Letters : Bryant-Vanalden Area

I lived for 16 years just two blocks from the Vanalden/Parthenia apartment complex.

While the apartment house owners are being blamed, as well as everyone else except the people that live there, the plain fact is that the area was clean and had very little crime. It was no worse than any other area. Now the illegal aliens have started moving in, and the area is now a trash dump, a high-crime area.

When you have as many as 10 or 12 people in one apartment, many from areas with only rudimentary sanitation facilities, what do you expect? When these people use the yards and buildings as toilets, it does tend to lower the class of the neighborhood.

When you have many people out of work, crime does go up. Many do not speak one word of English and have little skills other than the most basic, no matter how much they want to work.

While everyone is blaming everyone else from the federal level on down, the simple fact is that we can not continue to allow these illegal aliens to come in, in increasing numbers.

When people move into an area where there are many people in one room, most with little knowledge of sanitation, with many unemployed, you will get exactly what you have in the Vanalden/Parthenia apartment area. It did not take that long to convert a reasonably clean, low-crime area into a trash dump and high-crime area.

Don’t the citizens of this country have some right to be protected from this kind of creeping slum? At the rate we are going, the apartment houses in the city, county, state will be one big slum in the not-too-distant future.

The fact is that the illegal aliens are moving into more and more jobs. Look on any construction site, go into these semi-skilled-job factories. The areas where they move soon are blighted. Maybe it is not their fault, but we have to control the influx of illegals into our country, and if we don’t we may have one very large slum for a state.

Blame the slumlords, but these apartments were not always as run-down. The tenants have to accept some of the blame.

WILLIAM F. LANGLEY

Canyon Country