Linden Street Construction

[Homer Jones]

To each his own.

[Edwin]

To each his own.

Figured someone would say that, problem is if one person's "own" is deliberately enforced on an entire area. So far all we've got in the tri-state area is super-gentrification. I remember once seeing some woman in Harlem or somewhere screaming that her low-income neighborhood was being kicked out, now I understand her frustration.

Part of the problem isn't just with the approvals for building, but also taxes and regulations making lower-income/smaller housing less profitable than it naturally would be.

Luckily, ultimately we have COAH in this state.

[just watching]

It's hard to make the case that Hackensack is "gentrified", since the value of a house in Hackensack is so much lower than the identical house in Fair Lawn, Paramus, Oradell, or Westwood.  Even Maywood.  It used to be that a single family house in Hackensack was about 80% of the price of the same house in northern Bergen County, and now it is less than half. And so much more really upscale housing has been built in the northern towns that Summit Ave is no longer one of the best streets in the entire County.  I remember when Summit Ave was better than ANY street in all of Paramus.

 Also, nobody can realistically complain about gentrification in Hackensack because the school system went from integrated to almost entirely minority.  Granted, most of that happened 1985 - 1995, but it still happened.  The income level of students' families has also gone down, as have the performance on standardized test scores.

The battle is not gentrification versus affordable housing, the battle is to keep or make neighborhoods and the downtown attractive to the mainstream population, meaning everyone of all backgrounds.  Otherwise, we slip back and become another Paterson.

If people want to complain about gentrification, those complaints may have some validity in Edgewater, Hoboken, West New York, downtown Jersey City, South Orange, and Maplewood.  But not in Hackensack.

[Edwin]

oh, of course not Hackensack, I was talking about the area in general, and it seems to be starting in Hackensack with the Avalon and 29 Linden St. Maybe Hackensack is so middle-class is why I like it so much. All the Hispanic people make for awesome little Hispanic-carribean comfort food restaurants, and the town is still actually walkable (not that the more hoighty-toighty developed places aren't walkable, but Hackensack's old development is even denser than the new planned mixed use stuff)

I'm just worried that our self-appointed overlords want to make EVERY town a yuppy hangout with a minimum of 2 Starbucks'. I don't want that, I can go somewhere else for that (like Edgewater, Hoboken, etc.)

[just watching]

Actually there's no part of Hackensack that's gone down more than the Anderson retail district and the apartments around the fountain. You'd have to have a 40-year perspective on Hackensack to understand.  Those were once THE premiere rental buildings in the entire City if not the entire County, and they remained very much middle class into the 1970's. What happened is that they became absolete compared to newer rental buildings on Prospect Ave, and in other towns. 

And the quality of stores along Anderson Street catered to seniors and other collectors of historic furniture.  People came from all around NJ and NYC just to visit the antique shops.  At one point, there were 17 of them.

[Editor]

Related topic: 1990 Record article about Anderson St.

[just watching]

Thanks for the historical context. Very appropriate.

A couple years ago, the city designated most or all of the Anderson retail district an area in need of redevelopment.

Don't remember if it was the Zisa's or the Melfi group.  That was when the city also designated the lower blocks of Main Street, and then all the law offices down there went biserk at city hall.  I told the council that lower Main Street would be a very very difficult target because of the law firms, and they found out the hard way.

Don't know why the city has kind of backed off on the Anderson Village area.  I can imagine some awesome mixed use buildings there, right next to the train station, with retail on ground floor and higher-end apartments up top.  You know, people who will actually USE the train, as opposed to the current residents of the older buildings in the area.