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Crowded houses gaining attention in suburbs
By Charisse Jones, USA TODAY
Tensions in the community of Farmingville, N.Y., finally erupted.

Police locked up 11 houses they said were dangerously overcrowded. About 200 tenants, all Latino and many of them day laborers, were evicted. The displaced residents and their advocates marched in protest, filed a lawsuit and set up a tent city behind one of the houses.

The Long Island community where rancor spilled into the streets last summer is just one of several places where anger over immigration is playing out through the issue of overcrowded housing.

Police crackdowns and ordinances limiting the number of unrelated people or extended family members living in a home also have cropped up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Boston and Washington, D.C.

The actions often are prompted by complaints from neighbors that their property values are being jeopardized by multiple cars parked in front of houses, trash, unsanitary conditions and fire hazards. Some public officials and policy analysts say crowded housing poses safety hazards and squeezes schools and other services.

Tensions between newcomers and some of their neighbors is a byproduct of a the nation's porous federal immigration policy, says Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors tighter border controls.

"People who are concerned about this are not necessarily motivated by racial or ethnic animus but a sense the place is going downhill," Camarota says. "When you get a big concentration of folks, you not only get a lot of traffic on streets, you might also see a real strain on social services."

Civil liberties groups say overcrowding measures are increasingly being used by communities to keep out Latino immigrants, many of them day laborers.

"These are places with growing Latino populations," says Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia ACLU. "They are people who in many instances speak a different language, whose shade of coloring may be different from people who have lived there for many years. It's xenophobic and discriminatory."

Shanna Smith, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based group that fights housing discrimination, says occupancy limits have been used in a biased way in the past.

"This is not unlike what happened in the 1920s, when we had a huge European population coming in from Hungary and Poland and Germany, where families and extended families would live together," she says. "I remember in the '60s these types of things happening against African-Americans. ... Now you see, with this new wave of Latino immigrants ... more of these ordinances happening."

Complaints up sharply

In Fairfax County, Va., a Washington suburb, complaints about overcrowded housing rose to 600 in 2005 from roughly 360 in 2002, says T. Dana Kauffman, a Democratic county supervisor who says the issue has replaced transportation as residents' primary complaint. "Now folks are more concerned about the house next door than their commute," he says.

About half the complaints are unfounded and some are rooted in bias, he says. "But in many cases, I've personally visited these properties." Often, he adds, "these are dangerous conditions. You can't be concerned about being politically correct when people's lives are at risk."

Cobb County, Ga., last year enacted a rule requiring 50 square feet of sleeping space per occupant, excluding bathrooms, closets, hallways and garages.

Sometimes, "you get some flat-out ignorant people who call up because someone different lives next door to them," says Rob Hosack, the county's community development director. The houses targeted by complaints often are large enough to accommodate extra residents or the occupants are related, meaning no violations are occurring, he says.

The Boston suburb of Milford has seen the problem of overcrowded housing escalate with the arrival of immigrant workers from Latin America, town health officer Paul Mazzuchelli says. In October, the town proposed requiring an official to determine the maximum occupancy rate for rental houses and apartments. Under the measure, which needs final approval by the state attorney general, landlords could be fined up to $300 a day if they ignore the limits.

A delicate balance

As the issues of overcrowded housing and immigration become intertwined, local officials must walk a fine line, says Tom Suozzi, the executive for Nassau County on Long Island.

"Long-term residents have a legitimate concern that illegal housing is dangerous and devalues their neighborhoods," says Suozzi, the son of an Italian immigrant. "But day laborers and immigrant activists have a legitimate concern, also, that this issue cannot be used as an excuse for racism. So finding that balance is one of the tough challenges that exist."

In June, when a home in North Hempstead, N.Y., was found to violate the local housing code, Nassau County officials helped the tenants find alternative housing. That reaction contrasted with actions in nearby Suffolk County, where town officials locked tenants out of houses they said were dangerously overcrowded in Farmingville.

"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."

Advocacy groups for immigrants disagree. "There's a lot of housing out in Long Island that's not in good shape, that may be overcrowded," says Foster Maer, legal director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which sued on behalf of the tenants. "And yet the town wasn't going after any housing except that occupied by Latino day laborers."

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."