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Welcome!Welcome to our parking boot forum. We created this forum in order to initiate the dialogue regarding this issue. Thanks. A Celebration Fundraiser
A CELEBRATION FUNDRAISER June 24th, 2009 | 6-9 PM RSVP Shelley Skinner
A Better Illegal Apartments PlanFriday, June 5, 2009 By Steven Fulop SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL Last week, Mayor Healy raised the issue of the city capitalizing financially on its sizable number of illegal apartments. This is a significant quality-of-life issue that has broad repercussions in terms of safety, public services, and potentially state and federal funding if these residents aren’t being recorded. Although I prefer a different approach to resolving this problem than through the legalization of these illegal apartments, I am in complete agreement with the mayor that we need to address this all too frequent occurrence. Illegal apartments affect their neighborhoods in a variety of ways. Since they typically lack a secondary exit or basic fire suppression equipment, such as sprinklers and smoke detectors, these apartments pose disproportionately high fire risks to their tenants, other occupants in the house, and neighboring structures. Additionally, given that illegal apartments increase the population of a neighborhood beyond the level for which it was planned and built, all residents in the neighborhood suffer from diminished services such as sewage, trash pickup, and the overall cleanliness of the area. Likewise, the scarcity of on-street parking in certain parts of the city is only made worse through the existence of illegal apartments. …. (For the complete text of this letter, please click here: http://bit.ly/J3v30) The problem with the mayor’s current proposal is that the worst offenders wouldn’t choose to participate… If the mayor’s objective is safety, we are not solving the problem since the worst violators won’t be compliant. If the mayor’s goal is to generate more revenue for the city, it is important to note that this can be done in connection with the Census without condoning prior illegal activity. In the last census in 2000, a PriceWaterhouseCoopers post-Census report indicated that Hudson County had the second highest rate of undercounting in the country, with an estimated 13,620 residents going unreported in that count. Since Jersey City represented roughly half of that total, the loss of state and federal aid amounted to more than $70 million, according to published estimates of $10,674 of state and federal aid lost per each uncounted person. Currently, the city has very few people dedicated to next year’s Census. By temporarily reassigning existing city employees to assist in the census-taking process, we can, in a cost-neutral way, gain a truer understanding of the scope of the illegal apartment problem and avoid the negative repercussions that would follow legalization. This more patient approach would not only allow us to begin to address the mayor’s concerns around determining the exact number of illegal apartments but also meet another of his goals by identifying a major source of revenue through correcting the census undercount. In the meantime, we should be adding inspectors to find the worst illegal apartment offenders to ensure their safety as well as that of their neighbors. Increased safety, a large new source of recurring revenue and the resolution of a long-standing blight, all at minimal cost to the city; what’s not to like? STEVEN FULOP is the Jersey City councilman for Ward E, which is made up of mostly the Downtown section of the city.
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