My son and I were amazed at the smoke billowing throughout the apartment buildings across from my condo. The fire trucks blocked the streets coming in and out and the firemen were rushing in to carry out their rescue.

Fellow neighbors poured out to observe the exercise, even bringing out lawn chairs and eating sandwiches as we watched the firefighters as they mounted ladders to climb in the buildings through windows and breaking down doors to defeat the flames inside.

We pointed out hotspots and lifted our kids high so they could see the inevitable destruction. Gone was the final bastion of affordable housing in that portion of our town.

You see, these apartments had been targeted by several local jurisdictions to be used as a training exercise. The apartments were to be demolished and new, luxury garage townhomes were to go up in its place as well as through the woods (which would be ripped down) adjacent to the recently abandoned apartments.

What was now becoming a charred skeletal structure used to be the home to scores of working Hispanic families. These were the guys that got roused up in the morning about 5 a.m. with a honking horn from their foreman, driving into the parking lot with the work truck. They would drag themselves out of bed and hop in the back with their coolers, waving bye to their wives as they headed toward another day of construction or road work or lawn maintenance.

Then the notice came in. “Your apartment has been sold, you must leave in 60 days.” Or something like that. I’m sure there was no invitation to tour another set of homes that could house their families for the same monthly payment.

My question has always been – where did they go? What houses could they afford in one of the most affluent counties in the United States – Fairfax County, Virginia – where the average price of a house is $301,000 and the median household income is $80,000-plus. These few dozen of older row houses were one of the last places where a family could live without having to share the two- and three-bedroom dwelling with another family.

More than likely, they moved far away. Maybe two counties over. The nearest county was making sure they couldn’t afford to live in their midst either, with new land-use legislation, requiring 5 to 20-acre lots per house. (Thus preserving the county only for the rich.) So now these workmen will have to get up even earlier to catch the car pool to get to their jobs to go and take care of building, cleaning and maintaining houses and structures for those who can afford to live where they work.

This is how, at best, suburban sprawl and, at worst, homelessness, is created.

Did you know that of the 36.4 million homeless people in the U.S., nearly a fifth of them are employed (according to the National Coalition for the Homeless and the U.S. Conference of Mayors). They are working people like the Hispanic laborers described above who were forced out of their houses.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Think about that for a moment. Have you ever needed to use a chain to pull something from the ground? If one link is weaker than the rest – it won’t work. You’re stuck with an old tree trunk in your backyard because of one link – not the whole chain – but one link that was too weak for the load.

But in our society, too many times the weakest links are ridiculed, despised and put out. We want our yard work done, but we don’t want to pay more than 8-bucks per hour to have it done and don’t care where those workers have to come from to do it. Then at the end of the day as they set out on their 40- or 50-mile commute, we wonder why traffic is so thick.

We must preserve more housing for those who don’t hold the white collar or unionized jobs, otherwise our chain gets weak and could break. While that seems to be a concept beyond our society’s grasp, fortunately we have many private and government-backed organizations which are stepping up to help those who are on the brink of homelessness.

Below is a list of several of these organizations.

Published: May 3, 2002

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Mr. Carr is an award-winning real estate broker in Northern Virginia and authored "Real Estate Investing Made Simple: a commonsense approach to building wealth." He also contributed to Donald Trump’s book, "The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received," and is an active trainer and coach of top producers in the Washington DC market. As a sought-after expert on real estate, Mr. Carr has been featured on CNN, various broadcast outlets and was the former real estate editor for The Washington Times. He accepts questions at his blog www.RealEstateOlogy.org.