The cost of illegal housing to the taxpayers is in the million. Many of the homes being used as multi-family residences are single family houses being used as 2 or 3 family or 2 family houses being used as 3 or 4 family houses. These owners are paying very little in property taxes and school taxes, however, they have multiple families with many children in the school system. They reap the benefit of large rent rolls and the rest of the tax payers gets stuck paying their bills. Some of these houses pay as little as 2500.00 a year in taxes yet have 3 families with 9 kids in the school system at a cost of over 100k a year. It’s a tough situation to remedy because some of the city hall bigs own some of these properties. An easy start would be to cross reference the property records with school records. It should take a matter of minutes in a database query. If you have a 2 family house that has 4 families using that address in the school system = RED FLAG. a single family with 2 or 3 families using it as an address in the school system = RED FLAG. It’s a start.
2 thoughts on “Illegal Housing – cross reference Property info with school records.”
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Great but…
…as we have documented many times, the school district WANTS as many kids as possible in the public school because more kids means the need for more jobs for more union employees and bigger budgets which means more money sloshing around which means more money going in lots of different directions. Keep in mind that the Board members are tools for the teachers union (they finance their campaigns), the board picks the administrators (so they are also tools of the unions). The district is run by and for the benefit of the union. And the union wants more kids, more public money, more union jobs. Of course, they will ALL strenuously deny this but facts are stubborn things.
Before you worry about overcrowding in single family homes, consider this…
The district has many more kids in our schools who do not live in New Rochelle. For many months the BoE and administration denied there any wrongly-enrolled students in New Rochelle schools. Over the summer, the BoE put out a report that about 50 “wrongly-enrolled” students a year were removed from the schools (and another 50 denied entry). In the Bizarro-World of the BoE this was taken as evidence that they were effective in keeping non-residents out of the schools. See how that works? After denying claims by residents, school board candidates and Talk of the Sound that there were any wrongly-enrolled students in our schools they issue a report that confirms that they knew of 100 such students and they claim that as a “victory”?
If this is their attitude toward students from Mount Vernon, the Bronx and elsewhere attending school in New Rochelle then you can imagine they have zero interest in dealing with kids who do live in New Rochelle but live in illegal dwellings.
In the examples you describe, those kids who do live within New Rochelle are, by law, entitled to attend school in New Rochelle public schools. By law it does not matter if the parents are in the country illegally or whether there dwelling is a legal dwelling.
Final thought.
People are constantly telling me about these illegal dwellings but the claims are non-specific so they take on the aura of urban myths.
If you or anyone else really wants to see change in this regard, there is a simple, definite answer. Identify a specific address. Go to the City web site and look up that property. Identify the owner. Then provide specific information about the occupants. As long as you are on public property (street, sidewalk, etc.) and you do not zoom into the windows, you are perfectly entitled to shoot video or still photos of people coming and going from the address.
It is not necessary to find every single case of wrongly-enrolled students or people living in illegal dwellings. It is enough to take it one case at a time. Rest assured, the word will get around that if you own a property used as an illegal dwelling or have a wrongly-enrolled child in the New Rochelle schools you run the risk of finding yourself splashed across the web courtesy of Talk of the Sound. For some that alone will be a deterrent. It also allows residents to ask elected officials what they are doing about each case as it comes up.
The simplest, most direct method is to identify specific properties by address, do the lookup on the City’s Property Portal and identify the owners of these properties on Talk of the Sound.
It should be clear by now that New Rochelle residents cannot rely on the City government to clean up these problems because City officials and their cronies are the problem. There are laws like FOIL and tools like this web site that citizens can use to take back their City, If every person who outraged by these steady streams of stories of abuse and corruption were to pick just a one dwelling as their contribution to the effort we could quickly identify the culprits.
As Justice Brandeis famously said “Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant”. In today’s society that sunlight comes in the form of the Internet. We do not need City officials or law enforcement or the local newspapers to pull up the records from the City web site and publish them names of the owners of illegal dwellings. We just need the will to do it.
Unfortunately, not all
Unfortunately, not all information in the City’s Property portal is correct. I checked my address and found they have the wrong school district listed. The same goes for my neighbor. I wonder what else is wrong. I sent them an email about the error. Lets see how long it takes to fix.