Illegals' squalid housing transforms cities

WorldNetDaily ^ | July 17, 2005

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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INVASION USA Illegals' squalid housing transforms cities Sewage flows in streets as landlords cram up to 64 in single-family homes

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 17, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

The impact of uncontrolled immigration is coming home for residents of many Long Island, New York, communities as landlords turn single-family homes into filthy, overcrowded tenements holding as many as 64 renters – causing health and fire dangers and transforming neighborhoods.

Illegal rooming houses, serving both documented and undocumented immigrants, are increasingly appearing across Long Island, as landlords fill a niche created by the demand for and availability of cheap foreign labor.

"It's definitely spreading," Brookhaven Councilman James Tullo, who heads a task force investigating 300 illegal rentals in his town, told Newsday. "It's popping up in areas where you wouldn't expect them to be."

While the closure of a home housing 64 men in Farmingville last month represents the most extreme case, officials in other communities cite their own examples:

12 men living in a basement flooded with sewage; Sheds rented without heat or plumbing; Sleeping cubbyholes accessible only by passing through a hole in the wall; A five-bedroom home converted to nine with spliced, makeshift wiring providing electricity to 30 dwellers; A home with as many as 25 cars parked on the lawn, with residents sleeping in vehicles, urinating in the bushes and the septic tank overflowing into the street; Garbage bags sitting in yards for days; Vans from the local country club and other labor contractors honking their horns at 5:00 a.m. and picking up their employees; Loud parties running late into Saturday night with crowds of men. "They're changing the face of the neighborhood," says Farmingville resident Lisa Marino. "There's this flophouse atmosphere."

"I've never seen it this bad," adds Islip Town Councilman Christopher Bodkin, "and it's getting worse all the time."

The worst conditions are found at "shift-bed" houses – places where mattresses are rented for limited periods of time. Most such houses offer two shifts per day, notes Nassau County Assessor Harvey Levinson.

"Sleeping in closets, sleeping in basements, sleeping in shifts," says former Nassau County Assistant Fire Marshal Steve Wenk. "We've seen it all."

Renters say they typically pay from $250 to $350 a month per person. When five or six share a bedroom, rates are usually less.

Seasonal workers from South Africa pay their employer, Glen Oaks Country Club, $75 a week to live two or three to a room in a home the club rents from a Queens businessman. Included in the rent is transportation to work in the club's van that honks it's horn during it's early morning pickup – to the chagrin of neighbors.

"We're paying our full load for taxes to live here and the person behind me is running a rooming house," complains neighbor Carol Voelger.

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of "overcrowded" housing units in Nassau and Suffolk counties grew by 41 percent. Officially, the "overcrowded" label is used to describe housing with more than one person per room. With the influx of immigrants into Long Island, officials say finding 15 people living in a single-family home is not rare. Most cases of overcrowded housing and squalid conditions never come to their attention, authorities admit.

Vanessa Tallerico, whose neighborhood has six illegal rooming houses, remembers when her community had "a mixture of people."

"When you have 300 to 400 men move in, that's no longer diverse," she says.

[muawiyah]

As the property values around here have risen sky-high (4-fold in two years), some folks have begun having trouble paying the taxes on the houses they rent out as investments.

One guy down the street now has 8 different satellite TV dishes on his roof. His neighbor had had 10, but then he sold it to a company that does rehabs and resells (for a substantial profit).

My own plans are to rent this out to anywhere from 8 to 15 nurses to attend the school of nursing just across I-95.

Pay off that mortgage in a year or so; move to Aruba where the price of housing is probably going to slump real bad if they let that kid off!

[cartman90210]

Well, as the 'rod would tell you (once again), they're just here to create the flophouse atmosphere that 40 million aborted children aren't here to create.

Strange, isn't it, how we "need these migrant workers" to keep our lawns mowed and our dishes washed and our houses cleaned, yet so often their own dwellings are total pigsties. But hey, I manage to keep my own place vacuumed without any help, so maybe it's easy for me to say...!

The one thing in this article that sounds a little fishy is the part about "up to 25 cars parked on a lawn" - man, that must be one humongous lawn! Where exactly is this particular flophouse, the Hamptons?

[pabianice]

"It's definitely spreading," Brookhaven Councilman James Tullo, who heads a task force investigating 300 illegal rentals in his town, told Newsday. "It's popping up in areas where you wouldn't expect them to be."

Why do I suspect that Park Avenue and The Hamptons will not be affected?

[gubamyster]

ping

[JohnLongIsland]

while i was having a beer yesterday watching
the yankees-red sox game yesterday at my local saloon, it dawned on me in my backyard the anti-smoking laws are more strictly enforced than the illegal immigration laws.
priorities i guess?

[primeval patriot]

Got Cholera?

[jb6]

Hay what are you complaining about? These guys are just willing to live in conditions Americans aren't. They're filling an economic slot. Their benefits out weigh the costs. You couldn't survive without their labor. It's the right and humane thing to do. It's all just scare mongering by the conservatives. It's just part of the neocon(artists) Free World of bourderless markets.

Can you think of any more excuses? I'm fresh out.

[TheLion]

Coming to everyone's community!

[RATkiller]

Have you seen that commercial where the middle-aged, grey-haired and bearded man holds the hand of a little girl? They appear to be in an alley, with an open sewer down the middle, in a shanty town in a third world country. The man then goes into a pitch on how you can help this little girl to a better life for a few dollars a month.

I was wondering how long it would take for those sorts of conditions to become common, rather than rare, in the United States. It looks as if it is beginning.

It took a long time for our ancestors to climb out of the poverty of tenements and live a decent life. For the most part, this happened not because the majority of them were entrepreneurs or geniuses like Edison but because they worked hard and employers were not allowed to treat people like machines. Machines that you threw on the scrap heap when they were no longer useful to you. The hated GOVERNMENT passed laws that constrained employers in the treatment of their employees. They did this even though it may not have been "most efficient" in terms of economics but because it was morally righteous.

US citizens, for the last fifty years, have slowly become accustomed to being treated fairly and with dignity by employers. However we see that employers are now learning that they can get away with nearly anything, without the government(s) doing anything, and they are taking advantage of this. On the low end of the employment ladder, unlimited supplies of cheap labor are their hammer to depress the wages of the poor. It really would be hilarious if it were not disgusting; that from the article, a country club, the bastion of the wealthy doesn't want to pay an American say $25k to be a gardener but will turn a decent neighborhood into a slum and blast the horn of their van at the crack of dawn waking everyone up just so they can have a $4/hr peon.
At the higher end of employment, the corrupt Republican (and Democrat) congress is run by industry and trade associations. The money pours in and our representatives listen in open mouthed adoration as industries tell them we don't have enough smart Americans and our education system is rotten and we need foreigners to do engineering, computer design, programming, architecture, accounting, etc.
It's the same old horse manure.

Don't bother calling me a loser because I'm not. Freepers can worship at the idol of the utility function if they want. But if you look at the founding documents of our country there are many mentions of the people and the welfare and freedom of the people of the US. I don't remember seeing anything about the dire necessity of keeping the capital markets liquid.

[blackie]

Protect our borders and coastlines from all foreign invaders!

Be Ever Vigilant!

Minutemen Patriots ~ Bump!

[bayourod]

"Illegal rooming houses, serving both documented and undocumented immigrants, are increasingly appearing "

TIME OUT!

Don't forget the mantra:
"We love legal immigrants, it's just the illegal immigrants we dislike."

Please don't slip up and admit to disliking legal immigrants also because you know what that would mean.

[ikka]

Most cases of overcrowded housing and squalid conditions never come to their attention, authorities admit.

Give them a dozen Krispy Kremes for each illegal they capture and I bet that would change real fast... these Keystone Kops need to be fired and new ones hired that will actually get up at 5AM and look for the guys walking around to catch their rides.

[grey_whiskers]

Please don't slip up and admit to disliking legal immigrants also because you know what that would mean.

Ah, yes. No one has said anything of the sort--so, in the same fashion that a liberal does, you accuse them of a *thought crime* in order to introduce the subject.

Then it's off to the races when they object.

To use this same technique against you, when *did* you stop membership in DU? ;-)

Cheers!

[dagnabbit]

George Bush's vision of America coming to your neighborhood.

[chris1]

You must either be an illegal yourself or profiteer off illegal alien cheap labor.

Otherwise, no one could have a straight face and type the nonsense that you do.

[chris1]

The lazy overpaid underworked AS$%^T are too busy giving out tickets for seatbelt violations.

[Moonmad27]

Your list of excuses for illegals was close to complete. I'd add "Our own ancestors were immigrants."

[unixfox]

Aw c'mon now, it's much easier to handcuff school children, stop those pesky seat belt violators, bust the high school punk for a joint, and arrest prostitutes rather than try to actually try to arrest an ILLEGAL alien that might be a TERRORIST.

[A. Pole]

Illegals' squalid housing transforms cities Sewage flows in streets as landlords cram up to 64 in single-family homes

Free trade at work