Dear Editor:
Up at Stevens, they showed the movie “Delivered Vacant.” I saw some people in the audience that I am sure felt vindicated in their actions, as redress for how others suffered in the past, and they missed the true lesson of history. Hoboken was DYING!
You take away the shipping, Holland – America Line, then the Shipyard, Maxwell House, Colgate, and any number of middle class jobs, and Hoboken dies. The middle class left un-noticed and un-mourned. Government did nothing to keep the middle class heart of the city pumping. Yes, the remnants of the middle class and the poor got to live in cheap housing as it degenerated into a slum, and ruin. Homeowners watched as their capital starved property slowly lost its value. People died in agony!
The City did not buy these buildings and maintain them for the residents. No one did anything to prevent the decay, or to moderate what they knew was coming. It’s not like it has never happened before. Just as someone on Wall Street takes the opportunity to buy low and sell high, without any qualm, Developers came in.
Just as we have seen greedy Bankers and Wall Street use the rules of Capitalism to devastate people with the “Greed is Good” attitude that they still embrace even after the people have bailed them out, there are Developers that leave a trail of misery in their wake.
There are landlords who are heartless. Yet we also saw an activist betray her fellows for a sweetheart deal of her own, and act bewildered that she had become persona non grata. We saw the people embrace Socialism when it meant taking from someone else. We saw their happiness at becoming property owners, after having gone tooth and nail against property owners. Many of the people in that film are long gone, replaced by a new wave of Immigrants, and the City is saved. I grew up here so I know.
I dearly miss some of our architecture gone into dumpsters, but not how bad our waterfront was. I miss the German butcher shops, and have no use for Sushi. I miss much that was, yet take joy in new stuff we never had here. Hoboken, however, is still alive because private enterprise invested here. That’s the American way! It is also the American way to moderate the greed of Capitalism, and the greed of Socialism, and bring Justice to all parties.
Now we have laws for the tenants that allow for extortion: the practice of obtaining something, esp. money, through force or threats. They wield the tenant laws to hurt property owners just as surely as it had worked the other way. We should take a lesson from history that the oppressed will become oppressors if they get the chance. The wronged will wrong in turn if you do not moderate them as well.
We need to revisit the laws and strike a better balance, one that allows a City, and it’s people to thrive, to maintain our free will, and to cherish that opportunity for advancement that we so cherish as Americans, without preying upon each other. We must allow the City to renew itself without plunging into crisis, just as we allow our government to renew itself without Civil War. As the filmmaker said, she had a hard time finishing the movie because the story continues. The filming is done, but it isn’t over yet. The balance is not yet struck.
Friedrich Haas