To curb illegal immigration, South cracks down on housing codes

"It gives the government extraordinary power to interfere with the personal [and] private decisions made by families about how they will function as a unit," said Kent Willis, the ACLU's Virginia director, in an e-mail.

Many critics also cite a 1977 US Supreme Court ruling that municipalities cannot define the boundaries of family when setting housing policy.

In particular, legal advocates, including the ACLU say that the law proposed in Cobb County is more difficult to challenge than the one in Manassas, which strictly defines a family.

Meanwhile, proponents of ordinances argue that laws limiting occupancy are necessary because poor living conditions negatively affect property values and quality of life.

For example, Cobb County recorded more than 60 complaints about crowded houses last year, many from whites complaining about their Hispanic neighbors. The suburban county has seen a six-fold increase in the Hispanic population in the past 10 years. County Chairman Sam Olens has said that homes are in effect being turned into apartment complexes.

"A lot of the issues communities are dealing with as far as limiting immigration, or making it more difficult to live within that area, have to do with how much they can stand as a community and how much they can absorb," says Monica Razavian, a critic of US immigration policy in Manassas.

Many Hispanics say pooling family resources to move into the suburbs is their version of chasing the American dream. It's also often necessary in places like Atlanta and northern Virginia, where property prices are too high for hourly wage laborers, many of whom come into the US with almost nothing.

What's more, a Pew Hispanic Center study on the "New Latino South" found that Latino families, on average, are twice as big as white families.

"Hispanics have very close family ties, with extended families that look after each other," says Gilbert Moreno, director of the Association for the Advancement of Mexican-Americans in Houston, Texas. "They pay bills jointly, they seek housing jointly, they work toward the same goals, which are all attributes that are magnified as you [get farther from] the border area."

But sometimes the struggle can be caustic because of language barriers and social segregation. It was on Alcott Drive, where attempts to discuss Mr. Rodriguez's trash pileup failed because neighbors could not communicate.

At the same time, neighbors have managed to work out other problems among themselves. After complaints that homeowner Raoul Molina, a Mexican expat, was parking cars on his lawn, he widened his driveway. Molina says, "It's not fair to separate the family."

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