City's shame: No room to live - Lack of housing puts grim squeeze on immigrants

New York Daily News ^ | December 1, 2003 | FERNANDA SANTOS

[JustPiper]

BumPing!

Here in Chicago our Polish community does this very thing. They rent unfinished basements and several will lay on cold, cement floors. Is there a difference between escaping communism and Vincente Fox?

[janetgreen]

Wouldn't it be cheaper to deport ILLEGAL ALIENS than to provide housing for them? Bloomberg is just another panderer.

[FITZ]

Outsource housing like we outsource jobs --- send these people back home where cost of living is much much less. They can afford to live in Mexico where you can make a home out of discarded wood pallets and some corrugated tin.

[FITZ]

so they can live worse than they were in Mexico.

Actually they don't live worse here --- they live exactly the same way. It's common in Mexico to see several families living in one apartment ---- in this area they build what are called "illegal subdivisions", they ignore all the zoning and building regulations the rest of us are expected to follow, they don't build septic systems but use shallow outhouse pits and open latrines even though the regulations don't allow that ---- then they complain they don't have things as well as the Americans.

[A. Pole]

Even taking the mobsters, beaurocrats and unions into account, $3 billion for 65,000 apartments seems way excessive!

Let me calculate, 3000000000 / 65000 = 46153

$46 thousand per apartment does not seem excessive to me.