Not long ago I wrote (“Driving While Undocumented”) about whether recent law enforcement initiatives, such as limiting the number of unrelated persons who can live in one residence, were discriminatory against immigrants.
According to two stories today in USA Today (this one, on the front page, and that one),
Overcrowded housing is emerging as a battleground in the national debate over immigration as towns and counties crack down on landlords who permit many unrelated people to occupy single-family homes. [From this one]
Advocates of these new restrictions argue that they are required by health and safety concerns; critics call them discriminatory.
“Our focus is on health and safety,” says T. Dana Kauffman, a Democratic member of the board of supervisors in Fairfax County, Va., a suburb of Washington. “I’ve seen crawl spaces turned into bedrooms. … We’ve had people tap into gas lines.”
….
Some activists say measures limiting the number of unrelated people or extended family members in a home target immigrants, particularly Hispanics, who often need to share a home to afford the rent. [This one]
On that last point, this from the second article cited (that one):
High housing costs in areas where many entry-level jobs are filled by recent immigrants add to the problem. “Long Island is one of the places where it’s most expensive to live,” says Irma Solis, an organizer for The Workplace Project, a group that works with day laborers. “Unless there is alternative housing, people are going to be forced to rent wherever they can.”
It’s not clear that it’s primarily “Hispanics[] who often need to share a home to afford the rent” — why not all poor people? Nor is it clear that the reason Hispanics disproportionately crowd together in houses, assuming that’s true, has anything to do with being “Hispanic.” But it does have to do with being a recent and frequently illegal immigrant:
“There are about 40,000 illegal immigrants in the county, and many will live in grossly substandard conditions in part because they are hoarding as much money as they can to send back home,” Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy says. “These are gross firetraps and health hazards. … The concerns have nothing to do with race and everything to do with quality of life and zoning patterns.” [That one]
If this is right, “Hispanics” aren’t forced into overcrowded housing by poverty but because they send “as much money as they can” out of their earnings back to their families wherever they came from.
If that is true, wouldn’t outlawing unrelated group housing be a reasonable method of putting some much-needed teeth into our immigration laws? If illegal immigrants couldn’t afford to live here, might that not discourage them from coming in the first place? Is that any more discriminatory than turning them back at the border?
“If that is true, wouldn’t outlawing unrelated group housing be a reasonable method of putting some much-needed teeth into our immigration laws?”
Out with the frathouses!
As long as the focus is on outlawing overcrowded housing (8 or 9 people in a 4 bedroom house) and enforcing noise ordinances, that seems like a good idea.
But just outlawing multiple unrelated people living together isn’t the way to go. In the DC area, and I assume other places, there are lots of “group houses”, where 4 or 5 people, unrelated, get together and rent a 4 or 5 bedroom house to save on rent. It’s either that or live in an unsafe area. They’re often professionals, respectful, etc., and not trashing the neighborhood.
It is not just illegal immigrants, but legal immigrants too. Sending “as much money as they can” out of their earnings back to their families, is a characteristic of all immigrants, legal or illegal.
As for your statement: If illegal immigrants couldn’t afford to live here, might that not discourage them from coming in the first place?
Yes, it would, just as it would discourage legal immigration. Why would one want to do that?
John,
Overcrowded housing is one thing, housing occupied by people not sufficiently closely related by blood is something entirely different. These laws wouldn’t impact a single mother with ten kids, so long as there were sufficient bedrooms, but if you had three people living in your large house and asked a first cousin to move in with you, that’d be out. It is bloody obvious that this is about the foreign riff-raff moving in and lowering the tone of the neighborhood.
I say the whole thing stinks of prejudice. I live in Day Laborer Central here, and I see enough of it.
In Toledo Ohio, the furor about housing is college students living in a black neighborhood. The blacks do not want them there, and use a similar ordinace to get whitey out. The owner of these houses just went to jail
Hmmm… Illegal immigrants are usually poor so things that hurt the poor discourage illegal immigrants… so let’s do everything we can to hurt poor people?
This is absolutely ridiculous.
I’m no fan of government handouts for the poor but that doesn’t mean I support screwing them.
Our immigration laws today are so stupid that if we actually enforced them we would destroy entire industries and throw tens of thousands of Americans out of work. So they will never be enforced.
You may support ending illegal immigration today but I bet you change your mind when the price of meat goes up by 25% because US based meat packers double their prices or close and US cattle ranchers start declaring bankruptcy because they can no longer compete with imported beef.
Step 1 is to enact rational immigration laws. For example, how about letting in anyone who pays a US$2,000 deposit to pay the cost of repatriation if he fails or becomes a problem?
Once you do that enforcing immigration laws becomes a real option instead of stupid grandstanding.
9-11 demonstrated that lassitude of immigration law enforcement is not practical; there are plenty of hostiles, whether we find it pleasing to observe, or not. The issue here is whether some shystering federal judges can get away with saying that enforcement of minimum standards is racial, if the ‘disparate impact’ is racial. Could public health standards be shystered away on such an approach? If TB prevalence is 100X higher in one immigrant racial group than another, does that mean TB control programs might be cancelled at the whimsy of a federal judge? It appears that advocates are asking for special ethnic privileges for some groups to obtain exemption from minimum standards. They allege racial conspiracy, presenting it as the default assumption for which no evidence need be given, while demanding exemption from standards for their group on a racial basis.
“It appears that advocates are asking for special ethnic privileges for some groups to obtain exemption from minimum standards.”
As opposed to minimum standards being set to target a specific group.
Helps w/terrorists, too, anyone remember I think it was Virginia?
12 arabs living in a house, always had 1 in a car watching the street?
Aside from the fact that it’s an absolute nuisance to live next door to the house with 15 people living there.
“Aside from the fact that it’s an absolute nuisance to live next door to the house with 15 people living there.”
The common law has for a long time recognized nuisance actions.
As I said in the earlier thread, there are two separable issues here. Overcrowding and safety are one, and I think there’s general agreement that it’s OK to enforce codes meant to prevent people living in unsafe consitions. But tight controls on who can share a rental house or apartment, if it’s not overcrowded or unsafe, are an obvious way of keeping “them” out of the neighborhood, whether “they” are poor or Hispanic or Korean or whatever. Really, what’s the difference between a four-bedroom house shared by a husband and wife and three kids, and a four-bedroom house shared by five unrelated day laborers? Nothing, that’s what.
actus is right: There are nuisance laws, and there’s no reason not to enforce those either. But “all these dern Mexicans moving in on this block” is not a nuisance per se. I just have no sympathy at all with this sort of stuff.
There is a huge difference between five day laborers in one house versus a single family. Five cars versus two, the amount of noise and trash, the impact of housing values, the traffic, etc. There is a word for five unrelated people living in a single dwelling. It used to called a boarding house and it used to regulated.
Now, in some neighborhoods, you have the five day laborers with families paving over the front yard without a building permit, adding on without a builiding permit, splicing into the utilities without a permit. If the illegals aren’t going to obey immigration, tax, and forgery laws, what makes you think they are going to obey building ordinances?
“There is a huge difference between five day laborers in one house versus a single family. Five cars versus two, ”
You think five day laborers have five cars?
“It appears that advocates are asking for special ethnic privileges for some groups to obtain exemption from minimum standards.”
I agree. Cities have been criticized for enacting policies that fine people who get in accidents without insurance because minorities are less likely to have insurance. Traffic cameras that ticket everyone have runs red lights have been criticized for the same reason (I’m not a traffic camera fan, but for different reasons). Both these policies do not involve singling groups out–everyone who runs a red light or doesn’t have insurance when in an accident faces a penalty with these policies, but because minorities are more likely to break the law, enforcing the law must be stopped.
As for those who have “no sympathy” with people who do not like immigrant group housing, that’s more than a little harsh and it’s a slander against people with very real concerns. And calling them bigots is flat out wrong. I do not doubt there is a strong correlation with immigrant housing and noise, trash, excess parking, etc., just as there are with fraternity houses. A family that just paid a bunch of money for a house does not want a bunch of loud, young men living next to them and their small children. If those young men do not know the language or the norms of the country (like building ordinances) and can also easily flee the country when a crime is committed, there is even more reason to be concerned.
In college I didn’t want to live near fraternity houses for reasons of noise, too many young males, etc., and I know others who felt the same way. There have been nieghborhood protests of churches expanding because they would take up parking in said neighborhood.
To act like those opposed to overcrowded immigrant housing are automiatically bigoted is probably no more justified than to say anti-church parking or fraternity housing people are anti-Christian or anti-fraternity.
actus,
You think five day laborers have five cars?
Just what I was going to say. Understand how day labor works: men go to (usually) unofficial but recognized pickup sites, and contractors who need workers drive by and hire them for the day. Five day laborers living in one house is practically the definition of a carpool.
(Though around here most don’t drive at all; they walk, or take the bus. Since I don’t drive myself, and spend a lot of time on Marin buses, I know which routes they use and where most of the principal pickup spots are.)
superdestroyer,
Enforcing laws against illegal construction is pretty easy, because construction in progress is pretty obvious to the naked eye. If I tried paving over the front lawn of the house I rent, I rather think someone would notice.
Gina,
I do not doubt there is a strong correlation with immigrant housing and noise, trash, excess parking, etc.
Yes, I always did notice that Oakland’s Chinatown was much messier and rowdier than the other urbanized parts of the city. Oh, maybe those weren’t the immigrants you meant?
Look, I realize that a lot of young men concentrated in a small space can be a recipe for noise and the like. In actual fact, I haven’t found that to be the case with the recent immigrant families I’ve lived near. I have seen what weren’t so much crowding as traffic problems — one apartment I lived next door to housed a Korean family whose members seemed to shift periodically, for example (there wouldn’t have been 15 people in the apartment at any given time, but there might have been 15 people who had lived there during the four years I did). (The head of that household also had the irritating habit of coming out onto the balcony of his apartment — just outside my bedroom window — around 5 a.m., smoking, and making cell-phone calls. Since my window was about three feet away, and since I often left it open due to the heat, this was vexing.) Another family two doors down (Guatemalan, I think) was troublesome chiefly because there were several small children, tons of laundry, and only one washer and dryer for the six apartments.
(As for noise, rowdiness, excess trash, &c.: Nope. Everyone uniformly polite and quiet. And considering what white Marinites mutter at Mexican day laborers on a crowded bus, where the day laborers are going to work and the whites are going to shop in Union Square, that’s a miracle. I haven’t so much as seen a Mexican throw a burger wrapper on the street. White and Black San Franciscans? Constantly.)
The thing is, my troubles, such as they were, with immigrant neighbors were all minor stuff. The white dude in the house next door, who appeared to be running a combination meth lab and chop shop in his copious backyard, was a little more troubling. I might have talked to the police about him, had I not seen them parked in front every other week already.
My point is only that combating the actual problem(s), when and if they occur, makes a lot more sense than putting down a blanket rule like the Manassas one, that no matter how big your house, if you and your children and your husband live in it, your first cousin can’t. I wish we could find a really dynamite test case. A pair of gay sisters and their partners would fit the bill. God knows they’re not going to be married in Virginia any time soon . . .
You may want to tell the officials in Arlington, Virginia about how easy it is to enforce building codes. They are so scared to being called tourist and they look the other way as single family houses fill up with four or five families of illegal immigrants. The next step is to pave over the front yard. The covert the carport or garage into living space.
Then guess what? The elementary school that was built for a set density of single family houses has 200 more kids due to packed housing of the illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants are like a cancer. They do not stop growing when the hit the limits of their surroundings and they force out the health areas around them.
superdestroyer,
They are so scared to being called tourist [ . . . ]
It’s only February, and I already have my nominee for Weirdest Blog-Comment Freudiean Slip of the Year. Where the heck did that come from?
Do I have to say it again? Safety-based laws against overcrowding should be enforced, and I have no objection to that being on a complaint-only basis, because then there’s presumably something real to complain about. But laws like the Manassas one, where someone’s aunt or nephew or cousin living in an uncrowded house is illegal, but only brought to the attention of the law if someone complains, are not going to be enforced on dear Aunt Wilma, who’s come to “stay a spell” with her family two doors down, are they? The WaPo articles said specifically that the law was being enforced “overwhelmingly” against Latino households. And the ones profiled were not overcrowded; they just contained “non-relatives.” Like, say, nephews. And girlfriends.
As for the overcrowding of the elementary schools . . . well, in SF, one of the larger cities in the state with the country’s largest illegal-immigrant population, just now there are furious protests at SFUSD’s shutting down many schools because some of them have enrollment as low as 20% of capacity. The only crowding taking place is everyone trying to get into the few really good schools.
Look, you have more kids, you get more teachers, more space. This is not complicated.
And what do you suppose all these (purportedly) illegal immigrants are doing in Arlington, anyway? Twiddling their thumbs and watching the money magically roll into their laps? Of course not. They’re doing stuff that people in other places generally do for themselves, or hire legal workers to do for considerably higher wages. Like mowing the lawn, or vacuuming the floor, or trimming the prize rose bushes, or bringing up the children. Forgive me for not having much sympathy for people who want other people to do all this stuff, but blanch at the thought of actually (ick) living next to that riff-raff.
“Illegal immigrants are like a cancer. They do not stop growing when the hit the limits of their surroundings and they force out the health areas around them. ”
Maybe they will eventually put us into reservations.
Seems to me if the city is enacting these types of housing laws it is because the common law nuisance claims aren’t working.
And I don’t buy they “they take jobs Americans don’t want” argument. What you mean is they will work for much less than Americans. If the flow of illegal immigrants was stopped, the employers would, yes, have to raise wages which would, yes, raise prices. But people would adjust or do the jobs themselves. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the same economists were saying Americans wouldn’t tolerate paying $2-$3 for gasoline.
Michelle,
The illegal immigrants are doing more than cutting the grass. Illegal immigrants perform most of the painting jobs, dry wall jobs, and cement pours in the Washington, DC area. The downside is that there are few native-born, blue-collar people living in Arlington or Fairfax or Alexandria. So, we you need your heater fixed in the winter, the repair man drives in from Fredricksburg, Winchester, or Laurel and charges much more than would be necessary if they actually lived near their potential customers. Another problem is that the auto repair places can gouge you because there are few mechanics willing to live anywhere near the illegal aliens dominated neighborhoods. So the repair garages have to pay a premium to get workers to drive in from the exurbs. Also, medical care facilities suffer because they cannot get housekeeping personnel and entry level workers who can read and write English. Ask yourself if you want to be treated in a hospital where 10% of the employees cannot speak English.
As far as San Francisco goes, the reasons the schools are shrinking is that the blue collar and middle class native born Americans who have children are forced out by the crummy schools, the high taxes, the crime rate, and last but not least, the feeling that they do not belong in such areas that is caused by the illegal immigrants.
neighborhoods.
superdestroyer,
Odd. I live in a place full of day laborers, and yet it’s ridiculously easy for me (or rather my landlady) to get good, cheap, legal service anytime anything goes wrong in my house.
Another problem is that the auto repair places can gouge you because there are few mechanics willing to live anywhere near the illegal aliens dominated neighborhoods. So the repair garages have to pay a premium to get workers to drive in from the exurbs.
That’s also odd. When I lived in San Rafael, whose “Canal District” is more or less Marin’s Day Laborer Central, the remainder of the population consisted mostly of upper-class white stereotypical Marinites in SUVs with Kerry/Edwards stickers on them, and they didn’t seem to mind living a mile or so from the Canal District. Then I moved to Novato, which is about as working-class as it gets around Marin (apparently a big fraction of San Francisco’s police and firefighters live up here), but also has a large Mexican-immigrant population — at least to judge by the fantastic Mexican grocery store, the contents of the chain grocery stores (blocks of lard in a Safeway? walls of imported Mexican spices?), and the people I run into taking the bus. No apparent discontent here either.
Maybe the atmosphere of D.C. is infectious. All the Mexican immigrants I’ve met here, which would be hundreds, have been quiet, polite, and absolutely good neighbors. My one quarrel with them is that in San Rafael they tended to ride their bikes on the sidewalk, but having been nearly run over by Trophy Moms in SUVs in supermarket parking lots a score of times, I can see why they’d rather not bike on the street.
Also, medical care facilities suffer because they cannot get housekeeping personnel and entry level workers who can read and write English. Ask yourself if you want to be treated in a hospital where 10% of the employees cannot speak English.
If the 10% are basically doing janitorial work, I don’t care what they speak, so long as they know how to use disinfectant. And what is this about “medical care facilities” “suffering”? Of course they can get all the personnel they want if they pay enough. What you mean is that they’re trying to do it on the cheap, and the immigrants are willing to work for less. So it’s their fault. I see.
This business of not being able to find workers living close to where you need them to work is nothing new, and often has zero to do with immigration, legal or not. Silicon Valley still has trouble getting teachers for its public schools — not because people don’t want to teach there, but because no one making a public teacher’s salary has the means to buy a house anywhere nearby. I think one district even toyed with the idea of on-campus faculty housing.
As for the SF schools: You really can’t blame overcrowded schools and mostly-empty schools both on illegal immigration, superdestroyer.
[ . . .] and last but not least, the feeling that they do not belong in such areas that is caused by the illegal immigrants.
Um, whatever you say. I’d say it’s a combination of SFUSD’s ongoing busing program (not now explicitly racial, but de facto so) and, as you say, some crummy schools (both of which have sent people fleeing to private schools if they can afford them); and then people simply not being able to afford SF at all. I don’t think immigration has anything to do with it. In fact, if parents can get their kids into Lowell High, where they’ll be sitting next to a lot of Chinese and Vietnamese kids, I doubt very much the parents will be asking many questions about immigration status.
I think reasonable restrictions on how many unrelated people can reside in a single-family house are fine as long as they’re enforced equally across ethnic groups. I hear a lot of talk about “respecting different cultures” but sometimes the current culture should be respected as well as the culture of the new residents.
Of course, one guy who would probably be happy to have clear race-based housing policies is everyone’s favorite wacky mayor, Ray Nagin.
“In an interview with CNN, Nagin said he was addressing an ‘unspoken thing about who’s coming back, who should come back, what type of city we are going to have in the future.'”
Brian,
But, you see, at least in the Manassas case, they left enforcement more or less to the public. No complaint, no enforcement. It’s since become pretty clear who complains and against whom. I don’t think there have been many cases of elderly white aunts or young white nephews being thrown out on the street.
If there is any justification for such a law (which I doubt very much), it ought to be enforced properly, which is to say uniformly. If so-and-so’s aunt is illegaly living with her relations, don’t wait for someone to complain of it; just do a door-to-door survey and get rid of her, like all the other lawbreakers. Don’t limit the law to just the people the sort of officious folk who routinely report their neighbors to the police don’t like. Apply it to all, and see if they still like it. And if you protest that doing it properly is too expensive, then just don’t do it.