Dear Editor:
The Hoboken City Council voted against the need to improve the existing Housing Authority buildings. Yet it wouldn’t have cost the city anything. Vision 2020 would have created a more mixed income development that looked and blended in to the rest of Hoboken. It would have created a future and opportunity for the children growing up there. Besides the disabled and elderly, a great majority of the current residents of the Housing Authority hold jobs teacher aides in the schools, as crossing guards, other city positions, after school care and daycare workers, visiting homemakers health aides, taxi drivers, hospital workers the list goes on. These are your neighbors. They deserve a decent an affordable place to live in the community they have lived in and worked in and raised children in for several generations.
The citizens of Hoboken should care that this building improvement goes forward because it creates a better future for all of us. Especially the children. Right now these children are living in deteriorated conditions. For instance elevators and heating systems can’t be repaired. The parts no longer exist. These building eventually may need to be torn down if not improved. In the meantime these children need a secure place to grow up and remain in their school and with their friends.
Vision 2020 would go a long way to creating a united Hoboken instead of allowing the different economic levels to keep dividing. These children all play and go to school together. They should feel equal.
Having affordable housing is an issue that affects everyone regardless of whether it affects someone personally or not. Studies show that children living substandard housing or no housing at all…living in with friends and family are less likely to do well in school. Success in education is the foundation needed to prepare the workforce and attract businesses to locate to a community. Lack of dependable affordable housing is associated with increased health care cost, the children are more likely to suffer from asthma, anemia, viral infections and other problems due to living in substandard housing conditions. All this leads to more hospitalization and other health care cost in an already rising national health care crisis.
Families need options in affordable housing. Please say yes to improving and preserving our existing affordable housing. It will cost you nothing but having heart.
I am long time resident and I have worked as a counselor and teacher at The Boys and Girl’s Club for the last 13 years.
Yvette Miles