Illegal immigrants' squalid housing transforms cities

WorldNetDaily:

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 its horn during its 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.

Immigrants live in squalor in illegal homes

Landlord Arrested after Police Raid Home

Illegal housing probes grow

Housing 28 in home gets landlord busted

One Problem Equals Many Answers

Levinson: Emergency Response Report for Illegal, Unsafe Boarding Homes