The bottom of an air shaft in a West New York, New Jersey apartment building became a 31-foot deep tomb for one baby and nearly a death sentence for a second. Last week the sounds of a newborn crying echoed throughout the West New York apartment building until residents called 911 to get help in discovering the source of the muffled cries.
I am slowly realizing my current hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey is quickly becoming Murder City, USA. Yesterday, I discovered the going street price of a life in Jersey City is $6.66 as the murdered bodies of a woman and her two children — a boy aged six and a girl aged 13 — were found stabbed to death in a Greenville apartment. They died Monday.
I have been called a Pasty White Boy from Nebraska (my skin is so pale my friends tease me I actually look green) more often than I like and ever since I moved to the East Coast I have become, against my will, a Personal Information Servant.
Yesterday I was out for my daily walk along Palisade Avenue in Jersey City when I heard sounds 50 yards ahead of me I had never experienced before: Tires screeching on asphalt; a thump; crushing metal. Ahead of me people leapt out of their cars and from their porches. A cop on his lunch hour bolted from his parked cruiser with a sandwich still in his hand.
Over the last 12 months there have been seven murders within a one block radius of where I live in the Jersey City Heights neighborhood. These killings, I have discovered, are an unfortunate part of the fabric of living in Jersey City.
The incredible shrinking Newark urban core is disappointing, fascinating and understandable from an economic opportunity point-of-view.
On May 1, 2005, the New York Times reported the following:
“Shereef Cheatham, a single mother of four, had been waiting five years for a rent assistance voucher when the Newark Housing Authority diverted $3.9 million in federal funds from the program in 2003 to pay for property near a proposed hockey arena downtown. She is still waiting.
Millions of dollars have been diverted from providing affordable housing for the urban poor in favor of building self-interests in the inner city. The New York Times continues to unveil the Newark disgrace:
More than 21,000 people were on the waiting list for the vouchers when the housing authority used the $3.9 million, a small portion of the total budgeted, to buy 12 privately owned lots. The purchase came after a lawsuit thwarted the city’s plan to seize them through condemnation. Those lots were crucial to building the arena, which was at the time intended to be the home for both the New Jersey Devils hockey team and the New Jersey Nets basketball team. The arena, now for the Devils alone, is scheduled to open in 2007.”
The beat goes on but someone is needed to end the beating of the poor in the urban core.
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