I can understand why homeowners get upset when someone buys a house in the neighborhood and then leases out rooms to unskilled, semi-literate immigrants, who proceed to trash the place. Responding to the proliferation of illegal boarding houses, Fairfax County officials have begun cracking down by strictly enforcing zoning codes. (See the Fairfax County Times story.)
But it appears that part of the problem is of the county’s own making. The mortgage on a modest, middle-class rambler can cost $4,000 to $5,000 per month. Very few households can afford that on their own. That is one of the motivations for leasing out individuals rooms for up to $600 or $700 per month. (See the companion story in the Fairfax County Times.)
Marta Reyes … lives with her husband and two young children in a small, beige rambler with a perfectly manicured lawn on Frederick Avenue in Springfield.
Rooms rent for $400 month. She said that 11 people live in the house and that she would rent to six more. Her mortgage is $4,000 a month and, like many who rent out their homes, she said, “I can’t pay for the house myself.”
Clearly, there is a shortage of affordable housing. It doesn’t cost $4,000 a month to mortgage middle-class houses in fast-growth cities like Atlanta or Houston. That price reflects scarcity of supply — a scarcity induced by zoning policies that discourage construction of low/moderate-income housing.
The underlying cause of illegal boarding is clouded by the immigration issue. Most of the inhabitants of the illegal boarding houses are of Hispanic origin (Honduran in the case of the woman profiled by the Times), so there is a presumption that they are here illegally. Maybe the are, maybe they aren’t, I don’t know. If they are illegal, they shouldn’t be here — which means that we need to repair our dysfunctional immigration policy, too.
Update: The City of Winchester, population 25,000, has received 94 overcrowding complaints since July 2006, according to the Winchester Star.
