A New View of Vacant Houses

Their logic rings hollow to critics of the policy, who say it has also scared away single-family immigrant households who contributed to their neighborhoods.

"The resolution was motivated by people who, as we have said all along, would like to see Prince William County much less diverse," said Nancy Lyall of the advocacy group Mexicans Without Borders. "It's shocking to me and many people that there are people in this community that would rather live next to a vacant house than next to a house with an immigrant family. That is a perfect example of the racism in this county."

Pannell and Kipp, who were strangers a year ago, scoff at the suggestion that they are racists and say most of those who left were not single families. As a light rain fell one spring afternoon, they strolled along Lafayette, smoking cigarettes and collecting the yellowed newspapers that dotted driveways. The women stopped in front of a house with a mailbox shaped like a barn. By Pannell's count (she says she zealously tracks the block's comings and goings), a family with six children and five single men lived there until vanishing nearly two months ago.

Next door was a foreclosed house that Pannell said was filled for a decade with Hispanic men who frequently spent afternoons drinking on the front stoop and in the beds of pickups. She said she witnessed several brawls and saw men urinate in the front yard at least 10 times over the years. The inhabitants disappeared more than three months ago, she said, "and that's a good thing."

Other residents, who are not activists, said they also felt relieved that the worst of street's overcrowding appears to have subsided.

Kipp and Pannell acknowledge that they have no proof that the houses' occupants were illegal immigrants or that the county's resolution drove them away. But as they see it, legal immigrants would not move in and out in the middle of the night and would respect laws, so they would not break zoning regulations prohibiting such things as over-occupancy and blocking driveways. They don't believe that the general mortgage problem is to blame, because if anyone could keep up with a mortgage, the women figure, it would be a house full of people paying a few hundred dollars each.

"I have no doubt in my mind that these houses that are overcrowded are full of illegal aliens," said Kipp, who lives in her childhood home with her husband and four of their five children. "None."

Their neighborhood is a collection of modest houses built from four models (two with a front steps, one with a porch, the other with columns) in one of the region's Zip codes hardest hit by foreclosures. As Pannell and Kipp walked along the street, five houses were in some stage of foreclosure, according to the research firm RealtyTrac.

Kipp and Pannell describe the West Gate of their youth in halcyon terms. Doors were left unlocked, and children played outside until the streetlights dimmed. But they say it was always open-minded . When an influx of Cambodian refugees arrived in the area in the late 1970s, neighborhood organizations held toy and clothing drives, they said. Kipp said her brother's best childhood friends were black. One of Pannell's favorite neighbors was a Guatemalan woman, who moved away two years ago.

"They were welcome and invited," Pannell said of the Cambodians. "That's not what's happening today."

Change came over the past decade, they and other neighbors said. Single families left, and into their homes moved what appeared to be various unrelated Latinos. People came and went at all hours. Trash piled up, and grass went uncut.

Back then, neither Kipp nor Pannell paid any attention to news or politics, they said. They say they figured the new neighbors were illegal immigrants, but they also assumed that police were checking immigration status.