Control gentrification in Jersey City now, community leaders say. Residents are being pushed out of their homes.

(This Op-ed originally appeared on NJ.com on 4/18/19)

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2019/04/control-gentrification-in-jersey-city-now-community-leaders-say-residents-

being-pushed-out-of-their-homes.html

Long-time residents of Jersey City are being pushed out

Updated Apr 18, 3:31 PM; Posted Apr 18, 2:04 PM

By Richard Smith and Christian Estevez

With skyrocketing rents outpacing what most ordinary people can afford, Jersey City should be coming to terms with the fact that its residents are being priced out and forced out.

Developers who are making unfathomable amounts of money building homes for wealthy new residents have no incentive to solve this problem. It is time for Mayor Steven Fulop and the City Council to adopt an effective policy that requires developers to make at least 20 percent of new homes affordable as a way to curb the gentrification that is emptying Jersey City of longtime residents. In the case of city-owned land, or when public subsidies are used, the percent should go above 20 percent.

For decades, our state’s urban cores suffered from disinvestment, while wealthy suburban communities boomed. This disparity, driven by many towns’ exclusionary zoning laws, has helped make New Jersey one of the most racially and economically segregated states in the country.

As New Jersey’s urban communities revitalize, working families and communities of color in places like Jersey City are at the losing end of a real estate market that pursues profits over fairness and high rents over fair rents.

After living in Jersey City through challenging decades of disinvestment, lower-income African American and Latino families are being particularly threatened with displacement as investment floods in.

While we welcome additional investment in New Jersey’s cities, it must not come at the cost of displacement and homelessness. Our elected officials have an obligation to prevent the negative impacts that rapid gentrification has on our state’s most vulnerable communities.

Jersey City’s elected leaders must act – or they risk turning the city into an exclusive enclave of the rich and powerful.

It is irresponsible that Jersey City has added thousands of new apartments in recent years, rewarding developers with lucrative density increases, without putting inclusionary zoning requirements in place to protect lower-income families – as permitted under state law.

Left to their own devices, powerful developers will build housing for people earning over $100,000 annually and call these units “affordable.”

But that is not where the greatest need is.

Jersey City must target new affordable housing requirements to protect families earning as little as $20,000 to $45,000 per year – where the need is greatest.

And officials must prevent new requirements from being undermined by loopholes that would allow developers to wriggle out of their affordable housing requirements.

An effective fair housing policy must focus on housing – not be subverted as a tool to meet other goals while allowing gentrification to take over the city.

Mayor Fulop’s press releases and social media posts in recent years have claimed that his administration is going to address this issue. Most recently, the mayor wrote on social media last November that “Jersey City will be enacting an inclusionary zoning ordinance like many other major cities. … It is very close to becoming reality and will be a huge benefit to keeping Jersey City a special mixed-income community.”

But to date, there has been no real progress. While the mayor’s promises go unmet, developers are making Jersey City a “special” community for New York transplants who think nothing of paying $1 million for a condo – at the expense of the city’s African-American and Latino residents.

Indeed, while Jersey City stands still, other nearby cities have put in place protections for longtime residents and adopted equitable housing policies, including Hoboken, Newark and Union City. These ordinances require homes to be affordable at the lowest possible ranges.

Hoboken is even in the process of strengthening its affordable housing ordinance.

These gentrifying communities have benefited from the leadership of mayors like Dawn Zimmer, Ravinder Bhalla, Ras Baraka, and Brian Stack. Yet in the face of incredible progress, Jersey City, which has the greatest potential and the highest need, lags behind.

The time for Jersey City to adopt an effective housing policy has arrived.

We urge Mayor Fulop and the City Council to do what should have been done long ago: Adopt an inclusionary zoning ordinance that ensures that all residents of Jersey 

City benefit from the private market interest in the city. The ordinance should require all developments to have a minimum of 20 percent affordable housing. No buyouts, no loopholes, and no scams.

We need legislation that forces developers to address the negative consequences of gentrification. And we need it now.

Christian Estevez is president of the Latino Action Network and Richard Smith is president of the NAACP New Jersey State Conference.

Newark Housing Crisis Forum

Families in Newark continue to lose their homes to predatory lending and illegal foreclosures by banks. Meanwhile abandoned homes and vacant buildings created by the foreclosure crisis sit empty waiting for private equity firms from Wall Street to drop into Newark and make a quick profit off from our housing crisis.

Join NJ Communities United and our partners as we discuss Newark’s housing crisis and begin to build a movement to take back our our homes,
our community and #OURNEWARK!


This FREE community event is organized by NJ Communities United with support from Newark NAACP, ACLU New Jersey, New Jersey Community Capital, CWA Local 1037, 1199SEIU and the Latino Action Network.


**Child care will be provided for free


**Beverages & light refreshments


RSVP by contacting Roger at roger@unitednj.org or call 973-623-1828

Debate on immigrant driver’s licenses simmers in N.J.

BY MONSY ALVARADO, 

Staff Writer, The Record

Governor Christie says granting driver’s licenses to immigrants in the country illegally is a homeland-security issue, so he won’t approve it.

Advocates agree on the security point. But they argue that ensuring such drivers are licensed and trained also is a matter of everyday safety to all New Jerseyans. And they are pointing to California — which has extended federally reviewed and approved driving privileges to its residents in the country without permission — as a model for New Jersey.

“This is not just an immigration issue, but a public-safety issue, and this will benefit everyone who is on the road,” said Jackie Zapata, advocacy coordinator for Wind of the Spirit, a non-profit in Morristown and part of a coalition pushing for legislation in New Jersey. “There is a huge need for this, and people are asking, ‘When?’”

A new bill to change the law in the state was introduced this month. But it already has its critics, who say any legislation that extends driving privileges to immigrants who live in the country illegally goes against federal immigration laws and that it will bring its own set of security concerns.

Advocates have been lobbying municipal officials this year. They say the legislation will not only make roads safer, but will require that newly legal drivers be insured. And because driver’s licenses cost $24, they said, the state will collect more revenue through the Motor Vehicle Commission.

The Record found immigrants in the country illegally who said they drive without licenses because they have to, for work and in raising children. But whenever they drive, some said, they fear being stopped.

“Every day, I recommend myself to God,” said Sugey Chavarria of Paterson. “It’s trauma for people to live in the shadows and to drive without a license, but it’s a necessity.”

Christie called driver’s licenses the most important form of identification and said he wouldn’t give them to people “who I cannot be sure who they are.”

“I am not doing it, and I don’t care how much income I lose. Because if I wind up compromising the homeland security of the state of New Jersey for some revenue from MVC through driver’s licenses, I would not be doing my duty,” he said last month on his monthly radio show on 101.5 FM. “As long as I’m governor, folks who are undocumented are not getting driver’s licenses, and I’ve said that from the beginning.”

But Johanna Calle, program coordinator at the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said that under the proposed law, the licenses would be federally approved, and pointed to California’s driver’s license for immigrants in the country illegally, a system approved by the federal Department of Homeland Security.

California licenses bear the words “FEDERAL LIMITS APPLY,” and that is the type of licensing advocates seek for New Jersey, she said.

“Homeland Security gets to vet this, and this is for the purposes to drive,” she said. “Our goal is to change the governor’s mind, absolutely, and get him to approve it. … If he sees the issue for what it is, I don’t see why he wouldn’t support it.”

Trying again

Last year, Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, D-Union, submitted a bill that would have extended driving-privilege cards to immigrants, regardless of their status. Those cards would have been used only for driving, not for purposes like identification.

This month, she filed a new bill changing the driving privilege cards to driver’s licenses. She said she did so after consulting with immigrant advocates in New Jersey and reviewing California’s system. Quijano plans to visit California soon and present findings to Christie’s office and state lawmakers.

“I know there are going to be challenges, and we will address them,” Quijano said. She stressed that the proposed law would require immigrants in the country illegally be “tested, trained, licensed, insured and accountable.”

“Getting unlicensed drivers that are untrained, untested and uninsured off the road is our goal,” she said. “The governor is welcome to his position, which is more political than it is policy-related, but it is up to us to educate the public, who can then persuade the governor to sign this legislation. Our goal is to have safe drivers on the roads of our state.”

But Ron Bass, founder of United Patriots of America in New Jersey, opposes the bill, saying it would violate federal immigration law. He also questioned how state motor vehicle offices would authenticate documents presented by foreign-born persons. People who have entered the country illegally, he said, have not been vetted by authorities.

The MVC staff “may know who you claim to be,” he said, “but your records from your country of origin are not looked into.”

There are more than 500,000 immigrants without legal permission living in New Jersey, and about 464,000 could benefit if driver’s licenses were available to them, according to a report last year by the New Jersey Policy Perspective.

Chavarria, of Paterson, is among them. More than a decade ago, she came from Costa Rica on a tourist visa, which has since expired. For years, she said, she drove with a Texas license but, when it expired a few years ago, she could not renew it. She drives only locally for the most part, she said, tending to her family and sometimes going to Bergen County to clean houses.

The mother of two said having a driver’s license also would provide valid identification. “By not having documents here,” she said, “you get discriminated against.”

Carlos Guaran of North Bergen bicycles each week to Palisades Park, seeking day work in landscaping and construction. Not being able to drive, he said, has limited his prospects, but he fears being stopped on the road by police.

Tomas Sipak, another day laborer seeking work in Palisades Park, said he’s lost opportunities when he’s had to reveal he doesn’t have a license. “A few people said that if I had a license they would get me a permanent job,’’ he said.

Newark OKs ID cards

This year, the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, a statewide coalition, is educating the public about the driver’s license bill. So far, it has gotten six municipalities to pass resolutions supporting the legislation. On Thursday, Newark became the first city in the state to approve giving city-issued identification cards to immigrants in the country illegally, another cause the coalition has advocated.

Those cards can be shown to police in Newark and used to open bank accounts, advocates said. New York City launched its immigrant identification card this year.

“We have been pushing for the identification cards because we need some sort of identification if the licenses are not moving right away, so we are doing both,” said Calle.

A community forum on the licensing issue is set for July 18 at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Paterson.

Ten states and Washington, D.C., allow immigrants who are in the country illegally to drive, with most passing laws in recent years. California and Connecticut began issuing licenses in January, and Maryland, Nevada, Vermont and Colorado implemented programs last year. Alaska, Georgia and Maine allow limited driving privileges to certain immigrants. State lawmakers in Florida, North Carolina, Rhode Island and
Minnesota also have introduced bills.

In November, an Oregon referendum rejected allowing licenses for immigrants in the country illegally.

‘Bring people hope’

President Obama’s executive action aimed at giving temporary protection from deportation to millions of immigrants in the country illegally has stalled in the federal courts. And Zapata, the Wind of the Spirit official, said “something like this, that will involve more people, will bring people hope,” as immigrants await those court decisions.

Obama’s 2012 executive action shielded unauthorized youth and young adults from deportation if they had been brought into the country as children. Ann Morse, program director of the Immigration Policy Project at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said that besides the concern for safety and to get unauthorized immigrant drivers insured, the executive action has spurred a growing number of lawmakers who want to extend driving privileges. The young adults who qualified for the deportation waivers received work permits and Social Security cards, and in many states, including New Jersey, are able to get driver’s licenses.

“That,” Morse said, “gave people a new frame to look at the issue and say, ‘Perhaps we need to see what our legislation, our regulations say and should we be considering the public safety aspects of this as well as the national security aspect of this?’”

State House Correspondent Melissa Hayes contributed to this article. Email: alvarado@northjersey.com

View the original story at:  http://www.northjersey.com/mobile/news/debate-on-immigrant-driver-s-licenses-simmers-in-n-j-1.1341321