Simon Phoenix explains the "Jersey City Curse"
By D. Menzies
It was from “Simon Phoenix” that I first heard the term “the Jersey City Curse.”
Phoenix is a local counselor with roots in the city. He coined the term after seeing again and again how Jersey City’s most challenging areas affected the people who called it home.
“Just in growing up and seeing so many of our youth who had so much potential but felt like they just couldn't get away,” Phoenix said. “I realize even it more as an adult now along with working in the school system … that it has a lot to do with family structure.”
“Family structure” is simply (or not so simply) having order and a sense of reliable safety in a world that can otherwise be chaotic; and in Phoenix’s opinion, it’s particularly uncommon in disinvested communities.
“I've seen local people who reached academic and collegiate heights. But when they left, they found themselves wanting to be back to the only world they know,” he said. “This was their first experience outside of Jersey City. Sometimes you take that person and put them in another another atmosphere … they really don't know how to really conform or to act, and they only go to the one thing that they know, and in doing that, they lose everything and are back where they’re at. It’s just one of those things just sad to see that happens all the time.”
It’s in ways that aren’t as prosaic as any notion of one particular group's challenges, Phoenix said. For the last few decades, much of Jersey City’s infrastructure, its public schools, its disenfranchised neighborhoods, have had such low standards that it affects the sense of normalcy for those therein beyond that infrastructure, Phoenix said.
Despite the ever-increasing gravity of NYC-centric money, Jersey City still has at least some of its own unique qualities. But it also has some its always shared with neighboring NYC before it was “on the map.”
It speaks to the poor state of mass transit in the country as a whole, but Jersey City has one of the United States’ best mass transit systems, meaning as in NYC, driving hasn’t been as necessary within it as other places in the country. Particularly for those residents who aren’t privileged, getting used to the way to the rest of the country works may not be a smooth transition.
“Quality of life matters. It can literally change the way you think and move.”
But Phoenix considers that a trifle compared to the larger implications of growing to actually like the most toxic elements of Jersey City’s disenfranchised areas.
These are, along with the mere appearance suggesting those elements, what had “fairweather” state and NYC residents write the city off from the ’80s, pretty much until the 2000s when its downtown section firmly became a Manhattan bedroom community and, perhaps more often for state residents at least, Chilltown became considered something of an alternative to NYC.
But meanwhile in the inner city, “I've seen people move from one neighborhood to another neighborhood, and because they're so used to the loud atmosphere/volume, they don't know how to to to actually enjoy peace,” Phoenix said. “Like, that's what (those sides of) Jersey City breeds in you, doesn’t it? It probably takes you a long time (to acclimate to something better), but some people can't even function, so they move back. They moved to somewhere where there’s some action, and I just think that's ludicrous.
“You want to be able to move yourself or your family or your loved ones to a better situation to give them a better situation. But if you’re just so trapped in this toxicity that you want to stay … you don’t even know how to move, that's insane.”
That’s one aspect of “the Jersey City Curse,” and it’s one that extends far beyond its or even the country’s borders.
The other is being a longtime resident beyond ten or 20 years (spans of time considered a longtime by newer residents) and not being able to get out of the neighborhood with challenges they persevered through. As other neighborhoods like the Heights, Journal Square, the edge of Bergen Lafayette, and West Side see an influx of newcomers looking for affordable alternatives to what downtown represented, the cost of living in what’s left, the historically disinvested area known as The Hill, has risen alongside NYC-centric housing model prices with minimal additions of: local job opportunities for its residents, quality of life improvements, or recreational facilities.
“Why is that when I drive down Martin Luther King Drive it still feels like it’s 1993?” Phoenix said.
Jersey City is touted for its diversity, Phoenix said, but these days “we’re segregated economically more than anything. The haves and the have-nots.
“Quality of life matters,” he said. “It can literally change the way you think and move.”
Phoenix says all of this as someone who loves Jersey City. There’s something much less cold in some of the people who made it through its impoverished areas he hasn’t found much of in modern-day downtown, he said — that’s what the city needs to build on, he believes — and within those historically redlined areas as they related to the rest of the city, “no one felt like they were (that much) richer than anybody else.”
“I always say you can tell who’s from Jersey City when the holidays come around. Any major holiday, it’s never so easy to get parking downtown. These are people who aren’t invested in being here.”
Phoenix is for new residents, he said, but he’s a bit more for it not to be so hard to be a lifelong or “double-longtime” resident in certain zip codes … and for those zip codes to not so easily malform these people and lessen their chances in life altogether. All of its pressure can produce gems, Phoenix believes, but it shouldn’t come at such a high price.
So inroads to a Jersey City that builds on its unsung strengths, rather than something like an “NYC Slim,”* with a shiny new “Pompidou Slim,”* is where he wants to see the city head, he said.
*Slims are Sony videogame system consoles that try to reproduce the original console’s model in a more compact form.