The City of New Brunswick, NJ, is considering an ordinance that places a moratorium on bulk trash pickup between May and June. This, of course, just so happens to be when most Rutgers students living off campus move out of their apartments resulting in large levels of bulk items lining city streets. To be sure, it's a massive undertaking for the city to handle bulk pickup this time of year, but as the host of a University whose students call New Brunswick home, it's striking that this law specifically targets students, leaving them, and their landlords, in the lurch.
Why? Because if tenants don't want to risk losing their security deposits due to city fines levied on their landlords, they're going to have to pay to have their trash removed, or take other measures that aren't necessary other times of the year when there would be regular bulk pickup. This makes this measure unfair because it disproportionately affects a specific portion of the city's resident base.
According to a news release from Amy Braunstein, an elected member of the municipal Democratic Party committee, "first-offense fines of $250-$500, plus $100 per item, will be levied on the property owner, but will likely be passed along to tenants by way of deducting it from their security deposits. Third offenses carry a fine of $2,000, and all violations require a court appearance."
Whether this is a necessary measure taken by the city or an unfair "tax" levied on landlords of student rental housing is up for discussion, but at the heart of the issue is another key point that often gets lost. When it comes to the larger problem of off-campus student housing in New Brunswick, where's Rutgers?
Rutgers University is notorious for its hands-off approach to off-campus student rental housing, choosing to let the local housing market dictate demand, quality, and location. This approach is not only unsustainable, but destructive. Slumlords are given the ability to rent out subpar rentals to students willing to live in squalor, and subsequently, many (not all) students respond by treating city neighborhoods much like their landlords do -- that is, with neglect, disrespect, and disregard.
The University has been directly complicit for the city's inability to retain any University-oriented resident base, as well for the squalid conditions in campus-adjacent neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, many of which are historic, are close to downtown, transit, restaurants, and commerce and should be livable. They are not, and the city's seeming indifference, coupled with the University's dispassion, keep these neighborhoods down. The market keeps them populated, but the government and institutions keep them from thriving.
Showing posts with label New Brunswick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Brunswick. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The City Formerly Known As New Brunswick
In my previous post, A Crucial Vote for the Hub City, about the death of Richard B. Sellars, the one-time head of the New Brunswick, NJ-based Johnson & Johnson and a pivotal voice in keeping the corporation's world headquarters in the Hub City at a time of serious urban and economic decay, I looked (albeit superficially) at the effects of J&J's presence there.
I hinted that now, at a time when builders, retailers, and institutions are once again trending toward urban environs, and transit oriented development becoming a mainstream phrase, that it might be feasible to think that New Brunswick would have been just fine -- eventually -- without the unbelievable physical and cultural sacrifices the city made to accommodate these economic drivers like J&J, Robert Wood Johnson hospital, and Rutgers University. Acres upon acres of historic commercial districts were destroyed for suburban-style "campuses," a hotel, high-end residences, etc. In the picture above, is the foundation of the so-called "Gateway," a tower that will house very high end residences that will connect with the New Brunswick train station, as well as a Barnes & Noble. The Gateway comes at the expense of one of the last 19th-century-era commercial stretches in New Brunswick.
I get it. I get ratables and attracting business and deveopment to improve the economy. On the one hand, these days it's hard to argue with developing dense mixed-use, transit-oriented development. But it all comes at the cost of city history -- one that is now barely evident.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
A Crucial Vote for the Hub City
Richard B. Sellars, the former head of Johnson & Johnson died this week at 94. His was a crucial voice in keeping the health care conglomerate in the Hub City, and arguably the reason New Brunswick, NJ is, in fact, known as the "Hub City." Just the second person outside the Johnson family to head J&J, Sellars recognized the company's commitment to its original host city, particularly when company's board of trustees was leaning toward moving the company out of New Brunswick during the city's economic nadir in the 80s; and at a time when businesses and housing were trending toward the suburbs.The New York Times, in its obituary, referenced a 1984 interview with Sellars where he recognized the importance of J&J investing in New Brunswick:
“It was apparent even then that we had a commitment to New Brunswick that we couldn’t run away from,” Mr. Sellars said in a 1984 interview. “The survival of our country depends on the survival of its cities, so we’d all better get involved in cleaning them up.”
Of course, anyone familiar with New Brunswick knows the value of Johnson & Johnson's presence, but also the significant sacrifices the city made at a time when there was little political pressure to preserve the city's historical layout and buildings, as indicated in the picture above. There, the signature IM Pei building in the background and the fallowed land in the foreground that is now home to the Hyatt New Brunswick, were once major commercial districts. The sprawl development that resulted was heralded as urban reinvestment, but it would have looked the same in suburbia. The J&J campus and the Hyatt are colossal wastes of urban land.
These days, there are several major economic drivers in New Brunswick that remain committed to the city, but there continues to be little regard to the city's historic character -- character that was, in part, established by the institutions that remain.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
In New Jersey’s Hub City, A Push to Change Government Gets Big Government Resistance
Editor's note: This piece was originally posted by the author at the blog site, www.rooflines.org
__
In the 1970s, New Brunswick, NJ was struggling.
Like other New Jersey cities experiencing the hangover of race riots of the 1960s, the schools were in decline, white flight began to set in, and all of a sudden, the Hub City, as it’s called, that was home to the world headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers University was in serious trouble.
But there had always been hope. In the summer of 1967, as peace was shattered throughout cities in the Garden State, New Brunswick held fast, no blood was shed, and the peace was preserved. Then-mayor Patricia Sheehan, a 33-year-old widow and mother of three actually went out on patrol with the police, appeared with local clergy, and made it known—in person—that whatever happened in New Brunswick, her incumbency, part of a so-called “New Five” ousting 27 years of a previous administration, would watch over the city.
That resilience and sense of hope was instilled in the residents, and in 1975, New Brunswick Tomorrow, a partnership of public and private sectors, was organized. The following year, The New Brunswick Development Corporation, a private, non-profit organization designed to serve as New Brunswick Tomorrow’s implementation partner for economic development (and is still the city’s ostensible redevelopment arm), was created, and a city was on the move again.
Johnson & Johnson announced it would stay in New Brunswick in 1978, housing its headquarters in an I.M. Pei-designed campus, near the Rutgers University campus in a run down segment of the downtown.
While it can be argued that, once upon a time, concerned residents needed needed bold, do-it-itself government initiative to revive the city, the residents, as is the case in any locality, have always been the lifeblood, though city government did not always reflect that. There had already been a problem with the extreme transience of this community of 50,000 residents, whose tens of thousands of students passed through with few staying to raise their families in the city, and the changing immigrant population—for example, a once Hungarian neighborhood is now a vibrant Hispanic area—is changing the face of the city.
New Brunswick, being in the geographic center of the state, was, for a long time, at the center of New Jersey’s infamous corrupt Democratic Machine. Mayor John Lynch, who served as mayor from 1979 to 1991 and is the immediate predecessor of the current Mayor James Cahill, is currently serving a three-year jail term immediately preceding the current mayor.
To be sure, not all are corrupt, but there are so many tributaries that link New Brunswick government to the larger state Democratic Machine (the municipal attorney, William Hamilton, a junior grade Navy lieutenant before receiving his JD from Georgetown in the early sixties, and an overall decent man, was briefly the Speaker of the State Assembly in the 1970s) that it could take up an entirely separate article.
But back to Mayor Sheehan, who marched with police under the threat of race riots in the 1960s. Her daughter, Elizabeth “Betsy” Sheehan Garlatti, is currently the New Brunswick City Council president. Garlatti, the director of Finance & Research at the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, was appointed—as is often the case in machine politics—to a vacant city council seat in 2004 and has since won reelection by way of the 3,000 or so party insiders and municipal employees who actually vote in New Brunswick.
Because the Democratic Party has effectively shut out the primary process, various residents have run hopeful campaigns on an independent ticket, but have always failed miserably. Forget about Republicans. They hardly exist here.
One way Council has been able to hold power is by way of the at-large Council system that was established in the 1970s. New Brunswick is divided into wards, but none has direct ward representation.
This is nothing new, of course, in so many local governments, but a recent grass-roots push to change that government structure has begun to garner some attention.
A group, Empower Our Neighborhoods, last month filed a petition with the city clerk’s office to advocate for a ballot question that would change the current form of municipal government from an at-large system to a ward-based system, as well as increasing the number of seats on Council from five to eight.
But as is the case in cities where government is threatened, on July 2, the New Brunswick City Council passed a counteracting ordinance to push the citizens’ initiative off the ballot, and replacing it with a Council-crafted initiative that calls for creating a study that would examine the need to change government.
Knowing that they have at least 3,000 votes, and that Rutgers University students rarely vote, Council would entertain this question, it would fail, and Council could claim that it reached out to the community, and the community decided that it did not want to change government.
A legal battle could ensue that would determine whether the community or the City Council had first initiated a legal proceeding on that ballot question, but experts at Rutgers’ Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy appear to think Empower Our Neighborhoods is in the right.
Attending a New Brunswick City Council meeting is interesting. Based on what you’ve just read, you might think this is a contemptuous lot, but it’s not. They are good people who will speak to you after meetings, but seem averse to criticism, particularly when they stock Council chambers with municipal employees to attend the public meetings. At least two are dual office holders (Council Vice President Joseph V. Egan is a long-time state Assemblyman and Blanquita Valenti serves on the county governing body), and one, the aforementioned Garlatti, has bloodlines in city government.
All but one were born and raised in New Brunswick, and the one that wasn’t—Valenti—came to New Brunswick in 1956 from Puerto Rico and in 1971 became the first Hispanic appointed to the New Brunswick Board of Education.
These are community folks, no doubt about it, and their commitment to the city was never in doubt (though there are plenty of people who make strong cases to the contrary). This is not evil empire stuff: it’s simply a case of a city government that has apparently lost its way, forgetting about the fundamentals that make a city tick, like when Garlatti, and incumbents Jimmie Cook and Robert Recine cited scheduling conflicts for not being able to participate in a pre-primary forum co-sponsored by Empower Our Neighborhoods and the local NAACP chapter. New Brunswick has undergone an unbelievable downtown renaissance in the past 10 years, with an arts, culture, and culinary scene that is unparalleled in the state, but the schools still suffer (it’s an Abbott district), the residential neighborhoods near town are largely unsuitable for quiet, secure family living because of the rampant off-campus student housing situation. Absentee landlords let their properties deteriorate, broken glass, drug dealing, and homeless in neighborhood parks is the norm. Again, not surprising for so many cities, as isn’t the government’s resistance to this grass-roots effort, if not frustrating—but that doesn’t make it acceptable. If the folks at Empower win this battle, it would go to show that a once-impenetrable system can be changed, and that, just like Mayor Sheehan displayed during her courageous outreach efforts in the 1960s, residents are indeed the lifeblood of any locality.
__
In the 1970s, New Brunswick, NJ was struggling.
Like other New Jersey cities experiencing the hangover of race riots of the 1960s, the schools were in decline, white flight began to set in, and all of a sudden, the Hub City, as it’s called, that was home to the world headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers University was in serious trouble.
But there had always been hope. In the summer of 1967, as peace was shattered throughout cities in the Garden State, New Brunswick held fast, no blood was shed, and the peace was preserved. Then-mayor Patricia Sheehan, a 33-year-old widow and mother of three actually went out on patrol with the police, appeared with local clergy, and made it known—in person—that whatever happened in New Brunswick, her incumbency, part of a so-called “New Five” ousting 27 years of a previous administration, would watch over the city.
That resilience and sense of hope was instilled in the residents, and in 1975, New Brunswick Tomorrow, a partnership of public and private sectors, was organized. The following year, The New Brunswick Development Corporation, a private, non-profit organization designed to serve as New Brunswick Tomorrow’s implementation partner for economic development (and is still the city’s ostensible redevelopment arm), was created, and a city was on the move again.
Johnson & Johnson announced it would stay in New Brunswick in 1978, housing its headquarters in an I.M. Pei-designed campus, near the Rutgers University campus in a run down segment of the downtown.
While it can be argued that, once upon a time, concerned residents needed needed bold, do-it-itself government initiative to revive the city, the residents, as is the case in any locality, have always been the lifeblood, though city government did not always reflect that. There had already been a problem with the extreme transience of this community of 50,000 residents, whose tens of thousands of students passed through with few staying to raise their families in the city, and the changing immigrant population—for example, a once Hungarian neighborhood is now a vibrant Hispanic area—is changing the face of the city.
New Brunswick, being in the geographic center of the state, was, for a long time, at the center of New Jersey’s infamous corrupt Democratic Machine. Mayor John Lynch, who served as mayor from 1979 to 1991 and is the immediate predecessor of the current Mayor James Cahill, is currently serving a three-year jail term immediately preceding the current mayor.
To be sure, not all are corrupt, but there are so many tributaries that link New Brunswick government to the larger state Democratic Machine (the municipal attorney, William Hamilton, a junior grade Navy lieutenant before receiving his JD from Georgetown in the early sixties, and an overall decent man, was briefly the Speaker of the State Assembly in the 1970s) that it could take up an entirely separate article.
But back to Mayor Sheehan, who marched with police under the threat of race riots in the 1960s. Her daughter, Elizabeth “Betsy” Sheehan Garlatti, is currently the New Brunswick City Council president. Garlatti, the director of Finance & Research at the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, was appointed—as is often the case in machine politics—to a vacant city council seat in 2004 and has since won reelection by way of the 3,000 or so party insiders and municipal employees who actually vote in New Brunswick.
Because the Democratic Party has effectively shut out the primary process, various residents have run hopeful campaigns on an independent ticket, but have always failed miserably. Forget about Republicans. They hardly exist here.
One way Council has been able to hold power is by way of the at-large Council system that was established in the 1970s. New Brunswick is divided into wards, but none has direct ward representation.
This is nothing new, of course, in so many local governments, but a recent grass-roots push to change that government structure has begun to garner some attention.
A group, Empower Our Neighborhoods, last month filed a petition with the city clerk’s office to advocate for a ballot question that would change the current form of municipal government from an at-large system to a ward-based system, as well as increasing the number of seats on Council from five to eight.
But as is the case in cities where government is threatened, on July 2, the New Brunswick City Council passed a counteracting ordinance to push the citizens’ initiative off the ballot, and replacing it with a Council-crafted initiative that calls for creating a study that would examine the need to change government.
Knowing that they have at least 3,000 votes, and that Rutgers University students rarely vote, Council would entertain this question, it would fail, and Council could claim that it reached out to the community, and the community decided that it did not want to change government.
A legal battle could ensue that would determine whether the community or the City Council had first initiated a legal proceeding on that ballot question, but experts at Rutgers’ Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy appear to think Empower Our Neighborhoods is in the right.
Attending a New Brunswick City Council meeting is interesting. Based on what you’ve just read, you might think this is a contemptuous lot, but it’s not. They are good people who will speak to you after meetings, but seem averse to criticism, particularly when they stock Council chambers with municipal employees to attend the public meetings. At least two are dual office holders (Council Vice President Joseph V. Egan is a long-time state Assemblyman and Blanquita Valenti serves on the county governing body), and one, the aforementioned Garlatti, has bloodlines in city government.
All but one were born and raised in New Brunswick, and the one that wasn’t—Valenti—came to New Brunswick in 1956 from Puerto Rico and in 1971 became the first Hispanic appointed to the New Brunswick Board of Education.
These are community folks, no doubt about it, and their commitment to the city was never in doubt (though there are plenty of people who make strong cases to the contrary). This is not evil empire stuff: it’s simply a case of a city government that has apparently lost its way, forgetting about the fundamentals that make a city tick, like when Garlatti, and incumbents Jimmie Cook and Robert Recine cited scheduling conflicts for not being able to participate in a pre-primary forum co-sponsored by Empower Our Neighborhoods and the local NAACP chapter. New Brunswick has undergone an unbelievable downtown renaissance in the past 10 years, with an arts, culture, and culinary scene that is unparalleled in the state, but the schools still suffer (it’s an Abbott district), the residential neighborhoods near town are largely unsuitable for quiet, secure family living because of the rampant off-campus student housing situation. Absentee landlords let their properties deteriorate, broken glass, drug dealing, and homeless in neighborhood parks is the norm. Again, not surprising for so many cities, as isn’t the government’s resistance to this grass-roots effort, if not frustrating—but that doesn’t make it acceptable. If the folks at Empower win this battle, it would go to show that a once-impenetrable system can be changed, and that, just like Mayor Sheehan displayed during her courageous outreach efforts in the 1960s, residents are indeed the lifeblood of any locality.
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