied up every morning protecting its owner's hut that is about the same height as the dog), and mothers comb their daughters hair on Charpoys (rope strung beds) that sit outside the huts.

Then there are the businesses that exist along side the homes.

There's the guy who makes furniture, the vegetable vendor, the ironsmith, and the people who go around collecting garbage found all over the streets of Delhi and bring it home to pick through it and recycle the bits that can bring in some money.

After a year of drive-bys, this Delhi street side neighborhood had become a small part of my daily life.

So when I drove by two nights ago I gasped, the entire neighborhood had been leveled. Its tenants left sitting on piles of bricks and mortar looking dazed.

They had no warning except for that fact that most knew this settlement was illegal though they had been living there for years.

This is life in the slums. One minute you have shelter, the next you don't.

These people live on about $1 a day so being able to afford proper housing is next to impossible. They are here to work, many from destitute villages, but they can't make a living in anymore.

The government said this settlement on government-owned land was bulldozed because it was encroaching on the right of way and more importantly the road had to be expanded to accommodate the thousands of visitors expected to attend the Commonwealth Games Delhi is hosting in 2010.

Delhi has a master plan to relocate its millions of slum dwellers but qualifying for housing can mean going through a maze of bureaucratic maneuvers.

In this case the residents don't qualify. Even if they did, right now there isn't enough housing built to accommodate them.

It's not politically correct to say aloud (just try getting a politician to admit this on camera) but the truth is the city is also trying to clean up its image by erasing its slums. The question is how to do it humanely.

It's easy to judge those in power for their actions or inaction but it is much harder to figure out real solutions. Maybe you have the answers. Any takers?