Driving around my once beautiful and prosperous state of New York has become equivalent to attending a wake.
Commentary
Driving around my once beautiful and prosperous state of New York has become equivalent to attending a wake: You see there’s a body lying in the casket—it looks kind of like it did when it was alive, but you know it’s really dead.
But it was no fire that gutted the city; it was a lack of decent jobs. One by one, and for various reasons, the companies left, leaving residents to compete for jobs at gas stations, Walmart, or McDonald’s.
Fulton is located within Oswego County, which has recently seen a
dramatic surge in homelessness (79 percent increase), even as it suffers from some of the worst
food insecurity in the state. How does this manifest itself in an area known for its freezing temperatures and hard winters? It’s hard to say.
The director of a county housing and homeless coalition there acknowledges many of its rural homeless are “hidden,” not even showing up in annual
Housing and Urban Development-required surveys. “Couch surfing” is a term used to describe the homeless that are unaccounted for. It’s a population of usually young adults who are staying with whichever friends or family offer a couch to sleep on. These are the invisible people who don’t show up in a headcount conducted at shelters funded by the local Department of Social Services or other official organizations.
A coalition director was quoted as saying, “I think there are challenges for the rural community trying to end homelessness because it’s really hard to get a good scope of what the issue is.”
But we do know what the issue is. As Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) has
said, decades of ideological leadership have made the state unlivable, even as it leads the nation in population loss. Cities such as Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo rank among
the top 10 cities in the United States for the highest rates of child poverty.
A rural New York pastor whose church provides hot meals for the needy told me: “We’re seeing such a surge in people who need food and clothing that it’s hard to keep track, and asking them to leave contact information might scare them away. You see, many people can’t afford to pay their mortgages or rent anymore; they’re just becoming lost in society.”
I was curious to know if we were talking about new immigrants. The pastor said that about half of the people they are helping are new immigrants, but the church “had no idea where they were coming from.”
The other half seemed to be native-born New Yorkers who were either renters who could no longer pay rent or folks being forced to give up family homes because they could no longer afford mortgage payments or maintenance costs.
And you can see these homes not just in places such as Fulton, but across the state. (Deserted New York properties have oddly turned into the stuff of macabre art—as photographers
Bryan Sansivero and
Nicholas Long have documented in their work.)
Abandoned properties are marked with a red-and-white “
X,” to let first responders know they’re uninhabited and structurally unsafe. If you ask around, no one knows what happened to the people who lived there; it’s a story that’s repeated in every dying county from Buffalo to Albany, from the Adirondacks to the Catskills.
Known as zombie properties, most of these homes are abandoned when faced with foreclosure.
New York’s Department of Financial Services tries to get mortgagees to maintain the properties, but that’s easier said than done.
Zombie houses often provide the perfect shelter for drug dealers, where users get caught in a cycle of binge-using illegal substances, thus the idea that they become “trapped” in the house.
I first learned of “trap houses” when selling my aunt’s property in a small northern New York town.
She had died in her 90s, leaving a beautifully maintained house on a quiet tree-lined street. But as I tried to sell the house, I learned this was no quaint, small-town neighborhood. Neighbors told me trap houses infested the area, and the Drug Enforcement Administration was
monitoring surrounding properties with cameras. Large drug busts were common. The property was greatly devalued and sold at a loss. I know my poor aunt, confined to her house in later years and aided by visiting caregivers, never even knew of the horrors taking place just outside her door.
The out-of-control drug problem in Oswego County, including opioid overdose-related deaths, has
worsened dramatically in recent years, as it has across the nation. (Most folks aren’t even aware that New Yorkers living in small cities and rural towns are
more likely to die from an opioid overdose than people living in large cities.) But it’s important to remember that homelessness and poverty
aren’t always linked to substance abuse. Sometimes, these situations involve mental health issues; other times, it’s simply a bad economy and a convergence of unlucky circumstances that drives people to the lowest points in their lives.
The powers that be act like the root causes of homelessness and poverty in rural New York are a big mystery. They aren’t. If you don’t have industry, you don’t have jobs. If you don’t have a job, you can’t maintain your home. For those in suburban and rural areas, a car is the single greatest necessity to get to work, groceries, and health care; thus, car maintenance trumps house maintenance.
But instead of curbing liberal tax-and-spend policies that continue to hurt the economy, leaders cry with one consensus: “We need more affordable housing!” That’s right, if people can’t afford their homes, they’ll need to be stacked up in
HUD-funded government buildings where they can be tracked and monitored properly. (The
application process speaks for itself.)
While the cost of housing continues to outpace wages even as the cost of living goes up, the middle class is being picked off in a sadistic, whack-a-mole kind of way. Those who could afford to have
fled the state at record levels, while the poor who remain can put their names on a
waiting list that randomly picks who to help using a
lottery-based system.
So what is New York doing to help stem the tide of fleeing residents? They’re saying, “Don’t let the door hit you in the butt”—even as they bring in new illegal immigrants to replace the population they couldn’t take care of in the first place.
In her book “
City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town,” author Susan Hartman wrote about Utica’s downturn, explaining, “Now out of work and demoralized, residents turned against their city.”
For the book, Ms. Hartman interviews Utica native,
Democrat pollster, and
globalist John Zogby, who recalls a bumper sticker from those hard times that read, “Last one out of Utica, please turn out the lights.”
Utica, the county seat of Oneida County, was ripe for reappropriation, and that’s exactly what it got. With the help of nongovernmental organizations
well known for fueling illegal immigration, as well as an organization simply called
The Center, Utica became known as “The town that loves refugees.” The U.N. Refugee Agency in 2005 made a whole
issue of its magazine lauding the city for its “love affair” with refugees who supposedly “saved a dying city.”
And while the story goes that Utica welcomed refugees with open arms, it’s also clear that civil liberties activists used lawsuits—such as the one against the
Utica City School District—to get the compliance they wanted. (While the population of Utica is about 64,000, the school district struggles with a student body that speaks
42 different languages.)
The only criticism the U.N. article presents is about the locals who “Inevitably ... complain about the refugees receiving massive cash handouts, free apartments and easy jobs—grumbles heard wherever refugees resettle around the world, but all untrue.”
But it is true—even more so since 2005. How else could refugees who came here with nothing have purchased “cheap properties” and “
renovated entire neighborhoods”? How else could they establish restaurants, stores, salons, coffee shops, churches, mosques, and temples, not just in Utica but throughout the state and beyond? It’s what a lot of New Yorkers have been wondering.
The concise answer comes from a
website set up by immigrants for immigrants.
“The best part about the U.S.A. government is that they offer more opportunities to start their own business to immigrants with nothing compared to those born in the United States,“ it accurately reports. ”Amazing, right?”
Amazing is right, and that refugee assistance is flush with money from public and private donors.
Under the
U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, refugees are eligible for “assistance or support from private sponsors upon arrival in the United States. Each refugee approved for admission ... is sponsored by one of 10 non-profit resettlement agencies participating in the Reception and Placement Program under a cooperative agreement with the Department of State, or through the new private sponsorship program,
Welcome Corps.” (President Joe Biden’s new refugee aid program, “
Welcome Corps,” was recently hailed as a
great success.)
The Bennett Law Center
website gives immigrants tips to find funding through “state governments or nonprofit/charitable organizations,” encouraging them to find grants that don’t have to be paid back.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Office of Refugee Resettlement, helps “newcomers achieve economic self-sufficiency” with cash assistance, matching grants, agricultural partnership programs to start their own farms, and individual development accounts and training in professional or skilled career fields.
Ironically, and in a move that looks more like bribery, even the Department of Homeland Security is funding the illegal immigrant crisis,
paying out millions to cities and charities willing to help.
Most recently in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul
proposed spending more than $2 billion in taxpayers’ money to assist illegal immigrants. (Even as the state has gutted its own tax base by
driving out its wealthiest residents, it seems the poor suckers who remained behind are funding their own demise.)
Then, there are remittances to consider. The World Economic Forum
estimates that migrant workers around the world sent roughly $8 billion to their home countries in 2022. The top five recipients were India, Mexico, China, the Philippines, and Egypt. Why shouldn’t we assume that the people we’re paying to train, who are getting cash assistance and grants, aren’t sending money home as well?
And while refugees, asylum-seekers, illegal immigrants, or migrants—whatever name you give them—pour into New York state by the
thousands daily, we are
told that the 30 percent child poverty rates in the state are due to “structural and systemic racism.” You can’t make this stuff up.
Oneida and Oswego counties joined 28 other counties in issuing emergency declarations and executive orders barring sheltering illegal immigrants. They were both sued by attorneys representing New York City, who accused them of being “
xenophobic”—simply for trying to protect their populace amid an ongoing poverty and housing crisis.
For me, this hits home. It’s gut-wrenching to see a once great people suffer the way they are today. These are the suburban and rural folks I was born and raised with. Farmers, machinists, factory workers, and craftsmen. They were self-sustaining, independent people. Many of them were Christians whose goodwill was
exploited.
The truth is, we all come from immigrants, and regardless of what the globalists want me to think, the diversity of our melting pot is just one reason I believe America is superior to other cultures.
What’s happening now, however, feels more like the forced displacement of native-born Americans. New immigrants should be wary and remember that when their views are no longer in alignment with the prevailing establishment, they, too, may become “lost in society” even as a new, more malleable population is brought in to replace them.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
