As Newark, NJ embarks on ambitious redevelopment schemes, some are expressing concern that the projects will cater to wealthy newcomers while excluding longtime residents. How did civic leaders strike out? Read on…
As Newark Rises, Could Black Residents Be Pushed Out?
With another development planned at the site of a baseball stadium, local officials are trying to achieve revitalization without gentrification.
By Rebecca Liebson, New York Times
Nov. 29, 2019
Excerpts:
In the summer of 1999, a new minor league baseball stadium opened in Newark, attracting more than 6,000 spectators, including the mayor, to the first game.
The publicly financed ballpark, which offered sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, cost $34 million and was one of the most expensive minor league ballparks ever built. Elected leaders said the stadium would help reverse the declining fortunes of a city struggling with poverty and crime. One official declared that it would “send a loud signal that Newark is back in business.”
The idea of using a stadium as a tool for revitalization was part of a national trend. In New Jersey, seven minor league baseball stadiums were built between 1994 and 2001. But as many sports economists have shown, building flashy new stadiums rarely translates into economic gains for taxpayers.
Twenty years later, the stadium has been reduced to a pile of rubble. Taking its place is yet another project supporters say will bring an economic windfall: a sprawling development featuring hundreds of apartments, stores, office space and a hotel.
Equity Group, a New York-based developer, bought the property for $23.5 million. Lotus, which also purchased an adjacent property where a seedy motel once stood, plans to turn the 12 acres of vacant space into a development called Riverfront Square.
The project, which is estimated to cost around $1.7 billion, will include 2,000 residential units and developers said they believed the building would appeal to professionals from New York.
Still, some people expressed concern that the project would cater to wealthy newcomers while excluding longtime residents. Some activists worry that a building boom downtown could radiate out into more residential neighborhoods and push up housing costs.
With the city’s star on the rise, local officials find themselves at a crossroads: They must manage the development Newark has long needed while avoiding the kind of gentrification that could push out its poorer and largely African-American residents.
Skyrocketing rents in major metropolises across the country have forced people to abandon places like San Francisco and New York City in favor of smaller nearby cities like Oakland and Hoboken, N.J. But now even those places are becoming unaffordable. As a result, developers are taking a greater interest in Newark, a 20-minute train ride from Manhattan.
In the past three years, at least four multimillion-dollar developments have brought luxury apartments, charter schools, office spaces and the city’s first Whole Foods market to Newark.
Activists wonder how well the city will be able to resist market forces.
Rebecca Liebson is a reporter for “The Weekly” and the Metro desk, and part of the 2019 New York Times Fellowship class. @rebeccaliebson
Comment:
Indeed, market forces are nigh impossible to overcome, and the results are always slanted to favor the accumulation of wealth and profit. As Matt Hern poses in his book: What a City is For, we need to consider the city as a pivot point for resisting displacement and dispossession. That demands hopeful imagination and productive creativity. The most promising possibility for a better future is to remove urban land from the speculative market. Without limits on speculation there can be no affordable housing.
So, what is the most imaginative extra-market solution for Newark? Community land trusts! Limited equity schemes separate the two components of real estate: land and buildings. One party (the steward) buys and holds the land; the other party (the occupant) purchases the building. The steward is a nonprofit community corporation, committed to acquiring multiple parcels of land throughout a geographic area with the intention of retaining perpetual ownership. The occupants may sell their units on the market, but with resale caps. Thus, long-term affordability is locked in; there is no chance of flipping property and capturing windfalls from rising land prices.
Now why didn’t Newark city officials use that $34 million to finance a community land trust to purchase acres of low valued land, protecting it from speculation and displacement, instead of squandering the money on a baseball stadium? It’s not too late to capture some of those rising land values through a land value tax and use the proceeds to do what it could have done twenty years ago – had the city leaders had hopeful imagination.
