On "lost cities" and social contracts
Ahead of just enough of a blue wave hopefully ....
A couple of years ago, I interviewed Dan McNamara for a piece on NJ.com. McNamara is the creator of two comedy pilots that were New York Television Festival finalists along with, the reason I interviewed him, “Lost Cities: Jersey City,” the decidedly adult pilot of a mockumentary series that explored downtrodden cities around the country with improvisational, comedic “facts”; and McNamara sets out with the one he called home for just over a decade.
McNamara moved away from the Jersey City-area because a health condition made him particularly vulnerable during the pandemic, but he was still very fond of Jersey City itself and aware, that in leaving, he was in a position not everyone had the option to do. When it came to new developments in the city, he said (in late 2022):
“When I first moved there … it was affordable and it was great for an artist,” McNamara said. “… That’s not the situation any more … I also see the types of apartments, the types of developments being built in Jersey City, and they’re for New Yorkers. They’re for people who want to live a specific lifestyle that is unaffordable to a lot of people I know. … I don’t know what the future holds for Jersey City, when it comes to those kinds of developments for an everyday regular person who’s grown up in Jersey City.”
Let’s pretend that “specific lifestyle” isn’t just the kind portrayed in ads for luxury housing; it’s just a decent, affordable place to live, with decent being “quality of life” standards solid even by upper-middle class (people making a “luxury”-adjacent income of around $100K). But as McNamara alluded to, if that’s what someone wanted, they’re in a place where economic factors are increasingly stacked against the “everyday regular person who’s grown up in Jersey City.”
And, chief among them, people relegated options-wise to its redlined (or redlined-adjacent) sections — where housing both of the non-affordable and affordable housing variety are being added as with developments all over the city.
Going south from Journal Square via JFK Kennedy Boulevard., once you hit Communipaw Avenue, historically people would more or less say they’re in the Greenville section. Neighborhoods north of the Boulevard, in particular (aka the Hill), are where decades of redlining created a concentrated version of what used to be, in pockets, all over a city marred by disinvestment; and that’s a place with less, or sometimes seemingly no, social contracts in the air. Social contracts are a crucial part of quality of life standards. They are primarily composed of two forces — governmental upholding and citizen upholding. The less of the former one is privy to, the harder the latter. Let’s also point out that some forms of governmental upholding has been supplemented by corporations (who are supposed to be) acting in the government’s stead ever since Reagan’s “trickle down” economics policies including gutting government social programs.
As noise pollution expert Dr. Arline Bronzoft also pointed out to me in a recent interview, Reagan’s administration also defunded federal noise control programs — helping to make for the kind of local (instead of federal) regulation we have today in which protection from noise pollution is largely amassed in higher income areas and often doesn’t “trickle down” to the bottom.
So what’s it like for a regular Jersey City person with longtime roots who relies on either or both the technical and general forms of affordable housing? Maybe this person lives in one of the pockets with more social contracts in the air, but if it’s not such a pocket … and the person is aware of that ….
"Affordable housing devoid of a decent quality of life is of no value,” says longtime Greenville resident Hakim Hasan. “Ironically, even homeowners in Greenville if they find themselves living next door or in close proximity to people who've become too used to the trappings of poverty are wasting their hard-earned money. The question for them -- indeed many of us -- is where do we go in search of peace outside of the 'cities of destruction'?"
From the accelerated white flight of the 1970s to 9/11, Jersey City was written off by much of the state as being something akin to a “city of destruction.” For Hassan, that element is still in play; city-wide, it’s minimized in the face of a “renaissance” narrative of rising tides.
But rising tides do not lift all boats. Sometimes they just leave some people waterlogged with less options.
As is worth asking throughout the country, and indeed the world, what does prosperity mean when it’s in pockets, when it seems to mean less social contracts bolstered for “everyday regular people”?