Dear Editor:
Hoboken is out of control. The city government, planning board and zoning board are legally empowered to stop any detrimental development and to prevent the sacrifice of open air space to out-of-scale construction. So why the hell are we experiencing excessive building that is jeopardizing the residents’ quality of life?
Letters from Daniel Tumpson, Joseph A. Corrado and Michael Lenz observe that life for the average Hoboken resident is being destroyed. The threat of ill-planned development in Hoboken has always existed, but now it has manifested itself in the construction of monolithic structures and is moving at a bulldozing pace. The mantra is: Build! Build! Build! and everyone is getting into the act — from the homeowner converting a basement into an apartment, to castle-sized condos overshadowing a children’s playground in a park, to the obscenity of a parking garage sandwiched between residential buildings to accommodate almost 400 cars!
Developers take advantage of transient Hoboken residents, quickly absorbing their Wall Street money in high rents and parking fees. But building huge residential buildings in a mile square city, creates long term problems with infrastructure, congestion, traffic jams, pollution land noise. We already have more noise than we need with the constant construction, honking cars stuck in traffic, car alarms, blaring sirens and drunken people screaming down the streets. And now we have, on a daily basis, at any hour, the skies being ripped open with screaming propellers of helicopters flying so low that I have actually thought they were going to crash into town.
The suburbs have spawned the urban sprawl which eats up farm land and destroys natural habitats. Hoboken has its own version of sprawl, spreading inward upon itself. It is like a cancer feeding off its host until it destroys the very thing it needs to survive.
Those who govern our city know what is happening but have sold the town to the developers to fill their own coffers. They have ignored the cries of Hoboken’s people to stop the over-development. The desire for the quick dollar has allowed over-sized structures to eliminate our precious living space.
Unless out-of-scale building construction is curbed and no more harmful variances given, the Hoboken we love will forever be ruined. What is lost can never be regained.
Mary Ondrejka