Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

We can be offended by the expenditure of federal funds to build developments such as this. Personally, I believe that if public funds are to be used for purposes such as this, they should be state and local funds, not those from the federal government.

But with regard to the allegations contained in the video--a little bit of research shows them to be incorrect and intentionally misleading.

• The development was not built for immigrants. In fact, the 2000 census of this development shows the percentage of foreign-born residents as only 22%. There are no statistics that I could find which supported the allegation from the video that the development was "... built for illegal immigrants..."

• The video alleges that the development was funded from the Social Security budget. That's incorrect. It was funded with a federal block grant from a HUD program called Hope VI. That program was passed by Congress in 1998 to re-build the worst public housing developments in the U.S. Most of the $6 billion distributed to re-build over 100 such communities was done between 2000 and 2008. President Bush called for the abolishment of the program, but all that happened was that Congress reduced program funding somewhat.

You can reach whichever conclusion you wish on the expenditure of federal funds for purposes such as this, but we should at least be careful in accepting all that we see on the internet describing this stuff. The producers of the video obviously wanted to elicit a strong partisan response. But in this case the information they provided appears to be quite incorrect.