Dear Editor:
Parking will soon take a back seat to an even more pressing problem in Hoboken: soon the development will exceed the capacity of our existing sewage and water infrastructure.
A recent New York Times article revealed a Federal study drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency that is warning that annual spending to maintain and expand water and sewage systems is inadequate to keep up with the population growth in urban areas across the United States. These invisible aging infrastructures of urbanized America threaten to hinder their economies because eventual capital improvement costs for cleaning up water for public health will become necessary as water and sewage treatment capacity falls short. Cracked and leaking pipes, which waste up to 20% of the water supply, have outlived their original design life and will need to be replaced. This only exacerbates water shortages in droughts like the one the East Coast is currently experiencing.
These ancient city supply systems will put a burden upon residents whose local fees account for about 85% of spending on society’s circulatory system. The rest comes from federal loans and grants, but since this aid has been sparse for years, local water and sewer rates will continue to rise.
As an observer of most planning and zoning board meetings, I am aware of the latest development projects that are moving Hoboken toward becoming a very densely populated urban area. Currently, some of the largest developments to date are awaiting zoning approval but hundreds of units have already been approved and many more have been built and awaiting occupancy. Many of these units each have their own dishwasher, washing machine, and multiple bathrooms. With the exception of the future Shop-Rite, the development of choice is luxury housing in the Northwest Re-Development Area, where a maximum height of fourteen stories is allowed. In the southern end of town, the foundations for a project with two 17 story towers, which was given zoning board approval in 1998, is currently being built at 101 Marshall. This is in an area that rests below sea level so the North Hudson Sewerage Authority denied the project a sewer hook-up permit in March. (Why such a large development project is approved before they are allowed the sewer hook-up, I have no idea.) But the developer feels he can overturn that decision by building up the land and road around it.
All these new projects are connecting into the existing sewage system’s main pipes and are putting an incredible stress upon these antiquated structures, some of which date back to the 1800’s. No one can say for sure what long-term needs for wastewater and water systems will be since very little hard data exists to assess the viability of the underground pipes. In fact, the lifetime of identical sections of iron pipe can be 20 years or 100 years depending upon conditions of the soil and the use of the land above. With a vast maze of buried water and waste pipelines nationwide, future water problems are brewing.
While the population growth in cities like Hoboken is quite visible, the impact of increased usage on the sewage and water systems typically remains invisible to the residents until they fail. Inevitably, we will have to address new health and pollution problems from flooding due to inadequate sewage lines because our urban growth has outpaced planning.
Mary Ondrejka
April 15, 2002