Post by Freehold Resident on Aug 4, 2006 8:50:23 GMT -5
Influx of Latinos changing life, attitudes in small town
Published in the Asbury Park Press 3/21/04
By NINA RIZZO
and SHANNON MULLEN
FREEHOLD BUREAU
FREEHOLD -- Twenty-five years ago, when Ernesto Juarez arrived at this Monmouth County crossroads town, it was a rare event to run into a fellow Mexican immigrant on Main Street.
Maria, 28, is being evicted from the house she shared with her boyfriend and several others, paying $1,650 in monthly rent. Her boyfriend returned to Mexico; the others moved out. Maria has three children (from left) Francisco, 3 months; Jicela, 4; and Beatrice, 2. Maria asked that her las name not be used because she fears reprisals.
"I could count all the Mexicans on my fingers," the 46-year-old borough resident recalls.
Juarez has long since lost count of his countrymen.
Today, nearly one-third of the borough's 11,000 residents are Latino, as are two of every five pupils in the borough's elementary schools and almost 100 percent of the children enrolled in the federally funded Head Start preschool, which has a one-year waiting list. Eight new Latino-owned businesses have opened up in the downtown area of this bustling Monmouth County seat.
"It's like Little Mexico City," Juarez says.
This is a good thing, if you like Mexico City. But these changes don't sit well with longtime Freehold residents like Joan Kress, who find themselves feeling nostalgic for their old hometown, too -- a town where farmers have rubbed shoulders with lawyers and county government workers, a town where Main Street is an eclectic blend of family-owned businesses, bail bondman's offices, outdoor cafes and ethnic restaurants.
Kress said people have always gotten along in her interracial neighborhood, but with the recent wave of Latino immigrants that has changed. Problems with noise, public drunkeness and litter have escalated in recent years, Kress says.
"I wanted to get a group together because I felt things slipping away," says Kress, a founding member of PEOPLE, a residents' group voicing concerns about Latino immigrants. "I've never seen it so bad."
Freehold, the seat of Monmouth County, finds itself at a crossroads as tension grows between long-time residents and new immigrants. In many ways, Freehold illustrates the national debate over illegal immigrants and fast-growing Latino communities.
A recent wave of mostly undocumented, or illegal, immigrants -- emboldened by the federal government's schizophrenic immigration policies -- have helped boost Freehold's economy and enrich the cultural landscape. But they have also created serious problems for this community:
Crime is on the rise. Arrests among Latino adults have climbed 108 percent in the borough from 1998 to 2002, according to the most recent state Department of Law and Public Safety crime statistics.
The schools are overcrowded. Enrollment in the K-8 district has spiked 22 percent since 1999, and 581 of the 1,360 pupils are Latino, making up 43 percent of the school enrollment.
While the Latino population has more than doubled from 1990 to 2000, black people and white non-Latinos have been leaving the borough. For almost every Hispanic who came to live in Freehold from 1990 to 2000, almost as many non-Hispanic white and black people left town. During that period, the number of non-Latino whites dropped almost 20 percent and the number of black residents dropped by more than 12 percent.
Complaints from borough residents about littering, loitering, excessive noise and other "quality-of-life" nuisances are multiplying. Borough officials are attempting to crack down on rental overcrowding, when a landlord may rent to one Latino family, but then others move in to help make the rental payments.
The borough's "muster zone" -- a strip of vacant land on Throckmorton Street where day laborers waiting to be picked up for work have gathered for years -- has become the focal point for the immigration issue. When the borough attempted to close down the zone on Jan. 1, a coalition of immigrants' rights groups and day laborers challenged the closing in court. Earlier this month the borough and the immigrants' rights groups reached an agreement in court, but borough officials now say they didn't agree to re-open the zone, and they now intend to crack down on employers picking up the day laborers.
On the flip side, immigrants have become an integral part of the area's economy.
Latinos bus tables and wash dishes in area restaurants, muck out stalls in neighboring horse farms, landscape the yards of surrounding suburbia and clean countless local houses and offices. And though most business owners will not admit om the record to employing undocumented Latinos, many businesses would collapse without the affordable and available labor these Latinos present.
Despite its small size -- about 11,000 residents in roughly 2 square miles -- Freehold Borough's situation reflects many of the problems of undocumented immigration faced by larger cities and communities through New Jersey and the rest of the country.
Several immigrants' rights ac-tivists have said they don't be-lieve President Bush's pro-posed guest-worker program would have a significant im-pact on towns like Freehold, where many of the undocu-mented workers are day labor-ers and don't come here with any promise of employment.
Tensions in town are increas-ing -- so much so that the Free-hold Clergy Association is host-ing a community forum on March 28 in an effort to foster constructive dialogue. The event is scheduled to be held from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 118 W. Main St.
Kress, 60, of Institute Street says she asked the Rev. Myrna Bethke of First United Method-ist Church if the forum would help solve her particular neigh-borhood concern: noise. When Bethke told her no, Kress de-cided that she would not at-tend.
"If it's not going to help me with the things that I'm both-ered by, why should I go?" she says.
Neighborhood woes
It was about February of last year when the shopping carts left abandoned in her neighbor-hood really began to bother Kress. Families without cars would often wheel their grocer-ies home in the store shopping carts and then leave them on the street.
Kress wanted to set an example for others to follow. Whenever she spotted a shopping cart in her neighborhood, she asked whomever was passing by to help load the cart in her truck to bring it back to the super-market. She did that at least 26 times last year.
But that's not what made her lose sleep.
It was the excessive horn honk-ing by taxis and contractors coming to pick up her neigh-bors. It was the blaring car ra-dios that still played while the driver went inside a nearby house. It was the drunk who stood on her porch, and the kids who mistook her house for a drug den on another corner. It was the uneasy feeling she developed because she no lon-ger recognized many of the fac-es that were frequenting the houses in the neighborhood she had lived in all her life.
Kress, a retired licensed practi-cal nurse who now works as a school bus aide, shared her concerns with her friend Gail Trojan, who lives around the block on Union Avenue. Tro-jan, a 57-year-old homemaker who says she gets no reprieve during the day from the noise, agreed their troubles were get-ting worse despite the bor-ough's quality-of-life initia-tives.
Kress and her friend Trojan circulated a petition in their neighborhood and presented 40 signatures to Mayor Michael Wilson and the Borough Coun-cil in July. Nothing seemed to change over the summer, so they enlisted the support of for-mer Councilman Marc LeVine after reading his opinion piece in a local newspaper in Septem-ber. He wrote that the bor-ough's problems were similar to many other towns across the country "as a result of a system which quietly supports the no-tion of filling jobs with cheap labor and blatantly disregards our immigration laws and the hardships forced on tax-paying citizens."
Later that month, LeVine founded a community group called PEOPLE (Pressing Our Elected Officials to Protect Our Living Environment) to ad-dress their concerns -- and to lay blame.
"Are you unhappy with the quality of life due to the prob-lems associated with day labor and illegal aliens?" read a flier enticing residents to attend a PEOPLE meeting. "Overcrowd-ed schools. Overcrowded dwell-ings. Public nuisance. Crime. Loitering. Noise. Nontax-pay-ing workers and employers. Tent cities. Lack of respect for public and private property."
Borough officials acknowledge that these types of complaints have grown along with the bor-ough's Latino population, espe-cially over the past five years, but they would not attribute all of these problems solely to the immigrants.
"A population increase puts a strain on all services," Kerry Higgins, the borough attorney, says. "I can't say an undocu-mented population causes this."
Good plan, for a time
In 1998, the borough began to address its quality-of-life con-cerns -- even before that catch phrase became part of the bor-ough's vernacular.
Mayor Wilson and council members asked then-U.S. Immi-gration and Naturalization Ser-vice representatives how to deal with a growing number of immigrants who were standing on street corners looking for work. The INS suggested the borough create a muster zone. That summer, the borough des-ignated a barren spot on Throckmorton Street, near the train tracks, as the official gathering spot.
The plan worked well -- for a while.
The site drew up to 300 day laborers daily in warm weather and attracted contractors from as far away as Lakewood and Staten Island. Residents began to complain again. The bor-ough announced in the fall it was closing the site on Jan. 1, saying the zone had become a magnet for illegal employment.
Before it closed, three advocacy groups and six day laborers in December filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to keep the muster zone open. The suit claimed the borough embarked on a "deliberate and coordinat-ed campaign to harass Latino day workers."
Early this month, the borough agreed in court to stake out the publicly owned portion of the muster zone and allow workers to gather there. The borough argued that it never interfered with the lawful gathering of people anywhere in town; offi-cials said they thought the en-tire parcel belonged to Conrail.
Alejandro Abarca is the coordi-nator for the Committee of Workers for Progress and So-cial Welfare, one of the com-plainants in the lawsuit. The recently formed group runs the temporary hiring hall, which was set up at Second Baptist Church after the Throckmorton Street muster zone was closed.
Abarca, 28, of Freehold says many day laborers left town after the muster zone closed because they could no longer find work. They moved to How-ell, Lakewood, Manalapan and Old Bridge, he said. But that wasn't the only reason they left.
Abarca says "vigilantes" were making many immigrants feel uncomfortable.
"They just wanted to go some-where where they felt safe, where they don't have Ameri-cans standing outside their houses, following them," Abar-ca says. "We received a lot of complaints about this."
When asked to identify the vig-ilantes, Abarca sits quietly for a moment and stares at a re-porter: "You know exactly who we are talking about."
What the borough's done
Even before the borough agreed in court to allow the workers to gather on the pub-licly owned portion of the mus-ter zone, the PEOPLE move-ment continued to gain momentum. The group's steering committee, comprising seven outspoken residents, is leading the charge against Bor-ough Hall because members say the town isn't working fast enough to make things better.
All this flak about the borough not attempting to resolve quali-ty-of-life issues angers Council-woman Sharon Shutzer. She served as liaison to a residents group that tried to combat overcrowding in the Spring Terrace Apartments back in the early 1990s. She later got involved with another group that attempted to deal with the cultural differences between Hispanics and Americans and sat in on several discussions with the INS and its precursor, the U.S. Citizenship and Immi-gration Services.
"All these groups are pointing at us. They can point all they want. Not one of us has lost our focus," she says of the mayor and council.
Over the past four years, Free-hold added six police officers and one special police officer. The borough created a Quality of Life Enforcement Team and a special Municipal Court ses-sion to deal with an increasing number of such complaints.
The borough also established a register for absentee landlords that requires them to list the names and ages of all tenants and to provide a floor plan for each unit. The registration comes with an initial $500 fee. The fee would drop to $300 the second year and $100 thereafter as long as there are no convic-tions for quality-of-life offenses.
The registration fee generated $225,750 from 514 properties last year, which is put into the borough's general treasury, Jo-seph Bellina, the borough ad-ministrator, says.
Freehold spent a total of $806,853 on quality-of-life en-forcement last year. That figure includes $20,000 for legal costs associated with the lawsuit.
The borough intends to hire another code enforcement offi-cer this year at a cost of about $25,000, Bellina says.
Hank A. Stryker III, the bor-ough's director of code enforce-ment, says the number of quali-ty-of-life summonses written for overcrowding and property-maintenance violations by his department has increased since the enforcement team was cre-ated in July 2002.
"Regular property-maintenance violations have also increased about 5 percent a year, but no-where near the rate of the oth-er stuff," Stryker says.
His office received 2,964 com-plaints and issued 172 sum-monses in 2001. The following year, there were 2,976 com-plaints and 212 summonses is-sued.
The enforcement team, in its first six months of operation, performed 241 inspections and 124 reinspections and issued 150 warnings and 89 summons-es.
The bases for those 89 viola-tions included overcrowded dwellings, 37; sleeping in the attic, basement or closet, 34; improper smoke detectors, nine; and no certificate of occu-pancy, five. Those violations amounted to $37,810 in fines and court fees.
In 2003, the code enforcement office received 3,250 complaints and issued 230 summonses. The team handled 215 inspections and 168 reinspections and is-sued 275 warnings and 169 sum-monses.
Of the 169 summonses, the vio-lations included overcrowded dwellings, 57; sleeping in attics, basements or closets, 43; im-proper smoke detectors, 29; and no certificate of occupancy, 23. The fines and court fees totaled $78,970.
Stryker says most of the viola-tions for overcrowded dwell-ings were issued to absentee landlords who rented to Lati-nos. He could not say if any of those tenants were undocu-mented because he's not al-lowed to ask.
Landlords fined
Many residents and officials are pointing at absentee land-lords who charge exorbitant rents to those who can afford it the least -- undocumented im-migrants.
"The biggest problem is absen-tee landlords," says Stephen Bi-dun of Vought Avenue.
Bidun, 40, a construction super-visor, says he spends his week-ends driving around town looking for code violations and then reports them to the code enforcement office. He and his wife, Lee Diaz-Bidun, are mem-bers of the PEOPLE steering committee.
"We're in the midst of a slum-lord era," she says.
Andrew Bryant, a retired sci-ence professor who lives in Millstone Township, owns 18 rental properties in the bor-ough. He doesn't think it's fair to level such criticism on all absentee landlords.
"That's stereotyping," Bryant says. "They use absentee land-lords as the scapegoats. We didn't create the problem. . . . The government created the problem."
Bryant was fined $1,250 in 2002 for having an overcrowded rental unit. Since then, he says, he keeps a sharper eye on who is living in his properties. But he is not unsympathetic to the immigrants' situation.
Bryant says the borough's qual-ity-of-life policies are a "total failure." The borough, he con-tends, forced him to raise his rents when he passed along the registration fee. Then the bor-ough put immigrants out of work when it closed the muster zone. He can't allow his tenants to double up -- for fear of anoth-er fine -- so he's left with an unpalatable choice.
"I'm trying to suffer it out. These people have families," Bryant says, adding that the borough's actions did nothing more than create "another so-cial problem."
Not everyone is so sympathet-ic.
Maria, who did not want her last name published because of her undocumented status, has been living in a $1,650-per-month house with her three young children, ages 3 months, 2 and 4. She moved there in November with her boyfriend, the father of her two youngest children. He paid their share of the rent: $600 rent for one bed-room. The boyfriend went back to his wife in Mexico a month later; the other men who lived in the apartment left in Janu-ary.
At some point, the landlord found out that the man who signed the lease sublet the rooms, and the landlord is now seeking an eviction.
Maria, 28, says through a trans-lator she stayed in that house because she had no place else to go. She has no money and no family here. She only started working, in a local factory, on Feb. 25. She didn't even know how much she would be paid, she says, as she got ready for her second day on the job.
"I'm worried that I will lose my kids if I can't support them," she says as she begins to cry. "I don't want to lose my kids."
Meet the immigrants.
Many undocumented immi-grants are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
These are immigrants who did not want their full names or addresses published for fear of reprisals from their landlords: Gabriella, 33, says her hus-band, who has a work permit, earns $300 a week in a lumber yard. She cares for their two young daughters and cleans houses when she can find the work. The rent is $750 for their one-bedroom apartment.
"Sometimes I can only spend $30 a week on groceries," she says in Spanish. "Can you imag-ine that?" Maria, 37, could not hold back the tears when she ex-plained her deplorable living conditions to a reporter in the fall. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, a dishwasher, and their four chil-dren. They paid $1,250 in rent plus utilities but didn't think they could stay after December. That's when the lease expired, and she was sure they could not afford the next rent in-crease. Rosealia, 62, works in a su-permarket earning $10 an hour. Her 30-hour weekly schedule is not enough to pay the $815 monthly rent for the one-bed-room apartment she shares with her sister, Amelia, 75. So they clean houses, cook for oth-er immigrants and take in bor-ders. Last year, three men, in-cluding Rosealia's son, paid to sleep on their floor, and a young woman with a baby paid to share their bedroom. One set of brothers, when interviewed in the fall, said they didn't have a bed. They were among 10 men who paid $200 a month each to sleep in an attic. The landlady wouldn't allow them to have blankets for fear an inspector would catch on if he saw them, they said.
Cecilia Reynolds, an advocate for the Latino community and publisher of the local Spanish-language newspaper Nosotros, says that the brothers have since found jobs and an apart-ment. Gabriella's situation is the same, but Reynolds lost touch with the 37-year-old Ma-ria after her family moved out of their apartment. A housing inspector discovered the young daughter she had kept hidden from the landlord.
Rosealia recently visited Reyn-olds to ask her if she knew anyone who needed a place to stay. She is alone now. Her sis-ter went back to Guatemala be-cause her daughter was sick, and the men returned to their native country for the winter because there is no work.
"I keep asking code enforce-ment when they are going to establish rent control," Reyn-olds says.
Bellina, the borough adminis-trator, says the council has no plans for that.
"We're not aggressively pursu-ing it right now but it may be considered in the future," he says.
Town image changing
Lee Diaz-Bidun, of PEOPLE, said she knows the borough is becoming notorious because of the immigrant controversy. She is saddened to hear people insult her town. She says she and her husband joined the group because they wanted to make the borough a better place to live -- for everybody.
"I've come to love the borough, and I don't want to leave," she says.
But not every homeowner shares that sentiment.
Julie and Timothy Sullivan put their Lincoln Place house on the market last month. They have lived there for nine years and had four children in the last seven.
Julie Sullivan, 38, says they are looking for a "development community" with a cul-de-sac where the kids can play.
"We loved the borough when we moved here," she says. "Now we have a more sour taste in our mouths."
Sullivan, a stay-at-home moth-er, says she believes another young couple who loves old houses will come along soon and buy their home. But she doesn't think the quality-of-life concerns that frustrated her and her husband will disappear when the new owners come.
"I still love the borough," she says, "but I don't love to live here anymore."
Nina Rizzo: (732) 308-7755 or nrizzo@app.com
Published in the Asbury Park Press 3/21/04
By NINA RIZZO
and SHANNON MULLEN
FREEHOLD BUREAU
FREEHOLD -- Twenty-five years ago, when Ernesto Juarez arrived at this Monmouth County crossroads town, it was a rare event to run into a fellow Mexican immigrant on Main Street.
Maria, 28, is being evicted from the house she shared with her boyfriend and several others, paying $1,650 in monthly rent. Her boyfriend returned to Mexico; the others moved out. Maria has three children (from left) Francisco, 3 months; Jicela, 4; and Beatrice, 2. Maria asked that her las name not be used because she fears reprisals.
"I could count all the Mexicans on my fingers," the 46-year-old borough resident recalls.
Juarez has long since lost count of his countrymen.
Today, nearly one-third of the borough's 11,000 residents are Latino, as are two of every five pupils in the borough's elementary schools and almost 100 percent of the children enrolled in the federally funded Head Start preschool, which has a one-year waiting list. Eight new Latino-owned businesses have opened up in the downtown area of this bustling Monmouth County seat.
"It's like Little Mexico City," Juarez says.
This is a good thing, if you like Mexico City. But these changes don't sit well with longtime Freehold residents like Joan Kress, who find themselves feeling nostalgic for their old hometown, too -- a town where farmers have rubbed shoulders with lawyers and county government workers, a town where Main Street is an eclectic blend of family-owned businesses, bail bondman's offices, outdoor cafes and ethnic restaurants.
Kress said people have always gotten along in her interracial neighborhood, but with the recent wave of Latino immigrants that has changed. Problems with noise, public drunkeness and litter have escalated in recent years, Kress says.
"I wanted to get a group together because I felt things slipping away," says Kress, a founding member of PEOPLE, a residents' group voicing concerns about Latino immigrants. "I've never seen it so bad."
Freehold, the seat of Monmouth County, finds itself at a crossroads as tension grows between long-time residents and new immigrants. In many ways, Freehold illustrates the national debate over illegal immigrants and fast-growing Latino communities.
A recent wave of mostly undocumented, or illegal, immigrants -- emboldened by the federal government's schizophrenic immigration policies -- have helped boost Freehold's economy and enrich the cultural landscape. But they have also created serious problems for this community:
Crime is on the rise. Arrests among Latino adults have climbed 108 percent in the borough from 1998 to 2002, according to the most recent state Department of Law and Public Safety crime statistics.
The schools are overcrowded. Enrollment in the K-8 district has spiked 22 percent since 1999, and 581 of the 1,360 pupils are Latino, making up 43 percent of the school enrollment.
While the Latino population has more than doubled from 1990 to 2000, black people and white non-Latinos have been leaving the borough. For almost every Hispanic who came to live in Freehold from 1990 to 2000, almost as many non-Hispanic white and black people left town. During that period, the number of non-Latino whites dropped almost 20 percent and the number of black residents dropped by more than 12 percent.
Complaints from borough residents about littering, loitering, excessive noise and other "quality-of-life" nuisances are multiplying. Borough officials are attempting to crack down on rental overcrowding, when a landlord may rent to one Latino family, but then others move in to help make the rental payments.
The borough's "muster zone" -- a strip of vacant land on Throckmorton Street where day laborers waiting to be picked up for work have gathered for years -- has become the focal point for the immigration issue. When the borough attempted to close down the zone on Jan. 1, a coalition of immigrants' rights groups and day laborers challenged the closing in court. Earlier this month the borough and the immigrants' rights groups reached an agreement in court, but borough officials now say they didn't agree to re-open the zone, and they now intend to crack down on employers picking up the day laborers.
On the flip side, immigrants have become an integral part of the area's economy.
Latinos bus tables and wash dishes in area restaurants, muck out stalls in neighboring horse farms, landscape the yards of surrounding suburbia and clean countless local houses and offices. And though most business owners will not admit om the record to employing undocumented Latinos, many businesses would collapse without the affordable and available labor these Latinos present.
Despite its small size -- about 11,000 residents in roughly 2 square miles -- Freehold Borough's situation reflects many of the problems of undocumented immigration faced by larger cities and communities through New Jersey and the rest of the country.
Several immigrants' rights ac-tivists have said they don't be-lieve President Bush's pro-posed guest-worker program would have a significant im-pact on towns like Freehold, where many of the undocu-mented workers are day labor-ers and don't come here with any promise of employment.
Tensions in town are increas-ing -- so much so that the Free-hold Clergy Association is host-ing a community forum on March 28 in an effort to foster constructive dialogue. The event is scheduled to be held from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 118 W. Main St.
Kress, 60, of Institute Street says she asked the Rev. Myrna Bethke of First United Method-ist Church if the forum would help solve her particular neigh-borhood concern: noise. When Bethke told her no, Kress de-cided that she would not at-tend.
"If it's not going to help me with the things that I'm both-ered by, why should I go?" she says.
Neighborhood woes
It was about February of last year when the shopping carts left abandoned in her neighbor-hood really began to bother Kress. Families without cars would often wheel their grocer-ies home in the store shopping carts and then leave them on the street.
Kress wanted to set an example for others to follow. Whenever she spotted a shopping cart in her neighborhood, she asked whomever was passing by to help load the cart in her truck to bring it back to the super-market. She did that at least 26 times last year.
But that's not what made her lose sleep.
It was the excessive horn honk-ing by taxis and contractors coming to pick up her neigh-bors. It was the blaring car ra-dios that still played while the driver went inside a nearby house. It was the drunk who stood on her porch, and the kids who mistook her house for a drug den on another corner. It was the uneasy feeling she developed because she no lon-ger recognized many of the fac-es that were frequenting the houses in the neighborhood she had lived in all her life.
Kress, a retired licensed practi-cal nurse who now works as a school bus aide, shared her concerns with her friend Gail Trojan, who lives around the block on Union Avenue. Tro-jan, a 57-year-old homemaker who says she gets no reprieve during the day from the noise, agreed their troubles were get-ting worse despite the bor-ough's quality-of-life initia-tives.
Kress and her friend Trojan circulated a petition in their neighborhood and presented 40 signatures to Mayor Michael Wilson and the Borough Coun-cil in July. Nothing seemed to change over the summer, so they enlisted the support of for-mer Councilman Marc LeVine after reading his opinion piece in a local newspaper in Septem-ber. He wrote that the bor-ough's problems were similar to many other towns across the country "as a result of a system which quietly supports the no-tion of filling jobs with cheap labor and blatantly disregards our immigration laws and the hardships forced on tax-paying citizens."
Later that month, LeVine founded a community group called PEOPLE (Pressing Our Elected Officials to Protect Our Living Environment) to ad-dress their concerns -- and to lay blame.
"Are you unhappy with the quality of life due to the prob-lems associated with day labor and illegal aliens?" read a flier enticing residents to attend a PEOPLE meeting. "Overcrowd-ed schools. Overcrowded dwell-ings. Public nuisance. Crime. Loitering. Noise. Nontax-pay-ing workers and employers. Tent cities. Lack of respect for public and private property."
Borough officials acknowledge that these types of complaints have grown along with the bor-ough's Latino population, espe-cially over the past five years, but they would not attribute all of these problems solely to the immigrants.
"A population increase puts a strain on all services," Kerry Higgins, the borough attorney, says. "I can't say an undocu-mented population causes this."
Good plan, for a time
In 1998, the borough began to address its quality-of-life con-cerns -- even before that catch phrase became part of the bor-ough's vernacular.
Mayor Wilson and council members asked then-U.S. Immi-gration and Naturalization Ser-vice representatives how to deal with a growing number of immigrants who were standing on street corners looking for work. The INS suggested the borough create a muster zone. That summer, the borough des-ignated a barren spot on Throckmorton Street, near the train tracks, as the official gathering spot.
The plan worked well -- for a while.
The site drew up to 300 day laborers daily in warm weather and attracted contractors from as far away as Lakewood and Staten Island. Residents began to complain again. The bor-ough announced in the fall it was closing the site on Jan. 1, saying the zone had become a magnet for illegal employment.
Before it closed, three advocacy groups and six day laborers in December filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to keep the muster zone open. The suit claimed the borough embarked on a "deliberate and coordinat-ed campaign to harass Latino day workers."
Early this month, the borough agreed in court to stake out the publicly owned portion of the muster zone and allow workers to gather there. The borough argued that it never interfered with the lawful gathering of people anywhere in town; offi-cials said they thought the en-tire parcel belonged to Conrail.
Alejandro Abarca is the coordi-nator for the Committee of Workers for Progress and So-cial Welfare, one of the com-plainants in the lawsuit. The recently formed group runs the temporary hiring hall, which was set up at Second Baptist Church after the Throckmorton Street muster zone was closed.
Abarca, 28, of Freehold says many day laborers left town after the muster zone closed because they could no longer find work. They moved to How-ell, Lakewood, Manalapan and Old Bridge, he said. But that wasn't the only reason they left.
Abarca says "vigilantes" were making many immigrants feel uncomfortable.
"They just wanted to go some-where where they felt safe, where they don't have Ameri-cans standing outside their houses, following them," Abar-ca says. "We received a lot of complaints about this."
When asked to identify the vig-ilantes, Abarca sits quietly for a moment and stares at a re-porter: "You know exactly who we are talking about."
What the borough's done
Even before the borough agreed in court to allow the workers to gather on the pub-licly owned portion of the mus-ter zone, the PEOPLE move-ment continued to gain momentum. The group's steering committee, comprising seven outspoken residents, is leading the charge against Bor-ough Hall because members say the town isn't working fast enough to make things better.
All this flak about the borough not attempting to resolve quali-ty-of-life issues angers Council-woman Sharon Shutzer. She served as liaison to a residents group that tried to combat overcrowding in the Spring Terrace Apartments back in the early 1990s. She later got involved with another group that attempted to deal with the cultural differences between Hispanics and Americans and sat in on several discussions with the INS and its precursor, the U.S. Citizenship and Immi-gration Services.
"All these groups are pointing at us. They can point all they want. Not one of us has lost our focus," she says of the mayor and council.
Over the past four years, Free-hold added six police officers and one special police officer. The borough created a Quality of Life Enforcement Team and a special Municipal Court ses-sion to deal with an increasing number of such complaints.
The borough also established a register for absentee landlords that requires them to list the names and ages of all tenants and to provide a floor plan for each unit. The registration comes with an initial $500 fee. The fee would drop to $300 the second year and $100 thereafter as long as there are no convic-tions for quality-of-life offenses.
The registration fee generated $225,750 from 514 properties last year, which is put into the borough's general treasury, Jo-seph Bellina, the borough ad-ministrator, says.
Freehold spent a total of $806,853 on quality-of-life en-forcement last year. That figure includes $20,000 for legal costs associated with the lawsuit.
The borough intends to hire another code enforcement offi-cer this year at a cost of about $25,000, Bellina says.
Hank A. Stryker III, the bor-ough's director of code enforce-ment, says the number of quali-ty-of-life summonses written for overcrowding and property-maintenance violations by his department has increased since the enforcement team was cre-ated in July 2002.
"Regular property-maintenance violations have also increased about 5 percent a year, but no-where near the rate of the oth-er stuff," Stryker says.
His office received 2,964 com-plaints and issued 172 sum-monses in 2001. The following year, there were 2,976 com-plaints and 212 summonses is-sued.
The enforcement team, in its first six months of operation, performed 241 inspections and 124 reinspections and issued 150 warnings and 89 summons-es.
The bases for those 89 viola-tions included overcrowded dwellings, 37; sleeping in the attic, basement or closet, 34; improper smoke detectors, nine; and no certificate of occu-pancy, five. Those violations amounted to $37,810 in fines and court fees.
In 2003, the code enforcement office received 3,250 complaints and issued 230 summonses. The team handled 215 inspections and 168 reinspections and is-sued 275 warnings and 169 sum-monses.
Of the 169 summonses, the vio-lations included overcrowded dwellings, 57; sleeping in attics, basements or closets, 43; im-proper smoke detectors, 29; and no certificate of occupancy, 23. The fines and court fees totaled $78,970.
Stryker says most of the viola-tions for overcrowded dwell-ings were issued to absentee landlords who rented to Lati-nos. He could not say if any of those tenants were undocu-mented because he's not al-lowed to ask.
Landlords fined
Many residents and officials are pointing at absentee land-lords who charge exorbitant rents to those who can afford it the least -- undocumented im-migrants.
"The biggest problem is absen-tee landlords," says Stephen Bi-dun of Vought Avenue.
Bidun, 40, a construction super-visor, says he spends his week-ends driving around town looking for code violations and then reports them to the code enforcement office. He and his wife, Lee Diaz-Bidun, are mem-bers of the PEOPLE steering committee.
"We're in the midst of a slum-lord era," she says.
Andrew Bryant, a retired sci-ence professor who lives in Millstone Township, owns 18 rental properties in the bor-ough. He doesn't think it's fair to level such criticism on all absentee landlords.
"That's stereotyping," Bryant says. "They use absentee land-lords as the scapegoats. We didn't create the problem. . . . The government created the problem."
Bryant was fined $1,250 in 2002 for having an overcrowded rental unit. Since then, he says, he keeps a sharper eye on who is living in his properties. But he is not unsympathetic to the immigrants' situation.
Bryant says the borough's qual-ity-of-life policies are a "total failure." The borough, he con-tends, forced him to raise his rents when he passed along the registration fee. Then the bor-ough put immigrants out of work when it closed the muster zone. He can't allow his tenants to double up -- for fear of anoth-er fine -- so he's left with an unpalatable choice.
"I'm trying to suffer it out. These people have families," Bryant says, adding that the borough's actions did nothing more than create "another so-cial problem."
Not everyone is so sympathet-ic.
Maria, who did not want her last name published because of her undocumented status, has been living in a $1,650-per-month house with her three young children, ages 3 months, 2 and 4. She moved there in November with her boyfriend, the father of her two youngest children. He paid their share of the rent: $600 rent for one bed-room. The boyfriend went back to his wife in Mexico a month later; the other men who lived in the apartment left in Janu-ary.
At some point, the landlord found out that the man who signed the lease sublet the rooms, and the landlord is now seeking an eviction.
Maria, 28, says through a trans-lator she stayed in that house because she had no place else to go. She has no money and no family here. She only started working, in a local factory, on Feb. 25. She didn't even know how much she would be paid, she says, as she got ready for her second day on the job.
"I'm worried that I will lose my kids if I can't support them," she says as she begins to cry. "I don't want to lose my kids."
Meet the immigrants.
Many undocumented immi-grants are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
These are immigrants who did not want their full names or addresses published for fear of reprisals from their landlords: Gabriella, 33, says her hus-band, who has a work permit, earns $300 a week in a lumber yard. She cares for their two young daughters and cleans houses when she can find the work. The rent is $750 for their one-bedroom apartment.
"Sometimes I can only spend $30 a week on groceries," she says in Spanish. "Can you imag-ine that?" Maria, 37, could not hold back the tears when she ex-plained her deplorable living conditions to a reporter in the fall. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, a dishwasher, and their four chil-dren. They paid $1,250 in rent plus utilities but didn't think they could stay after December. That's when the lease expired, and she was sure they could not afford the next rent in-crease. Rosealia, 62, works in a su-permarket earning $10 an hour. Her 30-hour weekly schedule is not enough to pay the $815 monthly rent for the one-bed-room apartment she shares with her sister, Amelia, 75. So they clean houses, cook for oth-er immigrants and take in bor-ders. Last year, three men, in-cluding Rosealia's son, paid to sleep on their floor, and a young woman with a baby paid to share their bedroom. One set of brothers, when interviewed in the fall, said they didn't have a bed. They were among 10 men who paid $200 a month each to sleep in an attic. The landlady wouldn't allow them to have blankets for fear an inspector would catch on if he saw them, they said.
Cecilia Reynolds, an advocate for the Latino community and publisher of the local Spanish-language newspaper Nosotros, says that the brothers have since found jobs and an apart-ment. Gabriella's situation is the same, but Reynolds lost touch with the 37-year-old Ma-ria after her family moved out of their apartment. A housing inspector discovered the young daughter she had kept hidden from the landlord.
Rosealia recently visited Reyn-olds to ask her if she knew anyone who needed a place to stay. She is alone now. Her sis-ter went back to Guatemala be-cause her daughter was sick, and the men returned to their native country for the winter because there is no work.
"I keep asking code enforce-ment when they are going to establish rent control," Reyn-olds says.
Bellina, the borough adminis-trator, says the council has no plans for that.
"We're not aggressively pursu-ing it right now but it may be considered in the future," he says.
Town image changing
Lee Diaz-Bidun, of PEOPLE, said she knows the borough is becoming notorious because of the immigrant controversy. She is saddened to hear people insult her town. She says she and her husband joined the group because they wanted to make the borough a better place to live -- for everybody.
"I've come to love the borough, and I don't want to leave," she says.
But not every homeowner shares that sentiment.
Julie and Timothy Sullivan put their Lincoln Place house on the market last month. They have lived there for nine years and had four children in the last seven.
Julie Sullivan, 38, says they are looking for a "development community" with a cul-de-sac where the kids can play.
"We loved the borough when we moved here," she says. "Now we have a more sour taste in our mouths."
Sullivan, a stay-at-home moth-er, says she believes another young couple who loves old houses will come along soon and buy their home. But she doesn't think the quality-of-life concerns that frustrated her and her husband will disappear when the new owners come.
"I still love the borough," she says, "but I don't love to live here anymore."
Nina Rizzo: (732) 308-7755 or nrizzo@app.com