What Does Springfield Tell Us About Aurora?

I ended yesterday's post with a puzzle. According to the links, the Springfield, OH city elders somehow made a policy decision to encourage Haitian immigrants to move into town, because the local proletariat was unreliable, ungrateful, and unsuited to the low-pay jobs the employers had to offer. Bringing in a replacement working class was thought to be a win-win, the employers would get docile, grateful, and hard-working new employees, while the town would prosper. The links yesterday weren't completely clear on whether the Haitians were legal or illegal, but this story in the UK Daily Mail says,

Springfield experienced a wave of legal Haitian migration in 2020 in a bid to revitalize the struggling local economy.

Willing to do the blue-collar jobs locals were unenthusiastic about, the Haitians, who were already in the country legally, moved to the town.

Within a few years, 20,000 immigrants arrived, swelling Springfield's population, which was only 58,000 in 2020. These people arrived with social security numbers and working permits, they've paid taxes and occupied previously boarded up, abandoned homes.

Thw story here implies these Haitians are legal immigrants, but apparently they are only in the US under Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to work and travel but doesn't give them legal residence. As a result, the account is misleading, and as we'll see below, there may be a parallel situation in Aurora that's leading to similar results there.

Of course, the Springfield story has anything but a happy ending. There are unconfirmed complaints about the Haitians eating pets and waterfowl and traffic accidents resulting from their unfamiliarity with US traffic laws, but leaving those aside, there are confirmed issues with the Haitians crowding the native-born poor out of medical and housing benefits, to the point that state officials have had belatedly to address the problems.

But if the Haitians are prospering as the new town proletariat, why are their families overwhelming puiblic assistance resources? This just doesn't compute. And I'm scratchinmg my head at the reference in the Daily Mail story that they've renovated previously abandoned homes. That costs money, no matter how much sweat equity you put into it, yet the Haitians are overwhelming public assistance. Who is paying to rehab the bandos?

Are these rehabbed bandos rental units, or what? If so, who are the landlords, and who pays the rent? This brings me to the X post I embedded yesterday:

This is an absolutely insane video.

A Springfield, Ohio homeless advocate tells the city council that landlords are kicking people out of their homes and replacing them with Haitians and that the Biden-Harris government is paying them to do it.

He says he personally knows… pic.twitter.com/edNKl4tpDz

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 12, 2024

The gentleman here strongly implies that the rehabbed bandos are in fact rental units, and the migration incentives favor the Haitians, to the point that the landlords can renovate the homes and get some type of voucher money for the rent, which is above the market value that the native-born poor had been paying. So far, we don't know the details of whatever program is being used to subsidize renovations or provide vouchers for rent -- the mainstream media is neglecting its responsibility here, but a link below gives details of a possible equivalent program in Aurora. I'll see what I can do to fill in the gaps as the story progresses.

But the question of how the slumlords benefit from government subsidy of illegal or quasi=-legal immigration brings us to the stories about Aurora, CO and the apartment blocks said to have been taken over by the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.

Beginning last year, a large influx of Venezuelan migrants, some of them members of the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang, reportedly had “taken over” a series of apartment buildings in Aurora—and unleashed terror. Last month, Venezuelan migrants were allegedly implicated in an attempted homicide, an arrest of purported gang members, and shocking security footage that showed heavily armed men forcibly entering one of the apartments. In response to the chaos, police mobilized en masse and vacated one of the complexes after the city, alleging code violations, deemed it uninhabitable.

The root of the problem, as I've begun to suspect with Springfield, turns out to be subsidies to slumlords for housing illegals or quasi-legals. In Aurora, "a landlord called CBZ Management, a property company that operates the three apartment buildings[, is] at the center of the current controversy."

The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declared itself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.

. . . According to public records, between 2023 and 2024, [two non-profits,] ViVe Wellness and Papagayo received $4.8 million and $774,000, respectively; much of this funding came from the Migrant Support Grant, which was funded by ARPA. Then, in 2024, ViVe secured an extra $10.4 million across three contracts, while Papagayo received $2.9 million from a single contract to serve migrants; two of those five contracts were awarded to implement the Denver Asylum Seekers Program, which promised six months of rental assistance to nearly 1,000 migrants.

. . . We spoke with a former CBZ Management employee, who, on condition of anonymity, explained how the process worked. Last summer, the employee said, representatives from Papagayo began working with CBZ Management to place Venezuelan migrants in the company’s Aurora apartment complexes. When a Venezuelan individual or family needed housing, the NGO would contact the regional property manager, who then matched them with available apartments.

It was a booming business. According to the employee, Papagayo arranged hundreds of contracts with the property manager. The NGO provided up to two months of rental assistance, as many migrants did not have, or were unable to open, bank accounts. Within six months, according to the employee, approximately 80 percent of the residents of these buildings were Venezuelan migrants. The employee also noted that the buildings saw gang activity and violence.

The employee, however, alleges that these agreements were made on false pretenses. To convince the hesitant employee to accept the migrants, Papagayo made assurances that the tenants had stable jobs and income. With limited English and facing a minimum six-month wait for work permits, though, many migrants were ineligible for legal employment, struggled to find stable jobs, and ultimately fell behind on rent.

It sounds as though these circumstances are what's also going on in Springfield: although some of the Haitians are apparently good, steady workers, many others are not; their work permits may be delayed, their English and other skills may not be what the employers need, and they aren't actually working -- but the slumlords get subsidies for their rent. The circumstances outlined above indicate that the slumlords are complicit in setting up situations where gamgs can take over their apartment blocks. According to the New York Post,

A Colorado landlord has agreed to sell a troubled apartment complex that was taken over by the violent Venezuelan migrant gang Tren de Aragua.

Landlord Zev Baumgarten has been fighting with the Denver suburb of Aurora over the Aspen Grove after the city accused him of allowed it to become a trash-ridden, gang-infested hellhole, according to records obtained by the Denver Gazette.

Baumgarten is also the owner of another apartment complex where a viral video showed a crew of gun-toting thugs breaking into a unit, according to the Gazette.

. . . In June, attorneys for the landlords had sent letters begging police and local officials for help, claiming Tren de Aragua had “forcibly taken control” of Aspen Grove. The city finally deemed the site a “criminal nuisance” and evicted the residents.

Last month, a video surfaced at a separate apartment complex showed a gun-toting crew breaking into a unit.

That’s when Baumgarten found himself facing more than 80 charges for building code violations, ranging from vermin infestations to power outages.

But it looks like Baumgarten enabled the whole situation by playing the NGOs' game, accepting both their subsidies and the gang member tenants they provided while placing them in uninhabitable facilities -- and then blaming the problem on the police!

I strongly suspect something similar has been going on in Springfield, and no doubt in many other places all over the country. Both sweatshop employers and slumlords are political donors and have friends in the local machine, which I'm sure is why the Springfield mayor, city manager, and police department all deny there are any Haitians eating pets in their town. Somebody needs to look into who's renting those rehabbed bandos, to whom they're renting them, and what kind of subsidies they're getting for doing it.

My guess is that what;s trickling out now is just a tiny part of the story.