novatownhall blog

Cry me a frickin’ river:

Javier Martinez, 46, a construction worker who lives in Manassas, said that a year ago he was able to send up to $1,500 a month to his wife and two children in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Now he can only send about $500 a month. His work laying tiles has slowed down, and he can no longer find renters for the three houses he owns as immigrants have left Prince William County because of the ongoing crackdown on illegal immigrants.

(emphasis added)

In a nutshell there it is. The core of citizen outrage over illegal immigration in Northern Virginia is that the illegals are gaming the system to get away with stuff that law abiding residents would be penalized for. You can’t fight city hall – unless you happen to be facilitating the presence of illegal aliens, in which case city hall gives you a stack of get out of jail free cards, when you actually should be thrown in jail.

Buying single family homes, subdividing them into boarding houses and renting out floor space is a pretty fantastic investment arrangement which has also been against the law long before any Mexican entrepreneurs started doing it here. But our local government has decided to allow it to happen with the surge of illegal aliens into our communities.

In case you are new to the area, here is a basic primer: Boarding houses in neighborhoods are considered a bad thing because the boarders tend to behave badly.

And as the Washington Post geniuses did so elegantly and unwittingly for us two years ago, they once again document how foreign nationals have been allowed to thumb their noses at our local laws and proceed to degrade our neighborhoods.

Multiply this tile worker by a few hundred and you will suddenly understand exactly what has happened in eastern Loudoun County. You will also understand why Sterling Park residents are not only asking “where is our Board of Supervisors?” but also where the hell are our Sheriff’s Office and County Prosecutor, and why the hell Terry Wharton and his entire department are still employed.

This recently came across via e-mail; Loudoun Community Association:

Important government functions meant to protect our quality of life, such as zoning enforcement, are not being implemented even to the degree permitted by existing laws…

Please consider this forum an ongoing “open letter” to our local government officials.

That reminds me, tomorrow night (Tuesday, July 22, 6:30 pm) there will be a follow up public hearing in which the Loudoun County staff and entire Board of Supervisors will be at Park View High School to deliver the findings of the previous series of public hearings held in Sterling and Potomac Districts, and also to hear public opinions. I believe people get to speak for three minutes. It is an important chance to have the whole Board hear what you have to say – say, about zoning enforcement in eastern Loudoun – and not have to drive out to Leesburg to get it done.

So be at Park View tomorrow evening if you can.

The preliminary findings of the county staff are linked at the Loudoun Community Association Web site, go check them out. I won’t have a chance to read them for a while because of work but plan to eventually give my opinion. It will be interesting to see which public comments at the previous seven hearings the county staff heard.

In an editorial titled, Ending Government Sponsored Blight, the Washington Examiner adds another outraged voice to the roiling controversy over the Loudoun County Department of Building and Development:

Loudoun County officials have for years looked the other way when confronted with glaring violations of their own zoning ordinances. Angry homeowners have now joined a growing list of Americans demanding strict enforcement of such laws…

Read it all.

Eastern Loudoun is finally getting some attention because the problems have piled up to the point they can no longer be glossed over. The upside is we – especially those of us in Sterling – finally have a voice the county will have to listen to. If you are fed up with the utter uselessness of our Zoning Administration Division, send an e-mail to County Administrator Kirby Bowers and copy the entire Board of Supervisors.

(Heck, copy the Easterner or the Independent while you are at it.)

As I alluded to my letter last week, the county could do a lot worse than to empty the entire Department of Building and Development and hire some of the folks from Herndon to come over and show us how to rebuild it into a functioning government agency.

More on the problems in Loudoun County Zoning Adiministration:

Foreclosure, it’s just a state of mind

Eugene Delgaudio and Jeanne West Team Up to Denounce Zoning Violations in Sterling (includes video of WUSA Channel 9 news report)

Zoning Controversy Continues To Heat Up In Sterling

Loudoun County Focuses On Sterling

Dispatches from Sterling: Government-Sponsored Blight

In Sterling, apparently.

A story circulating in Sterling the past year is the Loudoun County government has cast a blind eye to many instances of squatting; specifically, when a house is foreclosed and everyone is evicted, little by little people show back up and occupy the residence. Sometimes it’s by entering through a rear entrance, sometimes former tenants of these boarding houses still having keys and going in through the front door, usually a strictly nocturnal phenomenon. People have even been seen sleeping on roofs at night, but by morning the houses are empty again.

Complaints to Loudoun County Zoning Administration, needless to say, have resulted in no action.

Well, the new trend we are heralding here at the NOVA TownHall Blog is to transform anecdotes into documented reality, and with evidence coming in from around the community and my own observations from the front driveway, we will continue that trend right here.

Exhibit One: House A from our June 23 post. You know, the one across the street from my house which Loudoun County Zoning assured us idiot citizens was perfectly above-board: “A family of six and two unrelateds” – no reason to inspect.

Well tonight, someone shows up and occupies House A which was supposedly foreclosed and all the boarders evicted from.

There are some lingering bad feelings about this particular residence, mainly because the voluminous collection of refuse in the back yard is still there: thirty to fifty bags of garbage a variety of junkyard-style trash in the yard and the back deck piled with refuse. When the car arrived, neighbors called the police tonight and five Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office cruisers showed up, deputies surrounded the house, knocked on the doors, but whoever was inside did not open up. No warrant, so no authorization to enter.

But let’s hand it to our Sheriff’s Office: they knew the resolution of the June situation and that the house was supposed to be empty, and they did all they could – at the present time. That’s the plus side. The minus side is we still have a festering landfill right here and our government entities are apparently powerless to do anything about it – a situation that could have been entirely avoided if our zoning enforcement officer had done what obviously needed to be done about two months ago when the first complaint was filed!

Thank you, Terry Wharton. I am sure someone, somewhere, is pleased that this property owner like so many others in Sterling was given a free pass.

Alas, we’re not the only ones with a problem caused by a broken Zoning Administration division. This is 504 W. Beech (I will make no attempt to protect anyone’s privacy because this one is so egregious):

The house on the right is 504. Neighbors complained about a boarding house being run from this location for well over a year, and the house was foreclosed several months ago, yet it remained occupied. Neighbors continued to complain to no avail. When the tenants finally left they cleaned the place out, from the major appliances to cabinets to doors to the garage doors.

The house to the left of it has a For Sale sign on it – has been on the market for quite a while. Too bad for them, eh? Laws on the books are not enforced, and the law-abiding citizens of Sterling (who I am convinced our county government considers first-class “chumps”) consequently get hosed.

Yes, even windows were removed. A resident of this court said they watched all this happening, reported it to the appropriate agencies in Leesburg, and were ignored.

It gets worse. There is another specific case going on right now which may be far more revealing than either of these, because evidence is piling up about a home purchasing mortgage-and-refinancing scam which might explain much of what has been happening in our area. It appears some of these boarding houses have been the result of a loophole in lending practices, in which someone can buy multiple residences, sell and refinance them several times over, then leave with a wad of cash and sticking the lending institutions with the bill. In the lag time between purchase and physical foreclosure, the residence is rented out to illegal boarders, and the rent money kept as additional profit. Banks, and eventually taxpayers, are left to pick up the final bills.

More to come – I expect MUCH more – on that matter. The Loudoun County government, in particular the Zoning Administration division and possibly the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office and some other departments, definitely has some ’splainin’ to do, if you ask me.

UPDATE: A group of Loudoun citizens met tonight to discuss these and other issues, and the consensus was we really need to find out whether any of the members of our Board of Supervisors – beside Eugene Delgaudio – is even conscious of what is happening here. The violations would not likely be allowed to stand if they were occurring anywhere other than in Sterling.

Something is very fishy in our county government, folks. I sense a groundswell of outrage from the citizens in eastern Loudoun.

UPDATE: The car in front of House A was gone by 6:30 the next morning, and did not return last night. Yesterday afternoon someone looked in the backyard and said the gate was open and it was relatively clean, so thank goodness for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office! Even though they would not have had to be there if Zoning had done its job in the first place, our deputies do get results just by maintaining a presence. UPDATE II: Another neighbor informs me the bags of trash had been removed over a week ago so all that was back there when the deputies came was junk like car seat, wire spool, miscellaneous construction-related trash.