Aspen Hill, Maryland, according to all sources, is one of the parts of Montgomery County most plagued by foreclosures, and is also one of the parts of Montgomery County most plagued by flagrant violations of County Codes limiting the occupancy of single-family detached residential homes.
Thus, even as more homes are emptied of their former occupants -- mostly people who should never have been given a mortgage in the first place, but got them through "stated income" loans or "liar loans" -- other houses not far from foreclosure are becoming grossly overpopulated.
What's happening here is this: with the construction boom at an end with the collapse of the Housing Bubble, unemployed construction workers, nannies nobody can afford to hire, cleaning service ladies -- who are discovering that in lean times, most Americans can and will clean their own homes -- all of these people are moving in with whatever friends and "relatives" have not yet received foreclosure notices or been evicted.
Within eyesight of my own back porch, I can see at least two houses which are severely overcrowded. How can I tell? Last month's very high temperatures caused a fair number of failures of central air-conditioning systems. The intense heat forced the occupants of these houses out into their yards, and in each of these roughly-1250-square-foot homes reside at least 15 people.
Despite new County Code regulations that pledged to deal with this, this isn't getting handled, not at any useful rate.
Almost every time an eviction has occurred around Aspen Hill, I shortly thereafter was apprised of the fact that someone had seen a family moving out of one home, into another. Sometimes -- as is the case with one of the houses I can see from my corner -- no less than three families of 4 or 5 persons moved in with "relatives" in a 10-day period.
And as the density of various homes rises far past law and safety considerations, so rise the tensions in the neighborhood.
Until the recent economic crisis began, we weren't able to fully suppress overcrowding, and the County Code dealt ineffectually at best with people paving their yards and illegally parking work fleets on the paved yards. But we were at least able to keep out most of the worst of the gangsters.
That is done with. With the massive overcrowding -- bringing in people from as far away as Woodbridge Virginia and from as near as Wheaton Maryland -- it's inevitable that there will be conflicts between the various groups composed of various foreign nationalities.
I should not need to remind the Astute Reader, but I shall remind everyone else: the reason most Central American are here is that they really don't get along. They get along so badly between their various nations and regions that a 12-year-long regional conflict that toppled some governments and threatened several more was started over something so stupid as a game of soccer.
The "Football" War (La guerra del fútbol, in Spanish), also known as the Soccer War or 100-hours War, was a four-day war fought by El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. It was caused by political conflicts between Hondurans and Salvadorans, namely issues concerning immigration from El Salvador to Honduras. These existing tensions between the two countries coincided with the inflamed rioting during the second North American qualifying round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup. On 14 July 1969, the Salvadoran army launched an attack against Honduras. The Organization of American States negotiated a cease-fire which took effect on 20 July, with the Salvadoran troops withdrawn in early August.
Eleven years later the two nations signed a peace treaty on 30 October 1980 to put the border dispute before the International Court of Justice. In 1992, the Court awarded most of the disputed territory to Honduras, and in 1998, Honduras and El Salvador signed a border demarcation treaty to implement the terms of the ICJ decree. The total land area given to Honduras from El Salvador after the court's ruling was around 374.5 km2. As of the beginning of 2006 demarcation had not yet been completed, but Honduras and El Salvador maintain normal diplomatic and trade relations.
The point being: when you have half of the working-age adults from El Salvador and a quarter of the working-age adults from Honduras all packing into some 1500 houses in Montgomery County -- half of those in Aspen Hill -- there will be frictions.
And frictions between Central Americans are not resolved through the courts, nor much through the police. They're resolved by tattooed assholes in hoodies, with large caliber handguns.
One local recently remarked that another local had tentatively expressed the observation: "so, is it just me, or is the neighborhood changing?" The tentative nature of the question may be ascribed to the fact that the "local" is no more local than any of the Salvadorans who snuck into the country and abused the blanket grant of Temporary Protected Refugee status to make bundles of money working construction during the Housing Bubble; he's just here legally and is now a citizen. So he might not be as attuned to "what is normal" in Aspen Hill as might be people who have lived here a long time.
Then again, as a person who came from a country that was notable for its violence -- much of that violence being clandestine, though widespread -- perhaps he can spot a gangster as quickly as anyone else, and perhaps better than many.
But there are some individuals that nobody -- other perhaps than my ancient mom -- could possibly mistake for anything other than a gang-banger, or someone who is such a wannabee that they might as well have been beat in or sexed in, it's only a matter of time, so to speak, before they stop just talking the talk and start walking the walk.
County policy is now such that anyone arrested for crimes of violence or for weapons violations will be getting their nationality and immigration-status checked. I'm getting the idea that such arrests will be happening with rapidly increasing frequency. In any case, orders have come down right from President Obama himself: all local jails should check the nationality and immigration status of all persons arrested for any violation whatsoever.
Yet this posting should not be misconstrued as me saying "the police really need to start arresting anyone dressing like an active gang member".
Considering how the wars were fought in Central America after being started by a soccer game -- clandestine Death Squads on all sides -- the police need to not focus so much on kids in silly clothes. They need to really start going after "those hardworkering undocumented workers". First, they are not hard-working: there is no work for them. Secondly, for most of those who are still getting work, they're getting it the Gangster Way: by criminal bid fixing, bribery, threats, intimidation, and violence against the competition. Third, if there is no work for them, if there is a crushed economy, if there is widespread bitterness among the citizens and Legal Immigrants, if there are no available funds for public assistance programs, then there is no excuse whatsoever for being the least bit tolerant. Nobody needs these folks, and they are becoming a clear and present danger.
It's time for the County investigators -- and there need to be more of them, and better ones -- to start applying the "no visible means of support" test. Who doesn't see someone who can barely speak English driving around in a brand new Cadillac -- bought in the last 6 months -- or some huge new pickup or "riced out" new import car with tens of thousands of dollars in new "mods", and think "there is no way that they paid for that working construction when there are no construction jobs". There's simply no way that a woman who works the night shift flipping burgers and the day shift cleaning houses can possibly afford a brand new Range Rover. There's a clear, simple, and almost certainly correct explanation, though: these vehicles are the proceeds of crime. And the only kind of crime that pays that sort of money is Organized Crime.
And judging from some of the vehicles -- and some of the drivers -- one will see cruising up and down Aspen Hill Road at evening rush hour, cruising the main drag of one of the poorest and most-foreclosed neighborhoods in the County -- Aspen Hill is where the fine officers of the law need to start looking for that Organized Crime.
Your first clue that these are dangerous adult gangsters -- possibly even veterans of the Death Squads in their own ravaged homelands -- is that they drive with their windows down in absolutely all weather, hanging their arms out the window like they were signalling "slowing or stopping". The second clue is that they throw crap out of the windows at any oncoming vehicle they know bears a driver or passengers opposed to gangsters, to organized crime, to illegal aliens who have no job here to excuse their presence or make money for supporters of law-breaking officials.
I do believe that these people think that because no action is taken, that this is all not merely tolerated, but approved from the highest levels of the Establishment.
It's time to show them the error in their thinking and behavior.
And as they said 8 years ago: "Let's Roll."
More to come?
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