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Laborers pack up ‘tent city’

BY BART JONES
STAFF WRITER

October 8, 2005, 8:50 PM EDT

A group of Mexican day laborers and an immigrant advocate have folded the "tent city" they set up in the backyard of an allegedly overcrowded Farmingville home from which some were evicted and left homeless, ending a two-month protest at the site.

Nine workers and the advocate who were living in the backyard of 196 Berkshire Dr. said they packed up their tents and left Friday night partly to preempt action by Brookhaven Town, which had been preparing to seek a court order to remove the tents.

Irma Solis, of the Hempstead-based advocacy group Workplace Project, slept in a car at the site since the evictions Aug. 10, called the protest a success. "It's very important that a group of immigrants have decided to say no, have decided to stand up to the town and won't allow them to step on them," she said.

Brookhaven Councilman James Tullo, who has helped spearhead the town's crackdown on illegally overcrowded housing, said he wasn't surprised the workers left because cold weather is coming. "We always assumed that the weather would be a self-correcting measure," he said yesterday. He added that the town would drop its legal efforts to remove the tents, which officials argued was an illegal campground in a residential area.

Solis said some of the workers went to friends' houses Friday night, while others went to a makeshift emergency location. "We really hope they don't have to resort to camping out in the woods as we know some have done in the past," she said.

Since late June, the town has shut down seven houses in Farmingville with at least 100 tenants. Town officials said they are enforcing codes against houses that are overcrowded and afflicted with other violations such as exposed electrical wires draped over propane tanks. Solis and other advocates contend that some of the houses are not nearly as packed or dangerous as officials said, and that authorities give tenants just a few hours' notice to leave while offering no relocation assistance.

Neighbor Shirley Jens said she was "very happy" the workers had left, adding that the tents didn't "give the appearance of a, shall I say, decent neighborhood."

But a worker, who declined to give his name, said, "I have no place to go ... I feel like crying, but what can you do?"