I’ve been at this blog for a few months now. I’ve been to meetings and community events, and I’ve met a lot of people active in local affairs, if not to have a one-on-one conversations, at least to recognize them when I see them out and about.
I think that we’re at a very important turning point, much like the country, and, in fact, much like the whole world. I think many of those worldwide and national issues are confronting us locally, on a local-sized scale.
Here’s my first crack at a list of the Top 10 Issues North Plainfield Needs to Seriously and Carefully Grapple With. For the time being, I’m leaving out medical care and education. I think those two issues are large and complex enough to form the other two legs of a three-legged stool, with the municipal issues outlined below as the third leg. As always, it’s a work-in-progress. UPDATE: A Courier-News article on some of these issues is here.
1) PRIORITIES – There are many, many dedicated, well-meaning individuals working to sustain the good things about North Plainfield and work toward solutions to the problems we have. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be coordinating their efforts with each other. Government officials, religious leaders, civic groups, neighborhood groups and many other “loners” are all pulling in different directions. To some extent, this is a natural function of human behavior. Everyone has unique personalities, experiences, ideas and goals. Nonetheless, it’s possible to set up communicative settings in which all of those ideas are heard, analyzed, sifted and organized into a plan with broad support. Our town doesn’t do this kind of meaningful, interactive, public priority-setting, and it shows in our haphazard law-making, law-enforcement, real estate development and other forms of (theoretical) self-governance. We should.
2) RACE and CLASS RELATIONS – We have an official population of about 21,000 people, about 7,000 families, including about 8,000 registered voters. We have an unofficial, possibly undocumented immigrant population, but little idea of how many people actually fall into this category; some people estimate it as high as 10,000 to 15,000 people. Of the documented residents, about half are Spanish-speaking people hailing from many, many Central and South American countries. A quarter are African-American and another quarter are European-American/Caucasian people, with smaller percentages of people of Asian, Middle Eastern and other cultural backgrounds. Although many of these families interact a great deal through our schoolchildren, there is a huge undercurrent of cultural animosity. I think many of the Spanish-speakers feel rejected and resented by the white and black communities, and many of the white and black residents reject and resent the presence of the Spanish-speaking people, regardless of their documented status. As in many racially diverse communities in America, almost every family has strong personal ties to individuals and families of different cultural backgrounds than their own. But when matters become more general, many of us fall into traps of talking about the behavior and attitudes of “those people.”
From my perspective, we’re all in more or less the same set of boats on the Bay of North Plainfield. Regardless of race - and most often regardless of how hard they work - those with lower incomes have leakier boats – it’s a brutal struggle to afford food and housing. Those with higher incomes have a little more day-to-day security, but heavier property tax burdens. Regardless of how the national immigration debate plays out, our immigrant neighbors work hard in and around our town. If they’re renters, they pay rent, supporting the property tax base even if their landlords permit overcrowding. They buy food and other necessities, they pay for medical care and participate in school activities. To create a community where we all want to live, with decent housing, jobs, schools, health care, recreational and social opportunities for everybody, we’re going to have to find ways to get beyond the generalities and work together. Blaming and scapegoating are not going to help.
3) ECOLOGICAL PRESERVATION – We have a good shade tree canopy, but it is being destroyed, quickly, by unchecked logging on residential, commercial and public land. As energy resources around the world and around the country become more scarce and more expensive – due to the intertwined factors of declining/unstable oil supplies, increased competition from developing economies, and tighter environmental regulation – the health and sustainability of our local ecosystems will become increasingly valuable both for cooling by shade in the hot summer months, and for growing more of our own food locally. If we wait to develop and enforce sustainable development policies, if we let the trees and the topsoil be taken away by thoughtless developers and homeowners – both local folks and outside corporations - we will not be able to replace them within our lifetimes, even the lifetimes of those of us who are relatively young.
4) GENERATIONAL RELATIONS – We have an aging population, as does America as a whole. We have plenty of children in town also, giving our town a vibrant energy and stake in the future missing in many declining post-manufacturing towns, and a definite stake in funding education. We have a lot of Boomers on the verge of retirement, and a lot of active retirees. It’s probably true that many of these longtime North Plainfield residents want to “age in place,” but given the high cost of housing and the high taxes, I’m skeptical about the feasibility. Then we have the generation in the middle, raising children and preparing to take more responsibility for the wellbeing of elders. Nationally and locally, the stage is set for an increasingly bitter generational fight over public resources. Who should get subsidies? Elderly people who have put in a lifetime of hard work to earn a peaceful retirement? Or young families trying to raise children with fewer social supports and an economic climate in which two incomes are essential to maintain the standard of living one decent income could buy 30 years ago? To defuse the battle here, we need to look at what each group will need in the coming decades, and work out feasible ways to provide for those necessities, through shared facilitise and services whenever possible. We’ll also need to distinguish between needs and luxuries, leaving the luxuries for richer towns to pursue.
5) OVERCROWDING/AFFORDABLE HOUSING – North Plainfield is the most densely populated of the 21 municipalities in Somerset County, and Somerset County is one of the three wealthiest counties in New Jersey. But overcrowding here is not just about the many low-income residents crammed into boarding houses by unscrupulous and unchecked absentee landlords. It’s also about having houses built on almost every available patch of grass, and permits in the works to put houses or apartments on the few remaining parcels of green space. There are at least two reasons for these two forms of overcrowding: the naked greed of the land owners, land developers and boarding house landlords, who want to maximize their profits by investing little and charging much, and the naked greed inherent in the New Jersey housing market as a whole, which creates incentives for bankers, real estate agents, attorneys, developers, economists and landowners to inflate the value of New Jersey homes far beyond the reach of wage-earning workers.
There are sensible ways to deal with overcrowding. Sensible solutions here will probably require several points of attack. We’ll need to reverse the redistribution of wealth flow from its current poor-to-rich and put a complete halt to development that tears up intact parcels of forested and open land. We’ll need to find or create pools of subsidy money to renovate the existing housing stock into decent-sized, rent-stabilized apartments, and either set maximum rents at 25-30% of family income, regardless of income, or subsidize the difference between 25-30% of family income and the market rate rents; in either case, the main incentive for overcrowding (spreading the exorbitant cost of housing among more wage-earners) will be eliminated.
The renovations will probably have to include some renovations to create apartments within large structures like Villa Maria and historic industrial buildings downtown, and some renovations of large single-family homes that are too large for small families, couples or individuals to adequately use, which will help homeowners afford their mortgage and tax payments. Another possibility is to encourage and create formal structures for house-sharing arrangements, in which young families share homes with elderly homeowners, exchanging reduced rent for household maintenance work, and enabling both parties’ housing dollars to stretch farther. Such renovations and home-sharing characterize economic hard times throughout human history, and I think it would be good for North Plainfield to recognize that we’re in such a period, so we can plan and create a smoother transition, less likely to create overcrowding and further ecological damage.
6) PUBLIC FINANCES - Property taxes are a huge problem here, but not only for North Plainfield. New Jersey suffers as a whole, and I’ve been doing some research to find out what factors play a role in that. Within Somerset County, we have one of the highest aggregate tax rates – for a full list of the 21 municipalities and their tax rates, click here.
I’ll be the first person to admit that I don’t fully understand how tax formulas are developed, and a quick look at the chart shows a whole host of sub-taxes that go into our total tax rate: county tax, county library tax, municipal tax, regular and district school taxes, county and municipal open space taxes. Even more complicated, of course, is the question: “What do those taxes buy for the taxpayers?” Are North Plainfield taxpayers (and renters, through rent) getting the public services we pay for? A couple things about that chart stand out. One, it looks as though towns with large immigrant populations, like North Plainfield, Bound Brook, South Bound Brook and Somerville, pay disproportionately higher taxes in both the county column and the municipal column. The wealthier communities pay less. It’s possible that wealthy communities pay less because their residents need fewer services and programs from their local and county government. It’s also possible that lower-income towns are subsidizing the services and programs used by wealthier towns – another redistribution of wealth in the wrong direction.
Throughout history, low-status groups that pay to support the more opulent lifestyles of high-status groups have tended to eventually get tired of it and revolt. Such a scenario is part of our founding American story – “no taxation without representation” and so forth. One possible response for low-income people subsidizing the priorities of high-income people is to withhold taxes in acts of tax resistance. Locally, that could play out either by the town withholding contributions to the county, and using that money to develop self-supporting affordable housing, open space and tax abatement programs in North Plainfield, or it could involve local homeowners withholding their quarterly property tax payments to the town assessors. The money could even be placed in escrow pending some meaningful sign that the county is ready to support solutions to North Plainfield’s problems, or that North Plainfield’s governing officials are ready to support solutions to the problems faced by residents here.
7) HISTORIC PRESERVATION – This town has an unbelievably rich stock of wonderful historic buildings, both homes and commercial buildings. Some of them are beautifully preserved, well-kept and proudly displayed. But many of our historic buildings are falling apart and are so covered by later, modern renovations and signs that they’re barely recognizable. I’m not an expert in historic preservation, and I realize that it can be expensive, especially if the renovation team scours the marketplace for exact period pieces and materials to replace worn or broken features. On the other hand, I know it’s possible to create sensible historic preservation policies that permit homeowners and business owners to make gradual, affordable changes, using cheaper but visually “close enough” materials, to create, over the next three to five years, a sense of local history that hangs together from one neighborhood to the next and finds its focus in the commercial district along Somerset Street. 
COMMERCE – Much as I harp on community, I think commerce is the lifeblood of community. Humans are transactional, sociable animals, and over hundreds of years , we’ve developed very effective ways to share knowledge, skills and products with each other. Ideally, we divide up labor by both interest and ability. At our worst, we divide labor by status designations unrelated to how interested or capable people happen to be. But all humans do work that is vital to community functioning , and all humans living in communities need public places and common currency (local or national) to exchange their labor and thereby sustain themselves and their families.
Somerset Street and Watchung Avenue are the main commercial districts for North Plainfield, and they are another underappreciated asset. There are many, many towns, some quite nearby, that have no clearly defined, public commercial district. Everyone in those towns must get into a car and drive to a privately-owned shopping center somewhere to go to work or buy needed goods and services. Similarly, our businesses on Route 22 generally require a car to get to: it can be terrifying to try to walk to them, particularly with children. At the same time, there are also many larger cities that have so many different commercial districts that it becomes difficult to identify and cultivate the assets of each one.
Here, we know exactly what we have to work with, how to conduct inventories of available goods and services, how to figure out which goods and services people want but can’t find, and how to encourage local entrepreneurs to step in and fill those needs, create jobs and stimulate pedestrian activity in the whole downtown economy. One overarching challenge for the foreseeable future is language diversity. But there are ways to work with, rather than against our cultural diversity, by acknowledging that North Plainfield is an American town (through visible English signs on every business) and simultaneously acknowledging that we value our immigrant identity, through signs, menus, community events and other marketing, to play up and better intermingle the wide variety we’ve been blessed with.
9) ELECTORAL POLITICS/COMMUNICATION – It may well be that there are projects underway to address some or even all of the issues identified here. But given the way local governance functions, it’s mighty hard to tell. For one thing, we’ve got partisan elections, which often bury local issues under state and national party characterizations. Regardless of who’s got the most interesting local ideas or the most practical local plans, many voters have a hard time getting past their feelings about the state and national party figureheads to listen carefully and choose local candidates based on local issues.
Local candidates often fall into the same claptrap as state and federal candidates; in candidate speeches at the few public forums offered before elections, the rhetoric is often long on generalities about the problems and short on well-grounded solution proposals.
Finally, after elections, it seems like a wall goes up between citizens and elected officials. Committee meetings are conducted as if through a one-way mirror: the committee members carry on their business, and the people get to watch, but there’s rarely any meaningful or respectful explanation for official decisions offered to the citizens, and rarely ever meaningful or respectful incorporation of citizen ideas into government projects. The one-way nature of the proceedings may be a front to conceal illegal or dishonorable backroom deals, or plain incompetence. But even if our local leaders are conducting town business honorably and relatively competently, their secretive behavior creates the appearance of underhanded dealings, and that’s not good for anyone in the long run: it undermines the public’s trust in the elected government, and it feeds the governing bodies’ contempt for the will of the people, because they rightly believe the public is ignorant since they refuse to properly inform people about what’s going on.
We need our leaders to be honest, clear and organized in presenting both their successes and their mistakes and limitations; even complicated subjects can be made understandable if carefully put together. More importantly, we need our leaders to actually listen to and act in ways that respond to what citizens are saying, not just nod, smile, pat people on the head and say: “Thanks for sharing.” Democracy is messy when done properly, and that’s not happening here; people are becoming increasingly frustrated and angry about being ignored on issues that concern us all.
10) RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM/LACK OF COMMUNITY VISION - This last one is also mirrored on the national and international stage. Too often, policy and practice decisions are made by simply cobbling together a bare majority of self-interested constituencies. Lots of people try to figure out “What’s in it for me?” and the wheelers and dealers try to convince the elected people that enough people will get the payout to return the favor on voting day. That kind of three-way backscratching goes on because it works – in the short run. But eventually, communities that operate this way wind up in trouble, like ours is: fragmented and directionless, treated occasionally to ceremonial photo opportunities, but starving for substance. We need leaders who can say to the townspeople: “We’re all in this together, we sink or swim together, we need to pull together,” and really mean it.
And we need citizens who won’t tolerate being patronized, who will demand their rightful place at the decision-making table, and who can look beyond narrow self-interest to what’s best for the actual people with whom they share this town, when they exercise that citzen power.
