I touched on this issue last year here and the situation hasn’t changed all that much since then. Farmingville is a town about 5 miles from where I live that has become synonymous with day laborers on Long Island. The PBS series POV had an excellent special on the situation in the town after a hate-crime ended in the murder of two Mexican migrant workers picked up from the street corners there. However, Steve Levy has been cracking the whip and Newsday reports today that one of the 117 illegal ‘flops’ currently being investigated for being, essentially illegal boarding houses, was closed today. Choice snippets from the article follow…
image from pbs.org, taken in 2002 at 7-11, Horseblock Rd. and 83
The house in question was all of 900 square feet and housed as much as 64 residents. “Suffolk police and Brookhaven Town investigators who searched the single-story house at 33 Woodmont Place early Sunday found 44 mattresses. Electrical wires hung from gaping holes in the ceiling, and dirt and grease caked the walls. In the basement, they found a propane gas tank next to exposed electrical wires. Next to one of the beds was a lit religious candle under a picture of Jesus.” They only had a warrant for the one house, although there were extension cords leading from this one to the house next door which is owned by the husband of the landlord. This is obviously not the entirety of their operation…

from the caption on one of the photos of the bust: “Unscrupulous landlords in Farmingville are making thousands of dollars in cash every month by cramming single-family homes with tenants, many of them day laborers from Mexico and Honduras. Fifty-eight men, each paying $200 a month, live in one house. At another house, where 33 men live, neighbors saw the owner digging a makeshift cesspool in the back yard. And officials had to remove a number of men from another house because it was about to collapse. County and town officials have tried to tackle the problem, but have often found their hands tied because of weak laws and the difficulty of proving cases against landlords”

How much money are these folks making providing illegal living space? At the minimum rent quoted in the article - $200 a month per resident, and if we just count the 44 beds (though a town investigator counted 58 people leaving one morning), the landlord was making a cool $100,000 a year easily on this one house. None of it made it back into the home as a look at the police video will attest. Obviously the take was much higher, considering there is another house owned by the same people right next door.

I have counted 300 people on just three of the street corners on my way to work some mornings, and this is long after most of them have been picked up for landscaping jobs.

I have nothing against these guys as long as they are working and not committting crimes, but I have no use for those getting rich employing them and boarding them illegally. The lady who ran this place bought the house in 1999 on a HUD loan! “Real estate records show that Dias bought the house in October 1999 for $86,177 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to tax records, the house is for one family and is owner-occupied.” My favorite part: “However, Dias and her husband, Jose Neiva, live in a spacious new home in Selden, with vinyl fencing and a terraced fountain. Their curbside mailbox, made of white aluminum with brass trim, retails for $485, according to sales literature.”

How much do you think the people in Farmingville living next door to this house are going to be able to ask for their home when they sell it? When I see the little kids waiting for the bus surrounded by 50 twenty-something unemployed migrant workers hussleing for work in the morning I wonder how I would feel sending my child out to get the bus.

Why does everyone here feel they need to have a landscaper these days? I think I live on the last street on Long Island where people mow their own lawns. The refrain you hear is “Why don’t you just get a service, it’s so cheap these days…” which is exactly the point. I always try to remember that everytime you get something cheap its on the backs of someone else who’s probably getting exploited to some degree.