Dear Editor: Not to start an argument with Mr. Faria, but some thoughts have been prompted by his letter. Saying that Hoboken had 70,000 residents in 1910, as opposed to its present 40,000, is supposed to mean what? That with our present abilities to build higher and move traffic, that we should be able to expand beyond 70K with ease, or to help us imagine what a crowded rat-hole it must have been with 70K souls overflowing four story tenements onto streets smelling of horses and their droppings? I don’t know what to make of that factoid. I do know what to make of that I wanted to pick up my mother-in-law from Jersey City on Friday, to take her to dinner in Hoboken. It was 25 minutes from 2nd and Hudson to the Holland Tunnel exit, and the mood was such that she almost got a call to forget about it. Arrival at the restaurant took nearly two hours, and we had to enter Hoboken from the viaduct to get back to 5th Street. She stayed over that night, as no one wanted to go near the car. This is “quality-of-life” as it hits us. Don’t tell me that our community sorely needs vital human resources of culture and skills! If you haven’t found it in the first 40K residents, what’s going to make the next 30K so golden? Which one of them will pick up my mother-in-law? The current residents, who apparently are not deserving of loyalty, feel that something is being stolen from them that the new residents will never have experienced, and therefore won’t miss. Perhaps the theory is that as older residents are alienated, they will be out-voted by new residents, who are grateful for having been allowed to move here. Therefore 40,001 new residents must be shoehorned in as soon as possible! I don’t know, but to even have such an idea is a bad sign. By the time I was old enough to see Hoboken, there were plenty of eyesores to look upon. It was like the lumps of coal that I dug up in the backyard. We’ve been growing a diamond, but now this crystal is growing so fast that it’s cracking. Can’t we just slow down? Fritz Haas