Dear Editor:
I forgive you for calling me “Mike Ellis” in your excellent coverage of last week’s City Council meeting where zoning board appointments became an issue. But I guess all of us white guys living in expensive homes look alike.
The facts are stark and have great bearing on Hoboken’s future.
The zoning board now consists exclusively of white people, almost all of whom live in homes worth more $1 million plus.
This zoning board has voted down every project containing affordable housing that has come before it, including a very attractive one that requested a 50 percent density increase to bring the total number of units to about 48.
At the same time, this zoning board consistently approves density increases of 33 percent on projects composed exclusively of luxury housing. These projects tend to be smaller. But there are hundreds of potential sites – most in the lowest density residential districts.
This raises two questions we should all ponder in this coming election cycle when 6 council seats are up for grabs.
First, what kind of future do we want for Hoboken? Do we want a town consisting ever more exclusively of well-to-do white people like myself – Short-Hills-on-the-Hudson? Or do we want to keep living in a cosmopolitan place where people from all sorts of different backgrounds live together in (relative) harmony – all richer for that experience? I mean, our top universities go out of their way to create similar environments.
I’ve lived about 100 feet away from a large affordable housing site for over 20 years. The worst I can say is that one of its occupants taught my wife how to parallel park. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt our home’s market value.
Second, how is it possible that the City Council cannot find competent, capable people to appoint to municipal boards who are not white folks living in expensive housing?
I think that both of these questions merit reflection and action.
Michael Evers