There are lots of sad things about it, actually.  But not all of them are unique to this particular situation.  Plenty of people around the world lack the resources to procure what we would define as adequate shelter for themselves.  Plenty lack the privacy and the conveniences that so many of us of certain socio-economic strata in the West have or do take for granted.  The sufferings of economic hardship are not unique or new to this story.  

To me, the poignancy of this story is that people could be connected like never before through the technology of the Internet, and yet isolated in reality to almost the smallest level.  Nothing more to themselves or their lives but the computer screen through which they gaze, as through a window to joy and promise and hope that must seem agonizingly out of reach.  To Twitter and MySpace and Facebook a virtual life, while barely having enough room to put up one's feet.  Nothing left to call one's own except the ability to interact with the world in an unprecedented manner.  The world at your fingertips, while you live in a closet.

If this isn't a circle in hell for a 21st century Inferno, I don't know what is.