“We also know without significant resources, there’s the real prospect of homelessness for some of these families.”
(Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service President and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah)
So what did they expect with Biden’s careless and illegal airlift of tens of thousands of needy Afghans!
Homeless in Sacramento, a top Afghan resettlement site! Will they soon be joined by Afghans?
How did they not see this coming?From CNN no less:
Refugee groups race to find housing for 53,000 Afghan evacuees
(CNN)Refugee resettlement agencies*** are racing to find housing for the approximately 53,000 Afghans on military bases in the United States who will eventually be resettled in the country, but the groups are facing a strained — and expensive — housing market.
Every year, refugee agencies find houses or apartments for refugees to live once they’re admitted to the United States. It’s a cumbersome process that often happens months before a refugee arrives. But the frenzied evacuation of Afghans from Afghanistan has turned the process on its head, with agencies trying to find housing for refugees who are already in the US with limited funds.
Cry me a river!
“We’re expected as a resettlement agency to do the work over the next three to four months that we did over four years,” said Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief.
The difficulty is compounded by the fact that refugee agencies were already under strain after years of low admissions under the Trump administration, requiring them to close offices and lay off staff. That meant they also lost some existing relationships with landlords.
The federal government provides a one-time payment of $2,275 for each Afghan an agency serves, of which $1,225 is available for agencies to use for direct assistance like housing and basic necessities, including furniture and silverware. The other bulk of the money is used to cover administrative costs. (Ha! Ha! That means money for the contractors—for salaries, office space, travel and so forth!—ed)
While outside help and donations might add to those funds, rent remains expensive. The national median rent rose to $1,302 in September, up 15% from a year ago, according to a report from Apartment List, a rental listing site.
“The housing crisis is essentially what Americans are experiencing but imagine approaching it when you don’t have a nest egg, you don’t have a safe income yet, you have no landlord references or history,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, a refugee resettlement agency.
So far, few Afghan evacuees have left the eight military installations that are being used to house Afghans while they finish processing, ranging from a couple dozen to a hundred a day, according to an administration official.
“It’s obviously going to need to be thousands of people moving off a week,” a senior administration official told CNN.
“We’re also cognizant of the fact that if we move people off too quickly before we have adequate housing and the other wrap-around services that people need set up that they could end up in a situation where they don’t succeed from the start in their new homes, so we’re trying to get the balance right.”
LOL! I love how the Left always figures out a new way to say something for media consumption.
There is a lot more information in the CNN report, click here.
BTW, they will likely get their federal payola for housing the Afghans, but it will be to the detriment of low income Americans, minorities, the disabled, and young people getting started who will suffer from increased housing costs.
*** Here are the nine federally funded refugee resettlement agencies which have been begging for more clients (refugees) to fill their coffers.
By the way, I don’t know how it is even legal for them to be tasked and paid to resettle parolees—parolees are not legitimate refugees.
Editor: Apologies from me for not being able to keep up with everyone’s requests for information. I am overloaded on all fronts as I try to maintain some balance in my life.
Searching for something? I urge you to use the search window here at RRW, there are literally nearly 10,000 posts archived here.
Some of you have noticed that I have deactivated my Facebook page—yes, I have.
My e-mail boxes are full and overflowing! The very best way to reach me is to send a comment to this post if there is something you want me to see. I do review and moderate comments every day or so, and if you have sent me some information that is off topic, I won’t post it, but will see it.
And, this time rather than the International Rescue Committee getting the blame (as they did in California), it is Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Antonio.
Catholic refugee agency worker:
The charity’s “model of resettlement has not really changed for 20, 30 years. They still basically do what they’re required to do, but they don’t do any more.”
Jose Antonio Fernandez, CEO of Catholic Charities San Antonio says the agency received $7.5 million in 2016 from the federal government to help 1,900 refugees. What! Over $3,900 for every man woman and child!
Sounds like they are taking in more refugees than they can adequately provide for!!!
Not enough decent housing that is also cheap they wail. But, I have noticed over the years that the answer is never that there might be too many refugees entering the US! And, with rich agencies like Catholic Charities, maybe they could pony-up with some of their own private Christian-charity dollars rather than depending on the US taxpayer to supply them with more!
As I reported here, just yesterday, Texas is the number one refugee-welcoming state in the nation right now! Sounds like Texas, and its stable of ‘charities’, are ‘welcoming’ more refugees than they can adequately provide for!!!
It is Saturday and, in recent weeks, I’ve made this my day to try to catch up on your e-mails and take care of other bits of maintenance here at RRW, but when I saw this story from New Jersey I just had to post it! Syrian ‘refugee’ safe in New Jersey had to shell out $200 of his own money to fix the heating in his US government funded apartment. Imagine that!
Syrian temporary ‘refugees’ say their government funded housing is dirty and bug-infested and so they hired a lawyer to fight for their ‘rights’ to better government funded housingin Paterson, NJ.
You will see that the story is about Syrians apparently granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Those would be people who got in to the US on their own somehow and miraculously were able to sign up for TPS.
These are apparently not refugees selected and screened through the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.
(The hot news on TPS at the moment is that Hondurans who have been here ‘temporarily’ for nearly 20 years—TPS is usually for 18 months—have been told they must leave the US in 2020.)
I did know that the usual refugees we fly in get help with housing, but I did not know that TPS recipients get housing help from the US taxpayer too!
More housing issues involving refugees—this time New York—see ourprevious post this morning on Michigan.
I saw this news the other day, but didn’t find time to post it. As I said in my previous post, look for many housing problems especially this year as federal contractors like Journey’s End in this story are desperate to find housing for the 85,000 refugees Obama is bringing to America.
They will argue that they don’t get enough of a federal hand-out to put them in decent housing, but they will never argue that that means the flow has to be slowed or cut off! Just get them in, get their per head payment and move on! That is how they roll!
From WIVB.com: Karen Andolina Scott is the Executive Director of Journey’s End in Buffalo. No comment on ceiling collapse story. http://www.jersbuffalo.org/index.php/news/entries/journeys_end_refugee_services_announces_new_executive_director
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB)- A refugee family living on Buffalo’s West Side is having a difficult first few weeks in the United States. On Sunday night, the ceiling collapsed in the kitchen of their rental home on Grant St.
“It fell on me and my kids we were all inside,” said Roger, who was visiting a family friend that lives in the home.
Roger told News 4 he was taking a call in the kitchen when the collapse happened.
“It’s really discouraging when someone comes here seeking a house and you find yourself in these conditions, this situation,” he said.
His family friend, Ley Baunda, lives in the house with his wife and seven children. They are refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo.***
They told us they blame local resettlement organizations for placing them in an unsafe house.
“I’m afraid because there is many, many things that is not good in the house,” said Baunda.
Baunda’s landlord wouldn’t talk to News 4.
We reached out to resettlement agency Journey’s End who wouldn’t comment on this case.
Continue reading to learn more as Ms. Scott explains the “federal program.”
From our handy list we learn that Journey’s End(a “Christian based” organization) is a subcontractor of both Church World Service and Episcopal Migration Ministries (two of the nine major federal contractors).
See our very large archive on Buffalo by clicking here.
***Just a reminder, on refugees from the DR Congo, we are in the process of bringing in 50,000, see one of many posts, here.
Over the years we have gotten whiffs of ‘strange doings’ going on between landlords and federal refugee resettlement contractors and this story from Battlecreek, MI gives us a tantalizing peek into how the ‘humanitarian’ Lutheran Social Services of Michigan operates. All I know is that, please watch for housing problems in refugee overloaded cities.
You will see refugees placed in slums, apartments with more residents than local zoning allows, conflicts with neighbors, landlords waking up to what they got into and trying now to get out, cozy relations between refugee contractors and certain landlords, competition between American poor and disabled and refugees for limited housing, and the list goes on. In fact, you will see even more competition this year as the contractors are expected to find places for the 85,000 refugees Obama has promised America. Sam Beals is the CEO of Lutheran Social Services Michigan. Since the article never names who the spokesperson is for LSSM in the housing dispute, the next best thing is to identify the head honcho. https://www.lssm.org/lssm/about-us/leadership
Here is the news from WWMT.com. This is the kind of story some local Michigan activist, concerned with too many refugees coming to the state, should dig into. I bet there is a lot more than is being said here! Emphasis below is mine:
BATTLE CREEK, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) – Refugees and community organizers say more than 60 refugee families received notices that their apartment leases would not be renewed.
[….]
“At the time the letter was sent, the apartment complexes had received information which caused the complexes to believe that the families/residents who received the latter had too many residents occupying the apartment units,” wrote Campbell’s lawyer, David Zebell.
The article reports that the landlord changed his mind and refugees can stay, but here is more:
Ginger Dowdle, a Battle Creek community organizer said she first became aware of the notices when an middle-eastern refugee approached her with concerns.
She said Lutheran Social Services of Michigan, which helps organize and place the refugees, did not challenge the notices, but instead, told the refugees about an option to buy homes recently acquired by the landlord of River and River Oaks Apartments. [That is the same landlord with whom they are having problems now.—ed]
“I tried to make them [refugees] aware, that if this is happening to them now and there’s no reason for them to be evicted, I would be very careful getting involved with this land contract for a home,” she said. [By the way, one of the things resettlement contractors brag about is that refugees are buying homes, do they get special government funded deals?—ed]
Dowdle said that a representative from Lutheran Social Services of Michigan indicated that LSS told refugees they would have to move out in one year, something refugees say never happened.
A spokesperson for LSSM defended the organization’s response to the notices.
[….]
As for community organizer Ginger Dowdle, she is in the process of making sure all the refugees know about the reversal in policy, and their rights.
“I feel like this has been going on for quite some time,” she said, expressing disappointment with both apartment management and LSSM.
There is more here.
I wondered if LSSM was running out of housing and thus trying to move some previous ‘clients’ into homes so that they could be sure to have apartments in order to keep the flow of new paying clients coming into the city.
Has anyone asked LSSM for its FY2016 R & P Abstracts? Go to the handy list of resettlement contractor officesaround the country, find the one closest to you and ask for their FY2016 R & P Abstract. The Abstract will tell you how many the refugee contractor thinks they can handle this year (from what countries) and what amenities your town is offering (which might be a surprise to you!).
