How to Use shantytown in a Sentence

shantytown

noun
  • Shoot-outs in favelas, or shantytowns, have killed dozens of people.
    — The Economist, 5 Oct. 2017
  • The city will finally lose that shantytown look of rotting shacks.
    — Justin Davidson, Curbed, 21 Aug. 2024
  • Most had to walk hours more, through torrential downpours, to reach the refugee shantytown.
    — Hannah Beech, New York Times, 2 Sep. 2017
  • To the south, cardboard shantytowns slump miserably in the dust.
    — Julia Scheeres, WIRED, 23 Aug. 2001
  • The film takes place in a shantytown constructed on a garbage dump on the outskirts of Tokyo.
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 2 Feb. 2018
  • People crowded into slums, shantytowns and favelas from where they were hard put to reach jobs.
    — The Economist, 5 Apr. 2018
  • For someone used to only a muddy shantytown, this can be life changing,’’ Muir says.
    — National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2016
  • Memon said her husband is a truck driver and the family lives in an urban shantytown.
    — Pamela Constable, Washington Post, 21 Jan. 2018
  • In the 2- or 3-foot gap between the metal and the wall sat a long makeshift shantytown with a web of tarps, chairs and cardboard.
    — Heather Knight, SFChronicle.com, 6 June 2020
  • In time the area also gave rise to an illicit shantytown replete with bars, brothels and trafficked young girls.
    — Kevin Monahan, NBC news, 26 Sep. 2022
  • Their shantytown, hidden from view by walls and closed to most visitors, is the envy of Skid Row.
    — Scott Harrison, latimes.com, 21 Feb. 2018
  • As the family moved through the shantytown’s narrow streets, gunfire erupted.
    — Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald, 20 May 2026
  • Killings in Rocinha, once the showcase shantytown in Brazil’s showcase city, had quadrupled in less than a year.
    — Washington Post, 5 Jan. 2018
  • The resulting shantytowns grew to each contain hundreds of settlers, many of whom also began to hunt for bushmeat.
    — Jerome Lewis, Scientific American, 26 Apr. 2020
  • Unable to squeeze into the four acres, hundreds of Guarani have spilled into adjacent shantytowns.
    — Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, 2 Jan. 2024
  • Many of these immigrants, known as Mizrahi Jews, were sent to shantytown transit camps and largely sidelined.
    — Aron Heller, Jewish Journal, 5 July 2017
  • The shantytown’s concentric bands of humanity can be read in the same way scientists like Hessl read the rings of a pine tree.
    — Russ Juskalian, Discover Magazine, 28 May 2015
  • With the shantytown long gone, the homeless piled onto the streets of a Skid Row that was forcibly contained to 50 square blocks.
    — Tori Richards, Washington Examiner, 22 Apr. 2021
  • Residents of Complexo de Alemão, a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, have no such cause for cheer.
    — The Economist, 26 Oct. 2017
  • By ’88, the park had become a shantytown, which was not popular with local residents.
    — Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 15 Oct. 2020
  • In 2011, federal agents raided the shantytown and made dozens of arrests.
    — Adam Sabes, FOXNews.com, 11 Aug. 2025
  • These new shantytowns are plagued with substance abuse, violence and prostitution.
    — Chicago Tribune, 17 Aug. 2025
  • At the hotel gate, a man from the shantytown across the street was sharpening knives for the hotel’s kitchen, a weekly assignment that earned him $3.
    — Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Discover Magazine, 12 Aug. 2010
  • Lesser known is a shantytown in a corner of Gangnam district, whose makeshift homes were destroyed by a fire on Friday.
    — Min Joo Kim, Washington Post, 20 Jan. 2023
  • The tactics were sometimes brutal and the problem was merely moved outside the city limits, where new shantytowns were formed and existing ones spread.
    — Washington Post, 17 May 2017
  • Farmers once proud of living and working their ancestral land were driven into poverty and forced into shantytowns.
    — Nik Kowsar, Time, 2 Oct. 2025
  • The rich traverse the skies in private jets, while the poor struggle in favelas, the shantytowns that have come to symbolize the city’s impoverished.
    — Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2017
  • In a deeply unequal city, home to mansions, resorts, and shantytowns alike, the impact of the shutoff will be felt very differently from one neighborhood to the next.
    — Jonah Shepp, Daily Intelligencer, 6 Feb. 2018
  • Perhaps the shantytown’s most memorable structure was the Hunger Wall, which served as a backdrop for the encampment’s city hall.
    — Brandon Tensley, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 Aug. 2020
  • One of the largest shantytowns once occupied the concrete channel in the Tijuana River, but the police burned it down.
    — Benjamin Preston, Fortune, 24 July 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'shantytown.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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