Newark: Real Estate, Development, News, & Politics

[kevin]

Epidemiologists generally know what causes the epidemic they're studying.

But this seems mysterious.

Must be a force of nature.

The power of the Universe...


Why? Why do young thugs, guns and drugs rule the streets?

Actually, scratch that. Guns and drugs don't rule anything, they're inanimate.

The proper question is: Why do young thugs rule the streets?


Yup, it's a force of Nature alright. Can't do much about that.


An implausible claim. It suggests that for every unemployed person you jail for a crime, there's another to spring into his place:


Put the punks in jail and simultaneously provide jobs. But no one should buy the idea that all unemployed folks are inevitably criminals. That's the Universe speaking again. The Universe doesn't decide anything.

Immediately implementable solution to this problem is a job for the police. Creating the jobs may take a decade. Meantime, there are victims' lives to be saved.

That's a nice bar graph they have. One thing they don't have is a listing of *where* the murders took place. Every time I hear about a murder (or shooting) in Newark, I hop onto google maps and try to pinpoint the location of the murder.

As unscientific as this study is, I've discovered that the bulk of the shootings occur in a triangle between Lincoln Park, Weequahic Park and West Side Park.

That triangle contains the south and west wards of Newark, the two more crime ridden areas of the city, and the area that requires the highest police presence.

That is also the area of the highest poverty rate in the city. More jobs? maybe. More police? Definitely.

But it doesn't paint a picture of Newark as a whole. In the downtown area, the Ironbound, and to a lesser extent, the north ward, the city is quite a safe place. Why? Money, for one reason. But there's also a much higher police presence. One thing Sharpe James cared about was the image of the city. So you had a police kiosk on Market St. You have a temporary police station across from the NJPAC, and plenty of police cars on the day of a game at Eagles and Bears stadium. Where do these police go afterwards?

My guess would be that if you targeted the highest crime areas (that triangle) and stationed an equal amount of police down there as you do in the business district, you'll see a significant decrease in crime.

[JCMAN320]

A polished and wrinkle-free city hall
In Newark, 100-year-old structure's $18M face-lift is finished

Thursday, December 21, 2006
BY KATIE WANG
Star-Ledger Staff

Exactly what did it take to give Newark City Hall its first deep cleansing in 100 years?

Several splashes of lemon juice, a few cans of shaving cream and 250,000 sheets of gold.

It was just what the doctor ordered.

After spending nearly a year concealed under scaffolding and white plastic, Newark City Hall's $18 million face-lift is complete -- in time for its 100th birthday, which passed yesterday. Mayor Cory Booker will rededicate the building at a ceremony today.

The building features restored front steps, energy-saving windows, a dome gilded with fresh gold and a brighter granite exterior. The brass railings and light fixtures on the outside have also been restored.

"City Hall is a national landmark and one of Newark's most prominent buildings, designed by local genius and ingenuity and stands as a testament to the city's history," said Brad Small, a librarian at the Newark Public Library and curator of an exhibit on the building's history. "Now when I pass by City Hall on the way home, it looks fresh, bright and really stands out again."

Giving a building its first makeover in a century was no easy task.

Even though the building's exterior has been cleaned from time to time, it has taken a beating from Mother Nature, Father Time and the pigeons -- the unwelcomed house guests who turned the top of City Hall into their penthouse suite, leaving behind thick piles of droppings.

"The pigeons were all nesting on the building and it was a health nuisance," said John P. Gross of Austin Helle Co. Inc., which was responsible for the restoration.

At least half the building is now draped in a nylon netting that protects it from birds. It is barely visible from the outside.

The most evident difference was also the hardest and most complicated part of the project -- the 60-foot dome.

When construction workers pried open parts of the dome, it created a funnel effect, sucking in the construction dust and odors into the building. They plugged the building's joints and gaps creatively, using tape, plastic and even shaving cream.

"That was probably our biggest headache in the whole project," City Architect Robert Dooley Jr. said.

When it came to refurbishing the dome, one of the gilders borrowed an old trick from her grandmother: lemon juice. The dome is made out of copper, but was gilded with gold in the late 1980s.

Workers from EverGreene Painting Studios Inc. scrubbed the copper dome using jugs of lemon juice to strip off the dirt and oils. After applying primer, two gilders spent five months atop the dome, pressing 250,000 sheets of delicate 23-carat gold leaf around the dome.

Each gold leaf weighs 18 grams and is 3 1/2 inches, approximately the size of a business card and the weight of tissue paper. It took two gilders about four months to complete the dome.

"It's essentially a labor intensive process done the way artisans have been doing it since they've started putting gold on buildings," said Tim Reilly, the supervisor of the dome portion of the project. "It took a lot of time to do."

So did the window replacement, which eventually had to be done in the evening and on the weekends because the noise was distracting employees during the day.

"There was a lot of trial and error, too," Dooley said. "We were replacing work that was done 100 years ago."

The building is one of the oldest City Halls in the state. Hoboken City Hall was built in 1883 and Jersey City's was completed in 1898.

The Newark building was designed in a Beaux Arts style, an ornamental European type of architecture that was popular in the 19th century.

Dooley said the next phase will be the interior of the building, expected to cost about $3 million. Dooley said he would like to replace the three large panes of stained glass inside the building, restore water-damaged plaster and repaint the walls.

Eventually, he hopes to restore the restrooms and remove the safety netting that was placed beneath the dome to catch chunks of falling plaster.

Regina Cummings, 42, of the North Ward said the building looked dramatically better. Cummings was at City Hall yesterday to get a copy of her birth certificate.

"It makes the city look much better," she said. "It used to be dull. It's much brighter."

---------------------------------

Katie Wang may be reached at kwang@starledger.com or (973) 392-1504.

[Dagrecco82]

I passed by it last week and was completely in AWE on how beautiful the restoration looked. I've never seen City Hall look so beautiful.

[Mix106]

Heys!!!

I am worried about security in Newark!!! Should I be afraid of moving to Ironbound, Newark?

Merry Christmas!

[Eugenious]

I passed by it last week and was completely in AWE on how beautiful the restoration looked. I've never seen City Hall look so beautiful.

Original Pic

[macmini]

Boulevard in Newark Runs From Decline to Rebirth


Richard Perry/The New York Times
Krueger-Scott mansion is empty, but new houses are nearby.
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: January 5, 2007

NEWARK, Jan. 2 — Carolyn Whigham stood on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and took in the landscape of tattered brownstones, trash-strewn lots and skinny addicts by the front door of the funeral home that has been in her family for three generations. Then she closed her eyes and a vision of the street in the 1950s took hold, a reverie of mansions, graceful oak trees and the reassuring roar of a bustling industrial city.

“I can see Lawyer Tate, Dr. Shelton, Old Lady Ruffin and all the beautiful buildings,” Mrs. Whigham said, ticking off the people who once filled the granite-and-marble Victorians. “It was a gem. For a black family, it was a dream to be living here.”

In the summer of 1967, the Whighams huddled on their rooftop as rioters burned neighboring buildings; then the Whighams helped bury a dozen victims of the violence. In the decades since, they have witnessed the flight of the professional class and the onslaught of drugs and despair, planning countless funerals for teenagers killed by gunfire and young mothers felled by AIDS.

“To see all that happening to my street, to my city, has been very traumatic,” Mrs. Whigham, 57, said.

But now, across the street from where she grew up, workers are laying sod in front of 100 crisp Georgian-style town houses that replaced a forbidding housing project. A few blocks north, a new dormitory for 800 students is to be finished by fall. To the east, the steel bones of a hockey arena are filling the horizon. Throughout Newark, even on the most ragged blocks, new three-family homes are selling for $400,000.

“This city is coming back,” Mrs. Whigham said. “It’s finally happening, and I believe it’s going to happen in my lifetime.”

After 30 years of decline and a decade of sporadic renewal efforts, the two-mile boulevard through Newark’s Central Ward — known as High Street until 1983 — is showing signs of progress. So is the entire city.
More than 2,500 private homes are being built, Barnes & Noble is looking downtown, and hundreds of suburbanites and New Yorkers are moving into the city’s first luxury high-rise in a generation.

Though these projects began under his predecessor, Sharpe James, Cory A. Booker, Newark’s ambitious young mayor, has revved up the momentum since he took office in July. He has made lofty promises to recast his struggling city as a national model for urban revitalization, and dismantled bureaucratic impediments to development. His administration plans to lift the more stringent zoning rules to encourage downtown residential construction, create building trade apprenticeships for jobless young people and develop a municipal loan pool for minority business owners.

“It feels like all the pieces are finally coming together,” said Dennis M. Bone, president of Verizon New Jersey, one of the few corporations to keep its headquarters here as Newark lost many of its blue-chip employers and almost half its population.

Yet Newark faces steep obstacles to prosperity. Real estate taxes are onerous, the public school system is in shambles and any new businesses Mr. Booker may bring in will find a largely unskilled work force: of those 25 and older, 58 percent lack a high school diploma and 9 percent have a bachelor’s degree, according to the 2000 census.

As it stands, more than three-quarters of the city’s 150,000 jobs are held by out-of-towners. For Mr. Booker, already tarnished in the eyes of some as an outsider for his suburban upbringing and criticized for hiring too many aides from New York, the true challenge will be to spread change beyond a few shiny spots in the business district downtown into the struggling neighborhoods.

“All my life, the politicians have been calling this place the Renaissance City,” complained Latonya Edwards, 28, a part-time security guard who is raising three children in a decrepit apartment building on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. “I think the renaissance is for suburban people who go downtown. If they have their way, people like me would just disappear.”
Even some of Newark’s biggest civic boosters worry about outsize expectations after Mr. Booker’s public pronouncements of the city’s potential. (The mayor, a vegetarian, often talks about luring a Whole Foods market to the city.) And while Newark’s overall crime rate dropped last year, homicides recently reached a 10-year high, hardly helping to improve its reputation.

“The edge is so thin right now,” said Alfred C. Koeppe, president of the Newark Alliance, a consortium of business leaders working to improve the economy and schools. “All it takes is one kid who recently moved here to get shot on the way to the PATH train and it could be all over.”

Still, urban experts say Newark, population 278,000, has an edge over other midsize cities still stumbling from the loss of their manufacturing bedrock. Just 10 miles from Manhattan and surrounded by wealthy suburbs, Newark is blessed with an expanding seaport, an international airport and a skein of highways and commuter rail lines.

Quietly and with little fanfare, high-tech entrepreneurs have set up shop over the past decade at a 60-acre science park that is growing alongside the city’s five colleges and professional schools. In October, the hockey arena is scheduled to join a decade-old performing arts center that has proved successful in drawing visitors to a downtown that otherwise feels like a disused Hollywood set after dusk.

“The one thing that New Jersey lacks is a premier city,” said Thomas K. Wright, executive vice president of the Regional Plan Association, which has helped formulate redevelopment plans for a number of struggling cities in New York’s orbit. “This is Newark’s moment to become that city. It’s going to happen in the next few years. Or it won’t.”

Directing Mr. Booker’s economic development efforts is Stefan Pryor, a friend from Yale Law School who led efforts to revive Lower Manhattan after 9/11. Now, as one of Newark’s three deputy mayors, Mr. Pryor has been hawking Newark to national retailers, streamlining the way City Hall doles out licenses and building permits, and trying to create a new Planning Department to replace a politicized, fragmented one that developers say often stymied projects.

“In the past you had to do back flips and jump through rings of fire,” Mr. Pryor said at a recent Chamber of Commerce breakfast where he gave a presentation of the streamlined permit process. “This is a new era. We’re going to be the new high-integrity folks at City Hall who you can talk to with intelligence.”

Mr. Pryor, 34, recently moved from Manhattan to an Art Deco tower a few blocks off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that has become a highly visible symbol — and test — of Newark’s aspirations. Vacant for 20 years, the building at Raymond Boulevard and Broad Street is being transformed into 317 apartments, and will feature valet parking, a mod bowling alley and a yoga studio. The average rent for a two-bedroom is $2,500; the building is still under renovation, but half the finished apartments have been rented.
A year from now, the landlord, Cogswell Realty Group, plans to break ground nearby on a project that would bring 2,900 units to a stretch of Broad Street now dominated by abandoned department stores. The company sees its markets as college students who currently commute to Newark, young professionals priced out of Manhattan and empty-nesters seeking an urban experience without depleting their savings.

“When we started this 18 months ago, there were plenty of people who thought we wouldn’t sign a single lease or that we wouldn’t get the rents we’re getting,” Arthur Stern, Cogswell’s chief executive, said during a tour of the health club in the Art Deco building. “I think we’ve proven everyone wrong.”

Mr. Pryor was among the first to move in, as much to make a statement about the area’s viability as for the five-minute walk to work. Unpacking boxes in his 15th-floor apartment one recent evening, he gazed out at City Hall’s gold-leaf dome and the fast-rising arena. Then his eye settled on the darkened 19th-century mercantile buildings in the foreground. “I’m hoping we can inject these buildings with some life,” he said.

To that end, Mr. Pryor soon plans to ask the City Council to eliminate stringent zoning rules that have made it difficult to get approval to renovate the upper floors of commercial buildings. Another major goal is revamping the city’s master plan, which has not been updated in 50 years. In a city with no bookstores and just two supermarkets, he spends most of his days on the phone with retailers and restaurateurs, talking up the untapped spending power of Newark residents.

Business leaders and politicians alike say such retail — and residential — development depends in part on the 50,000 students and teachers whose lives revolve around Seton Hall Law School, Rutgers University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Essex County College and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Once largely commuter schools, their academic buildings walled off from the surrounding city, these five institutions have been building furiously, constructing new dormitories that, by the fall semester, will house 4,000 students in and around downtown.

“People don’t think of Newark as a college town, but I think that’s about to change,” said Gene A. Vincenti, executive vice provost at Rutgers-Newark, at the school’s new $50 million administrative building, part of a $210 million capital improvement plan.

Up the hill from Rutgers, in a futuristic, four-story building, a biophysicist was busy working on a new ultraviolet system to treat psoriasis and purify drinking water, while a former telecommunications executive plotted the rollout of software that uses a computer-generated voice to read e-mail messages over the phone. Others in the so-called Newark Innovation Zone were creating facial recognition software for security firms and technologies that can detect biological agents in luggage.

Started 10 years ago, the zone — also known as University Heights Science Park — is one of three technology incubators in the state, with 60 start-ups and scores of lone entrepreneurs who enjoy cheap office space, free business advice and monthly networking lunches. There is a waiting list of several months, so this year organizers plan to build another 100,000-square-foot building, christened the Digital Century Center. A separate stem-cell research center is on the drawing board.

The lofty dream, those running the incubator say, is to turn the surrounding area into a high-tech manufacturing zone that could employ thousands of people. “The idea is to make these things here, and create more than just jobs for a bunch of Ph.D.’s and their secretarial and janitorial support staff,” said Donald H. Sebastian a vice president of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the center’s main sponsor.

But with almost a third of Newark’s residents living in poverty, and the city’s unemployment rate at 10 percent — more than double New York City’s rate and more than double New Jersey’s average — cynicism about such ideas abounds.

Ronnie Addy, who said he never finished high school and spent a year in jail for gun possession more than a decade ago, said he would “love to work in an office” someday, but has more or less given up looking for a job and survives on public assistance. “I can’t make ends meet flipping burgers and making minimum wage,” said Mr. Addy, 44.

An associate professor of management and global business at Rutgers, dt ogilvie, said many of the chronically unemployed here needed the most basic training: how to dress for an interview, how to speak to an employer and how to handle disputes without storming out the door. “We have plenty of willing workers in Newark,” he said; “a lot of them are just not equipped to work.”

Indeed, down at the waterfront, where the business of unloading and loading cargo has doubled in the past decade, producing about 1,000 new jobs a year, nearly 80 percent of the 28,000 stevedore and truck driving positions are held by people who live outside the city. At Newark Liberty International Airport, the airlines hire hundreds of baggage handlers, flight attendants and reservation agents every month; few are from Newark.
Mayor Booker insists that City Hall will not ignore the city’s poorest residents and frequently says he is trying to make the rehabilitation of former offenders like Mr. Addy a top priority.

With 1,500 to 2,000 parolees returning to Newark each year — and 60 percent of them ending up in handcuffs again within three years, according to city officials — the Booker administration plans to unveil a program next month that would provide ex-felons with job training and help them expunge their criminal records.

During a recent City Hall meeting, when Mr. Pryor gushed about a flood of calls from potential investors, his counterpart in charge of minority economic empowerment, Michelle Thomas, flashed an expression of concern.

“I’m worried people in the Central Ward will be upset if we emphasize downtown housing,” Ms. Thomas said of the neighborhood that took the most damage from the 1967 riots. “It’s semantic, but people will care and there’s potential for a backlash.”

Nodding, Mr. Booker said, “We don’t want to gentrify people out of the city,” but he added that “creating a 24/7 community means providing retail and jobs and these will be opportunities for Newark residents.”

From the antiseptic hush of the high-tech park on its northern tip to the Hotel Riviera, where $10 buys a room for an hour, two miles south, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a jagged montage of Newark’s grand history, nightmarish depths and nascent revival.

Not far from the Riviera, and an abandoned housing project occupied by a small army of squatters, sits Hopewell Baptist Church, a 3,000-seat behemoth known to another generation as Temple B’nai Jeshurun. The Rev. Jason C. Guice struggles to keep the rain from destroying Hopewell’s organ and to stop the termites from chewing the cherry-wood pews; last year, the sanctuary’s huge Star of David chandelier shattered on the floor. The congregation runs a soup kitchen that feeds 300 people every Saturday, a nursing school for young women and a day care center for their children.
“We haven’t really arrived yet, but we’re on our way,” Mr. Guice said of both Newark and his church.

Mrs. Whigham, the funeral home owner, left Newark a few years ago for Livingston, an affluent suburb nine miles northwest.

Yes, she said, she has appreciated the tranquillity of sleeping behind windows without bars. But she misses the energy and rich history of her High Street.

“This place is in my blood,” she said.

Mrs. Whigham plans to turn one of the four brownstones her family owns on the boulevard into a mortuary-science school. And, this month, she plans to sell her house in Livingston and move back into the apartment above the funeral home.

[JCMAN320]

Newark can become the premier city for the state, but right now that city is Jersey City. Newark has to not just focus on it's Downtown but its neighborhoods. Thats where JC has Newark beat. We have nicer neighborhoods and only few areas became down trodden compared to Newark. Newark can do it and has the pieces but if they don't do it right now, it will never happen.

[macmini]

Like the article said there is no premier city in NJ right now Jersey City is trying to be but it's not. I think Rem Koolhaas describes Jersey City the best “It is clearly emerging into a new future, though it’s not clear what.” We have a great sky line, but there are parts of Jersey City that are just not cohesive.

Directing Mr. Booker’s economic development efforts is Stefan Pryor, a friend from Yale Law School who led efforts to revive Lower Manhattan after 9/11. Now, as one of Newark’s three deputy mayors, Mr. Pryor has been hawking Newark to national retailers, streamlining the way City Hall doles out licenses and building permits, and trying to create a new Planning Department to replace a politicized, fragmented one that developers say often stymied projects.

To that end, Mr. Pryor soon plans to ask the City Council to eliminate stringent zoning rules that have made it difficult to get approval to renovate the upper floors of commercial buildings. Another major goal is revamping the city’s master plan, which has not been updated in 50 years. In a city with no bookstores and just two supermarkets, he spends most of his days on the phone with retailers and restaurateurs, talking up the untapped spending power of Newark residents.

Mr Pryor is exactly what Jersey City needs to become a premier city. We have a master plane, but we just don't use it. Developers just come in and take control of the city closing down blocks for months at a time.

[macmini]

New look for Newark

Contrarian developer pushes downtown luxury projects




By John Celock
The lounge at Eleven80, a new 35-story rental in Newark.



Cogswell Realty Group is betting big on the notion that if you build it, buyers will come, even if they're coming to the drug- and crime-ridden core of Newark.

Developer Arthur Stern's vision of residential redevelopment for the city's downtown seeks to draw young, hip and value-conscious buyers to the urban core at Eleven80. Cogswell's new 35-story tower sits across the street from Seton Hall University Law School, a block from Gateway Center and Pennsylvania Station.

The luxury apartment tower is scheduled for February completion, after which Stern plans to start work on several new condominium and apartment complexes lining Broad Street across from Military Park. Stern said the end goal is to add 3,000 residential units to downtown Newark, as well as 200,000 square feet of retail space and 2,500 parking spots.

Revival of New Jersey's largest city has been a fond hope for decades, ever since the former manufacturing center was ravaged by riots in the late 1960s, spurring a cycle of economic woe, white flight and urban poverty.

Recent steps to revive Newark include siting the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on the banks of the Passaic River in the late 1990s. Most recently, Newark's downtown will be the location for the National Hockey League's New Jersey Devils when the 2007 season begins, and boosters say a full-scale downtown revitalization is in the works.

Cogswell is one of the believers. The firm purchased the National Newark Building at 744 Broad Street several years ago, did extensive restoration and renovation, and recruited new businesses to fill its space. Tenants include the information management company LexisNexis.

Stern said prospective tenants at Eleven80 are the type of people who are eager to pioneer a residential renaissance.

"There is a segment of the population who is looking for the new hip thing," Stern said of the demographic he is targeting. "They like when the eyebrows go up when they give their address."

After Eleven80 is complete, Stern said the former Hanes Department Store building will be torn down for the next phase of development. The trio of new buildings will look like progressively rising steps in the revived skyline, he said. Stern also said he recruited architects who worked on Manhattan's Bryant Park to redesign Military Park. The entire process is scheduled to be finished in seven years.

Eleven80 first started renting units last summer, but some apartment floors and amenity spaces are unfinished. The project is loaded with amenities, which Stern says helps attract his target demographic of young professionals. The doorman-staffed tower has a bowling alley, billiards room, lounge, massage therapist, health club, Pilates studio and basketball courts. It also offers parking and shuttle service to the train, airport and local universities.

Loading buildings in less-developed areas with lots of amenities to give residents all they need right at their fingertips is a strategy used in recent years in places like the Financial District and Long Island City.

Rents on the one-bedroom units average $1,500 a month, with $2,200 a month for a one-bedroom with den and $2,500 a month for a two-bedroom. Several duplex penthouses with terraces are set to open when the building is completed.

"It's much more value than you'd get elsewhere," Stern said of Eleven80. "When you look at the game plan for the building you have to offer something compelling."

Much of Newark's recent visibility has been generated by new Mayor Cory Booker, who took over in July from Sharpe James, a long-standing incumbent. Since Booker took office, Stern said he has seen more interest from other developers and the state in helping revitalize Newark. Booker has been praised for recruiting Deputy Mayor Stefan Pryor, the former president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, to oversee economic development in the city.

Eleven80's tenants average between 25 and 40 years old, with a few empty nesters. Many are originally from Manhattan and 34 percent are single women. Stern takes pride in the high number of single women in the building, saying they traditionally avoid unsafe neighborhoods.

Stern said he hopes to see more college students and medical residents move into the building. Newark is home to a campus and the law school of Rutgers University, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, along with several hospitals as well as Seton Hall's law school. Estimates suggest 50,000 students and university staff work and study in Newark daily.

Stern noted that his biggest battle has been overcoming negative perceptions of Newark as a center of urban blight and high crime. In addition, many metro-area young professionals view the neighboring Hudson County communities of Hoboken and Jersey City as the Garden State's best areas to live. Jersey City Councilman Steven Fulop, who represents the growing waterfront, touts his city's growth rate and said it's on pace to outgrow Newark by the end of the decade, a notion Stern disputes.

"Newark has reversed its population decline, and I think there will be significant population growth here," Stern said. "What's different to me with Newark and Jersey City is that Newark has long been an established city with a great cultural and higher education system. It's got all the pieces, but it lacks the perception."

[Radiohead]

During a recent City Hall meeting, when Mr. Pryor gushed about a flood of calls from potential investors, his counterpart in charge of minority economic empowerment, Michelle Thomas, flashed an expression of concern.

“I’m worried people in the Central Ward will be upset if we emphasize downtown housing,” Ms. Thomas said of the neighborhood that took the most damage from the 1967 riots. “It’s semantic, but people will care and there’s potential for a backlash.”

Nodding, Mr. Booker said, “We don’t want to gentrify people out of the city,” but he added that “creating a 24/7 community means providing retail and jobs and these will be opportunities for Newark residents.”

Ms. Thomas' comments stuck out to me. It's tantamount to a mother fearing her child will be upset with her for repainting her crayon streaked dining room walls. Does this woman have a clue, and what is she even doing in charge of minority economic empowerment? It seems she prefers the status quo, which clashes with the vision of the mayor, Mr. Pryor and others. If the residents are economically empowered via education and training, then they would be able to afford to live in the "new" Newark. Rather than showing optimism that the investment in Newark could be a boon for the area's residents, she seems more concerned about appeasing the chronically unemployed Ronnie Addy's, who rely on the public dole. Whether she likes it or not, some gentrification is necesssary to save downtown Newark. Unfortunately, that means poor residents will be priced out of some areas. So it is with any urban renewal project. While the city does need to ensure that safe, affordable housing is available as well, it has to welcome potential investors, who have been few and far between over the last 40 years.


Statements like hers remind me why Newark is still the way it is, and why it has the reputation for high crime and urban blight. Fortunately, Mayor Booker seems to "get it". Unlike some, he doesn't want the image of Newark to be this.............

[ablarc]

Ms. Thomas' comments stuck out to me. It's tantamount to a mother fearing her child will be upset with her for repainting her crayon streaked dining room walls. Does this woman have a clue, and what is she even doing in charge of minority economic empowerment? It seems she prefers the status quo, which clashes with the vision of the mayor, Mr. Pryor and others.

She needs to read this article: http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...ad.php?t=11879

[JCMAN320]

Newark creates police foundation to battle crime

3/5/2007, 5:12 p.m. ET
The Associated Press

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Newark Mayor Cory Booker raised $1.25 million in a month from private companies, public agencies and foundations to create a police foundation in another effort to reduce crime in New Jersey's largest city.

Among the first objectives of the Newark Police Foundation are a gun buyback program and police-monitored tip line, called Crime Stoppers and Gun Stoppers. Tips leading to an arrest and/or indictment can result rewards up to $2,000 in cash.

Callers to a toll-free number will be able to anonymously provide information about criminal activity in Newark directly to police.

Police Director Garry F. McCarthy said detectives will answer two tip lines, which will be staffed 24 hours a day and will accept calls in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

The Newark Police Foundation, a fund within the Newark Community Foundation, will support programs that the city cannot finance itself.

Money has come from companies that have strong ties to Newark, including Prudential Financial Inc.; Cogswell Realty Group, a developer with several high-profile projects in Newark, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Arthur Stern, CEO of Cogswell, said the real estate community was appalled to see the condition of some police precincts.

"We have pledged to work with the city," he said, "giving the police the support that they need to make changes."

The foundation will publicize its efforts with donated billboards and will raise money to buy equipment for police officers, including mobile data computers, video cameras, satellite cellular phones and computers to fingerprint arrestees.

___

On the Net:

http://www.crimestoppersnwk.com

http://www.gunstoppersnwk.com

[clubBR]

My father owns a business on Market St. in Newark. I've been there a few times and noticed how thin the commercial strip was. Immediately surrounding this thin commercial sector is vast and dark residential zones. The lights are dim or there are no lights at all. There are police cars on every street corner. The only buildings you see are projects and bodegas. How is Newark going to up these surroundings? The police presence helps but there needs to be some sort of gentrification. Anyone have any ideas of their own?

[Marv95]

My father owns a business on Market St. in Newark. I've been there a few times and noticed how thin the commercial strip was. Immediately surrounding this thin commercial sector is vast and dark residential zones. The lights are dim or there are no lights at all. There are police cars on every street corner. The only buildings you see are projects and bodegas. How is Newark going to up these surroundings? The police presence helps but there needs to be some sort of gentrification. Anyone have any ideas of their own?

Is this near the arena site or is past the UMDNJ area? I think it's up past UMDNJ off Central Ave, since the Georgia King projects and bodegas are there. unfortunately that area will not be "gentrfied" since low-income residents live in that zone.

[investordude]

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey...l=1&thispage=1

I think the city of Newark should favor, rather than resist, airport growth. First, it provides jobs for Newark residents - Newark happens to be an area where flight crews would be reasonably likely to live given its low cost, etc. And this happens to be something someone without that much education can do to get started in life.

Besides, who in their right mind buys a house next to an airport and then sues the airport for being loud?