Destroying Disabled: Anti-Group-Home Opposition Rises Again in Aspen Hill? (Part VIII)

Earlier we covered opposition to group homes in general, and then opposition to subsidized housing of psychiatrically-disabled people in group homes in Aspen Hill. We covered a tentative move by the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., to close down a group home housing elderly severely disabled people, and we note again in passing that they just couldn't bring themselves to follow through.

We provided some background and links to various types of mental illness, contrasting and comparing people who were incapacitated by mental illness and those who octuply outnumber them, the competent but horrid personality disorders such as Borderline, Histrionic, and Antisocial.

We covered the mysterious "welcome-wagon walking-tours of wackos and weirdos" given by people who seem to have no actual association with any legitimate agency or organization, and contrasted and compared these odd instigators with the legitimate agency of the County government, the "Assertive Community Treatment ("ACT") team", which actually has a mission roughly opposite to the mission evidenced by the "walking tour" posse.

We detailed how it sure would make sense, in terms of profit motive, for speculators in real-estate -- house-flippers and illegal boarding-house slumlords -- to try to shut down subsidized housing sites in order to "free up" the property so that they could acquire it "on the cheap".

We then descended into Pure Fiction -- although we made it as plausible and locally-realistic as possible -- to give fictional details of how a person could recruit henchmen and minions and send them on a diabolical mission of Pure Evil meant to throw harmless incompetents into the harsh streets to flounder and perish in uncomprehended misery as their former safe and healthy assisted-living managed-care group residence was converted into an out-of-code flophouse for an illegal-alien workforce.

We covered the very plausible elements of a good old-fashioned "hatchet job": Identity, Vilify, Nullify... and today we will cover DESTROY.

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This is, of course, FICTION. Don't try to make it real, because a freshly warmed Hell awaits you. And though this is fiction, in the same way that you can read a story and believe it when the author tells you "it was a sunny day" because both you and the author have seen it, you can read and believe this fiction when the author tells you that there is genuine nastiness afoot in the very real world. The author may never have seen the ocean, and perhaps the reader also is a stranger to the sea. Yet the author can write of, and the reader can believe in, pirates. Because, after all, everyone knows that they are out there.

Ahrr, matey.

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Welcome back to the mind of a Dastardly Doer of Despicable Deed, and Mastermind of Many Minions.

You've picked your targets, and you have your reasons. You want a bunch of "mental folks" out on the street, you don't care where they end up as long as you get your hands on the house where they live. Remember, this isn't costing you much except the time to go cast a spell of delusion on a bunch of sketchy day-laborer types with their own mental problems, maybe a hundred dollars worth of beer and burrito money, and the time to hatch this nefarious plot and watch it unfold. If it succeeds, you could maybe make fifty or a hundred thousand dollars by flipping the property, or maybe have a long-lasting income stream of maybe ten thousand dollars a month by turning the place into a flophouse housing maybe 20 people in the basement and half as many as that upstairs. Compared to any legitimate work you could do, this is such big money -- and there is so very little personal risk to you -- that you simply can't pass it up.

You've sent your henchmen and minions to scour the land and they've made darn sure that the whole neighborhood -- especially the more borderline and histrionic residents -- are all up in arms about "those crazy people living in luxury on the taxpayer's dime". You've convinced everyone that the owner/operator of the place is a skimming and skimping and fostering an environment from which will doubtless emerge a new plague, or at least sad and sordid tales of woe and giant rats eating the toes of drugged-out mental patients. Or maybe you've convinced the neighborhood that they're all secret cannibals opening a gateway to the underworld and inviting in demonic forces. Maybe you've convinced half of the neighbors of one thing and the other half of the other, the impressionable ones, anyway. In either or any case, the approbation and ostracism is so relentless that the caretakers can't take care, and in the absence of any hopes of ever getting any work from anyone who has ever heard the stories you have sown far and wide (and deep, too), the clients of the caretaker are very slowly starving or failing to pay for their medication. One or two days work per month would make all of the difference to them, but you've got the neighborhood locking them down so tightly that they're withering on the vine, so to speak.

And that means that everything is going according to your plan. Eventually, you succeed.

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Successful destruction of a legitimate, inspected, legally licensed, health-and-housing code compliant, actually-therapeutic managed-care group home has left three professionals unemployed, and has put five completely helpless mental patients on the streets where they go to the middle of the ten-year waiting list for another managed-care facility that isn't an overcrowded and underfunded state mental hospital. The best thing that could happen to most of these people is that they get arrested and get housed and treated in jail, and placed by the release management team into another managed-care facility.

In place of the one-caretaker-per-shift and five residents with very rare visitors, you now have four families of five illegal aliens and their US-born kids living in the basement, and each of these 20 people earns you $300 a month. That's $6,000.00 per month just for renting out the basement. You should have no problem paying the first year of "low low teaser rates" on the "option ARM" mortgage that you got with a "liar loan" that your sociopath friends helped you get.

When the mortgage "adjusts" you can just flip the house, either refinancing it or selling it out from under the four or five families to whom you illegally rent this out-of-code flophouse and worker barracks. In the meantime, your repetitive refinancing has grossly inflated the value of the home, and it drags up the values of everyone around you, and they start using their own refinancings to turn their homes into ATMs, extracting equity which is in fact mostly fictional.

Eventually, there's a downturn in the housing market and the 20 illegal aliens in the basement lose their construction jobs and can't pay you, you can't refinance, neither can your neighbors, neither can anyone else because all of that equity is indeed fictional, and as the accountants start to figure that out, the global economy goes into free fall.

Congratulations, Evil Mastermind!

You set out to scam some mental cases out of their managed care so you could become a slumlord, and you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.

You've just launched the second Great Depression.

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I think this pretty much covers DESTROY.

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Next: Into the Aftermath...

TO BE CONTINUED

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