When Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop pushed the plunger and demolished three buildings at the Montgomery Gardens Housing project on Aug. 29, hundreds of housing units for the poorest residents in the city turned to rubble.
Although federal housing regulations require the city to replace those units, the city intends to build more upscale housing. Some of it will rent for market rates; other units will be geared to the average salary of residents in Jersey City. Only comparative handful of units will be dedicated to the poor, marking a significant change in role for the Jersey City Housing Authority which in the past focused primarily on housing the impoverished.
Fulop said this approach is designed to create mixed income neighborhoods and do away with the intense concentrations of poverty for which projects like Montgomery Gardens became notorious.
Critics, however, said the real intent is to gentrify the Montgomery Avenue corridor and McGinley Square. They say housing projects do not fit in with the upscale plans the Fulop administration has for the area. The implosion of the projects and new zoning are designed, critics claim, to encourage poor denizens of the area to relocate.
In one of the most crime-ridden parts of the city, the rebuilding of Montgomery Gardens is part of a massive redevelopment of the McGinley Square area, and a step westward in the expansion of redevelopment outside of downtown and the waterfront.
Zoning changes in the area will put pressure on property owners throughout McGinley Square to upgrade what the city considers an area in need of redevelopment. The city recently approved the construction of a 23 story tower at St. Peter’s University on the Square that will form the cornerstone of new development. New staggered-height development in the area will allow property owners to construct similarly high buildings provided they cobble together the necessary sized lots.
“Stevie Wonder can see that this administration is focused on gentrification rooted in the same way boroughs of New York City communities have been gentrified,” Bruce Alston
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Gone forever?
As Fulop pushed the plunger, singling the demolition team to set off charges in three of the six ten-story buildings, the mayor changed the future direction of the city, demolishing poor housing to replace it with homes largely geared to a slightly more affluent population. While most of the residents of the housing project will be relocated though Section 8 vouchers allowing them to rent elsewhere, the imploding buildings marks the end of an era in which the city, using federal and state dollars act as landlord for the poor.
Hundreds of people gathered at various locations to watch the buildings crumble, the first such implosion employed in Jersey City. Residents in the area were asked to keep their windows closed even hours after the implosion brought down the brick towers, turning them into piles of rubble.
A number of people stood stunned at the impact that rocked the ground, and at the aftermath, comparing the ruined landscape to the aftermath of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
The buildings were vacated two years ago when plans moved forward to demolish and rebuild a new development on the footprint of the old site. Although three of the six buildings were demolished on Aug. 29, only one will be retained. Two of the remaining three are also slated for destruction in the future.
The developer is Michael’s Organization, a design and construction conglomerate that won the contract to redevelop Montgomery Gardens. The company will construct a new complex that will replace the 434 apartments with a similar number of mixed income units, most of which, however, will be dedicated to residents with higher income than those who have moved out.
The first phase will construct 121 units, of which only 26 will be dedicated to residents that are considered poor.
Fulop said the redesign will make the area safer, noting that traditional housing projects tended to concentrate crime and pose public safety issues.
The residents of the buildings have since moved on to various other homes, some having been given Section 8 vouchers. Officials said that they can make a request to live in the new homes if they want.
A new community
The $100 million project comes under a Housing and Urban Development program called “Choice Neighborhoods Housing,” and changes the fundamental make up of population at the site. Included in the overall plan for the site are 466 mixed-income units, a large percentage of which will be comprised of senior citizen housing. The project is also expected to include a charter school, pre-kindergarten school, a community building, a supermarket, and some open space.
The three high-rises that have now been destroyed housed 221 units and will be replaced by 126 units – mostly affordable and 10 market-rate – in townhouse-like structures. A fourth building is being renovated and will become 68 units for low-income seniors.
Providing affordable housing in all parts of Jersey City has been one of Fulop’s goals. But “affordable” is not the same as “poor.”
Rents for the affordable housing being built at Montgomery Gardens will be based on an annual salary of $54,000, significantly higher than the income of residents being displaced.
“The premise of that was that regardless of where you live and regardless of your background, every single community in Jersey City should be mixed,” Fulop said, noting also that there should be no difference between market value, affordable and poor housing units in complexes such as the one proposed for Montgomery Gardens.
Standing high above the projects in the observation deck of The Beacon luxury development, an array of public officials sang the praises of the move to rebuild Montgomery Gardens.
Assemblyman Raj Mukherji, who also serves on the Jersey City Housing Authority, praised the Fulop’s approach, calling high rise poverty development of the past “a failed experiment.”
Housing authorities are going broke
Part of the issue is declining federal appropriations to build or even maintain poor housing. The national agenda since welfare reforms made under the Clinton Administration dramatically altered how housing for the poor is arranged. Now the focus is more on a voucher system that allows the federal government to pay a portion of poor people’s rent in privately owned units rather than public housing. Funding for maintenance of existing facilities has gradually been cut, leaving many housing authorities across the nation to find creative ways to raise revenue.
Throughout the nation, housing authorities are largely going broke, unable to maintain existing buildings with those limited funds, and unable to replace them easily. Jersey City replaced several developments in the city using money through Hope VI program – a program that has since been gutted.
The Duncan Avenue housing projects are the most recent funded under Hope VI, but they differ from Montgomery Gardens in that most of the restored units were still available to the city’s poor.
HUD, which oversees housing authorities, has been encouraging authorities like those in Jersey City to find alternative funding to make up for the loss of revenue.
Some cities such as Secaucus, West New York, Hoboken, Passaic and others have been encouraged by HUD to mortgage existing buildings to cover the cost of upgrading them.
But some officials such as Dana Wefer, chairperson of the Hoboken Housing Authority, are wary of this practice, since failure to meet mortgage payments in the future could result in the loss of the units. Tens of thousands of units in former housing projects in the nation have been lost already. Secaucus officials say they are considering the move in the hope that a change of philosophy in Congress might increase funding in the future.
Jersey City appears to have come up with its own formula by allowing its housing authority to collect rents on higher scale units.
The Montgomery Gardens model may become the blueprint for other housing developments throughout the city, and could cause displacement of a number of residents who are priced out of the affordable housing units.
Although Mukherji said residents of Montgomery Gardens were deeply involved in the planning of the reconstruction, as well as design of the new units, there may not be enough low cost units left to accommodate those residents.
Dorothy Carter, president of the Montgomery Gardens Resident Management Corporation, said she was proud of what had been accomplished.
Maria Maio, the director of the Newark Field Office for the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development who formerly served as executive director of the Jersey City Housing Authority, helped launch the redevelopment initiative, claiming that the authority could no longer afford to pay for upkeep on the old buildings.
While most of the guests to witnessed the implosion of the buildings sang Fulop’s praises and supported his vision for redevelopment, critics of the project did speak out elsewhere.
“Stevie Wonder can see that this administration is focused on gentrification rooted in the same way boroughs of New York City communities have been gentrified,” Bruce Alston, a community activist in Jersey City. “Let’s be quite clear the ‘JC Make it Yours Campaign’ was designed to spur interest in the city. More importantly it piqued interest to other areas of the city which still had affordable and low income housing. This city is moving progressively forward in closing the gap between a tale of two cities, by making sure it’s for upper middle class living professionals.”
Al Sullivan may be reached at asullivan@hudsonreporter.com.