Loudoun County officials have for years looked the other way when confronted with glaring violations of their own zoning ordinances. Angry homeowners have now joined a growing list of Americans demanding strict enforcement of such laws. As Examiner staff writer David Sherfinski reported last week, overcrowding complaints in Loudoun have more than doubled this year as citizens grapple with what Sterling Park resident Joe Budzinski calls “government-sponsored blight.”
Blight is what you get when you mix lax enforcement of federal immigration laws with Northern Virginia’s “see no evil” approach. Instead of doing their jobs and coming down hard on the owners of illegal boardinghouses, county officials were busy handing out publicly funded services to the thousands of illegal immigrants who moved to Virginia during the past decade — 85 percent of them drawn to Northern Virginia’s booming job market.
This mass migration put tremendous pressure on the area’s housing stock.
With prices too high for most unskilled laborers, landlords began renting out rooms — and even beds — in single-family homes in violation of zoning laws. Yet even when neighbors complained about piles of uncollected trash, heavy construction vehicles parked on residential streets, vandalism and harassment from hordes of young men crammed into single-family homes, local officials often refused to do anything.
Public protests finally forced Fairfax County to set up a zoning strike task force last year, but that was long after former County Supervisor Dana Kauffman, D-Lee, began complaining about county inaction in his district, parts of which were starting to resemble Guadalahara. Loudoun Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio, R-Sterling, whose district also has a large immigrant population, has met similar resistance from his county’s political establishment.
Herndon was in the same fix. But in a 2006 election that made national news, voters threw out the incumbent mayor and town council and elected candidates who promised to close down a controversial day labor center that attracted illegal immigrants. And once elected, they did. Under Mayor Stephen DeBenedittis, the town hired more zoning inspectors and trained them to gather evidence that would hold up in court. As a result, more than 140 cases of overcrowding have been reduced to fewer than 30. In May, Benedittis and his slate were easily elected to a second term. Government-sponsored blight is the direct result of bad political decision making by elected public officials. And as Herndon residents proved, they can only be reversed at the ballot box.
