Hackensack, NJ Community Message Boards

I'm astounded at the lack of real issues being discussed in this election. There's been multiple newspaper articles, and I haven't seen a substantive issue being discussed.

Some of the increase might be due to families doubling up in units, but probably less than you think.

I suspect that if someone looked in detail at the enrollments, you'll simply find that more one and two-family homes are occupied by families with children, and less by empty-nesters. The older folks are dying off or retiring out of Hackensack, and houses are selling.  And more families with children are living in apartments because of the housing crisis --- mortgage rules are tougher and people can't qualify for mortgages. Plus rents are way up and salaries aren't, so people can't even afford to save money to buy a house. They are trapped, as I am, renting.

Hackensack doesn't need to build a single unit to hit 50,000 population, because the number of people per unit that had been going down for decades is going to go up. Or it has already gone up.  Watch when the next census comes out, Hackensack will be at 50,000 or very close to it.

ANOTHER MULTI-UNIT FIRE in a wood-fram five-story building, this time in Ocean Grove, just across the pond from the Asbury Park boardwalk. The report says three separate buildings went up, perhaps the wind was a factor ?

http://www.nj.com/monmouth/index.ssf/2017/03/large_fire_burning_at_ocean_grove_condos.html

You know the Hilton's named their daughter, Paris.  So we have Paris Hilton.

Imagine if she was called Hackensack Hilton.  Or even better, there's a Hilton in Newark. They could have named their daughter: Newark Hilton.  That would be one bad-a$$ chick.

ANOTHER huge Avalon complex, under construction, burned to the ground today. This time in Maplewood, NJ.  This whole matter of allowing 5 stories of wood construction above a cement parking garage is very questionable.  What happened to the state legislation to address these fire hazards?

http://abc7ny.com/news/fire-tears-through-apartment-complex-under-construction-in-maplewood/1737455/

This whole issue is completely different from what it was only a few years ago.  And nothing like it was 20 or 30 years ago.

Our whole region is in a catastrophic housing crisis. There is an extreme shortage of decent 3-bedroom apartments, so much so that the cost to rent them in places with no rent control has nearly doubled in the last 10 years.  Income has barely increased in the same time period. Who needs these apartments --- families with children. 

Even if minimum wage were increased to $15 an hour, that's still only about $30,000 a year.  You can't qualify to rent anything with that income. And some people want to keep minimum wage at $8-something. The whole situation is absurd.

There's just a total disconnect. You can survive on public assistance, and you can survive making $75,000 a year.  In the middle, you can't survive.

How is a family of 4 to survive making $45,000.  You can't. It's impossible. Just run a basic household budget, and you'll see that a family of four can't really survive making less than $60,000.  And that's if your situation is PERFECT.  If you have credit card debt, alimony or child support payments, medical debt, you are underwater.

Almost all of our public policy makers are older people who own homes and have good income.  They have no clue what's going on out there, how people are squeezed into oblivion. But when their son or granddaughter decides to move from NJ to flyover country, the realization starts to set in. There's just no future here. Our region is for the rich and it's for the poor. Anyone else is smart to get out.

How much water was on that property during Hurricane Sandy, and how much are they regrading and raising the ground elevation, as part of this project.