An open letter to Mayor Bret Schundler: Since buying my house in the Heights, I have seen the houses and community steadily improve. People are moving in and buying homes, fixing them and having children. We intend to stay here. This kind of internally oriented, conservative, sustainable development needs support from the city; the Redevelopment strategy is not appropriate. I am deeply shocked by the City Council. Not only is this not a blight zone, but the arguably “blighted” area of the Heights that exist is not even addressed by the plan. We have factories and other vacant land that is being developed by the private sector, and very little inventory really exists in the Heights. Reassembling the four blocks between Palisades to Webster, and Griffith to Franklin, as “blighted” land, and offering some grants for facades to avenue homeowners looks to me like a selective use of the statute to benefit specific developers at the expense of the existing community. The plan also includes businesses that are old and successful like Palisade Lumber. Not to mention that the map includes a very large building, the Belvedere, that is simply mismanaged. Mr. DeGise very untactfully states in the Jersey Journal that it contains some drug dealers and “Latin Kings”–in other words, Hispanics. Clearing neighborhoods by ethnicity goes against all lessons learned in urban planning and community development for the past 30 years. Furthermore, all of us in the Heights will automatically be next to a “blight zone.” Our property values will decline. Why should we improve our homes, invest in businesses here, and fight for decent streets? This is radical and inappropriate for the Heights where we can do many things with the assets we now possess, and do not wish to become a “welfare mentality” community–a place that thinks it has to get money for growth overwhelmingly from outside sources in order to prosper. The redevelopment money is not free; our taxes pay for these subsidies to the private sector. Governor Whitman is probably right; the incremental gain will not pay the whole cost. We will pay the debt service and principle on these projects and they will make a one family house unaffordable. We did not vote for this liability . Yet you, Mayor Schundler, are going on to other things and leaving us with the burden. We need a long-range plan for a self-sustaining community. At the very best, this crude map amounts to window dressing Palisades Avenue. Few of these redevelopment projects offer our residents jobs with any future. We need homes for all our peopleCseniors, immigrants, disabled, working people as well as open space and religious space. What does it say about the council and you that our children are housed in trailers, while you allow land to be taken for luxury rentals? Who deserves a park bench with a view more than one of our senior citizens who has scrubbed her floors all her lifetime? In summary I can only say that it is sad and cynical to look at a community and count its assets only in the ratable potential of its land without looking at the associations, individuals, businesses and institutions that make a great community. Officials with maturity would lead in this situation by stepping back and letting the people tell you what they will support. Mary J. Mills