Re: Liberty Science Center begs Jersey City for $2.5M - Fulop: 'Bailout' by city would set bad prece |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
 
|
Quote:
I agree that the museum should go through a reorganization of some kind. Unfortunately, this isn't a time when it's easy to finance a reorganization.
Posted on: 2008/11/25 13:35
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Liberty Science Center begs Jersey City for $2.5M - Fulop: 'Bailout' by city would set bad prece |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
I hope the city and the state figure out a way to save the museum. Children really love that place.
Posted on: 2008/11/25 12:47
|
|||
|
||||
Re:Jersey City Reporter article 7/22/06 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
Congratulations. Sorry the dealers found a place to move to, but just the fact that they were forced to move even a little bit is something. Maybe if they know the fear of the neighborhood watch people, they'll at least try to keep their operation as low key as possible.
Posted on: 2008/11/25 0:30
|
|||
|
||||
Re: WEEHAWKEN: Cops break up gang meeting and get Bloods' notebook with 'significant' inside details |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think an officer could do that under the current laws. An official in Elizabeth was quoted a few days ago as saying that Elibeth doesn't really track gangs, as such, because there's nothing inherently illegal about belonging to a gang. The problem is if someone commits a crime, whether that person is in a gang or not.
Posted on: 2008/11/21 14:09
|
|||
|
||||
Re: GANGS? -- 5 Dickinson High students charged after battling cops -- LUNCHTIME TURMOIL |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Today, the Jersey Journal is reporting that a gang that helped start the fight is the Summit gang, which is made up of kids expelled from Dickinson.
Posted on: 2008/11/19 12:21
|
|||
|
||||
Re: GANGS? -- 5 Dickinson High students charged after battling cops -- LUNCHTIME TURMOIL |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
Honestly, I'm just enjoying seeing people who usually trash me trash one another. Anyhow: do you know enough about how the gangs work in Jersey City to know whether the Dickinson problems are the result of ordinary dumb kid gangs, or hardcore Crips/Bloods/Latin Kings sorts of gangs? If the latter: would you have any thoughts on which of the hardcore gangs are active at Dickinson? Are there any signs you look for to figure out who's who?
Posted on: 2008/11/19 1:19
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Waterfront Walkway threatened by Homeland Security Bill |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
But we all know that a LeFrak condo on the Jersey City/Hoboken border is SO much more sensitive than the World Financial Center. . . .
Posted on: 2008/11/19 1:00
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Waterfront Walkway threatened by Homeland Security Bill |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
I think it's really possible. I'm going to be a one-issue voter against Quigley or whoever else votes for this bill. I wish that one of the good guys/gals who are running for mayor will end up taking on Quigley.
Posted on: 2008/11/18 9:53
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Waterfront Walkway threatened by Homeland Security Bill |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
In defense of injcsince81 (and me): Except, maybe, for event listings and some first-hand accounts of crime, most posts on JC List are expressions of opinion. It shouldn't be necessary to write "In my opinion" or "I think" in every post, because it's pretty obvious that the posts are expressions of opinion.
Posted on: 2008/11/18 0:53
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Waterfront Walkway threatened by Homeland Security Bill |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
I agree with you. But, if there ever is some clear-cut reason why the walkway can't continue directly along the river, then have the walkway continue in such a way that it curves around the obstacle. The worst solution would be to have unwalkable, unbikeable gaps in the walkway just because there's an obstacle in the way.
Posted on: 2008/11/17 0:07
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Fulop says Housing Authority director should be stripped of position (over Montgomery Gardens) |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
I think that one issue is that there isn't a big pool of affluent retirees and affluent ladies who lunch living here. Most of us who are supposedly affluent feel pretty poor ourselves and have no time whatsoever. But, anyhow, a lot of us live pretty close to the Villa Bourinquen apartments on Marin and barely notice that those apartments are there, except to be grateful that the streetlights there work. Even the drug dealers there seem to be under control. Anyhow, how much does it cost to run the Bourinquen development compared with Montgomery Gardens? Is it astronomically expensive and pie in the sky-ish, or is there any way to apply what the folks at the Bourinquen development know to help the folks in the Montgomery Gardens project?
Posted on: 2008/11/15 23:53
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Nine units in Metropolis Towers up for IRS auction Nov. 13 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
30k for a single person in Downtown JC sounds really low to me. Don't forget that JC is a huge city, so the "average" income also includes a lot of poverty-stricken areas, which pulls down the overall average. I'd say 50k for a fairly young, single Downtown resident with an average education and job sounds more probable.[/quote] Short answer: Thanks for discussing this in a mellow way. Anyhow, your income estimate sounds reasonable to me. In a good economy, in which workers making a steady $50,000 a year know they can easily find new jobs, then maybe spending 30 percent of income -- $1,250 per month -- on housing would be reasonable. In a crummy economy, in which workers have to save more because they're more likely to be unemployed, I think workers earning $50,000 a year should only be spending 25 precent of income -- about $1,040 per month -- on housing. So, assuming that your income estimate is correct, a Metropolis Towers studio is not as overpriced as I was suggesting, but it's still pretty expensive relative to what a lot of ordinary Manhattan office workers can really afford. That means that the other nearby high-rise condos are way, way, way out of the price range of the typical Manhattan office worker. Appendix: - Apology for existence: I'm just trying to keep up my end of the conversation, not trying to say that I'm necessarily correct. One obvious counterargument is that, until recently, someone has been renting and buying a lot of very expensive housing here. Maybe there are actually a lot of people here making $250,000 per year. - Data: Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to get really up-to-date ZIP code area income data through the Web. The 2000 Census fact sheet is all I could find. Census Bureau 07302 Fact Sheet According to the fact sheet, 1999 median per capita 07302 income was about $29,000, and median household income was about $47,000. The median housing cost for someone with a mortgage was about $1,700. If you click to "see more" housing characteristics data, you come to a page that says the average rent for households that rented was about $800. The median ratio of rent to household income was about 25% to 29%. I don't know how much rents have increased since 2000, or how much typical incomes have increased. My gut feeling is that the typical income has increased about 30% and the typical housing cost has doubled. One interesting thing is to compare the 07302 stats with the Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, stats: Main 2000 Census Bureau Cobble Hill Fact Sheet page Census Bureau 11201 Fact Sheet housing characteristics page In 2000, the median rent in Cobble Hill was $822 -- only a little more than the median rent of $798 in 07302. But the median household income there was $56,293 there, compared with $45,223 here. If that differential has continued, I guess that explains why the selection of shops and restaurants is so much better in Cobble Hill than it is here . . .
Posted on: 2008/11/15 23:37
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Bone Cancer, Chromium and |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
One thing I wonder is whether people who live downtown in brownstoneland are exposed to anything other than old lead paint.
Has anyone here know anyone who lives in Harsimus Cove brownstoneland ever actually gotten a chromium blood test, or tests for any other pollutant other than lead? If so, what were the results?
Posted on: 2008/11/15 20:47
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Nine units in Metropolis Towers up for IRS auction Nov. 13 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
Relative to what people here really earn, the condos and coops around here seem to be way overpriced.
Posted on: 2008/11/14 21:58
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Nine units in Metropolis Towers up for IRS auction Nov. 13 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
The Living Wage calculator has figures that are comparable to my guesstimes. According to the Living Wage calculator, a typical single person living in Jersey City needs an annual income of about $24,000 per year. If that person pays half of after-tax income on housing, that person can spend about $884 per month on rent. The Living Wage calculator suggests that the Metropolis Towers apartments probably cost about 2 times as much as someone here who's just making a living wage can afford. I was strugling to say the apartments cost 2.5 times as much as I think people can really pay. So, my numbers are fairly close to the Living Wage numbers. Another source of data to consider is the census data: Here are some Jersey City census data. I'm too tired to look up the median income per worker, but the median per household is about $47,000, so I think my estimate that a typical single person here might make about $30,000 is correct. According to census figures, the median monthly housing cost for households that rent is about $800 per month. In other words, a studio at Metropolis Towers costs more than twice what a typical Jersey City household is paying for housing. And, of course, Metropolis Towers is cheap for downtown. I know downtown is different from the rest of the city, but I'm not sure incomes are really high enough to support the rents.
Posted on: 2008/11/14 1:07
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Steve Fulop |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
Did anyone else see the Rev. Santora letter slamming Fulop in the Jersey Journal today? Santora was defending Maio, the controversial housing official, and saying Fulop doesn't know about the history of what all has gone on. At some level, maybe Santora is right, but I think Fulop really does try to listen to people. If Santora knows so much before, why didn't he make an effort to share his knowledge with Fulop? I'm not sure whether Fulop knows every nuance of everything that goes on in Jersey City, but at least he's trying to clean up Jersey City politics. Or, even if he's faking it very well and is just pretending, at least he's pretending to do something good. The other members of the council don't even pretend to be trying to clean the city up. I've always liked Santora's Jersey City religion articles, but now that I've seen today's letter, I feel as if I've been had and Santora is also part of The Machine.
Posted on: 2008/11/13 20:05
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Nine units in Metropolis Towers up for IRS auction Nov. 13 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
If the job market is weak, I think that, in most places, a young, single person with a moderately crummy job would be making about $30,000 year. I think someone like that without great job security ought to be paying less than 25% of income in rent, or about $625 per month, or $7,500 per year. It seems to me that that's really quite a bit more than a studio costs in most of the country. So, if the economy tanks, and the economy here becomes more like the economy in the rest of the economy, then maybe you need to pay just $75,000 to get your money back in 10 years. On the other hand: if an investment holds half of its value over time, maybe that would be a good deal in a really rotten economy where all investments were doing poorly and inflation was running at 10 percent every year.
Posted on: 2008/11/13 19:54
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Steve Fulop |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
He is definitely extremely nice and extremely helpful. I think he fixes a lot of problems with the city just by helping people figure out how the city works. If the Hudson County Democratic Organization were smart, it would let Fulop be mayor for one term, then work to help him become governor or get into Congress. That way, he would be in a position where he could spend more time with people who have a clue, and the machine could go back to do its machinely dirty work. The harder and more effectively the machine works to bottle Fulop up, the more time he'll spend here holding the feet of the machinistas to the fire.
Posted on: 2008/11/12 13:48
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Fulop says Housing Authority director should be stripped of position (over Montgomery Gardens) |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
One question would be what the ratio of diehard troublemakers is to ordinary residents. It seems as if the city wants to knock down the homes of thousands of people to prevent crimes mostly committed by about, say, 20 rotten kids. Why not lock the rotten kids up somewhere and let the rest of the residents keep their homes?
Posted on: 2008/11/12 13:38
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Little Smiles Preschool JC Hights |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
River School, A Whole New World, Growing Tree (? - the one at about 5th and Marin).
People have complaints about Smile, but, to me, it sounds as if these are complaints about little problems at a place that is generally OK. (Example: there was a complaint about Smile workers not wiping a baby's nose often enough. But it can be pretty hard to wipe a baby's nose often enough.) To me, the refurbished place near Monmouth and Newark looks nice. I haven't been inside and haven't heard anything good or bad about it. I've also heard good things about a modest looking daycare over by Dixon Mills. It might be called Little Steps or First Stars or something like that.
Posted on: 2008/11/11 13:40
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Bergen Lafayette: Jersey City school bus operator booted by eminent domain, to clear way for par |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Is this the big, mostly empty white concrete parcel near the Garfield light rail stop?
If so, it would be fine to build a small park there, but I think what would make more sense would be to build some kind of charter school/community building there. Example: I know of a charter school that is considering moving to a building on Kennedy that is pretty far from the light rail. I think everyone without cars would be much better off if the school were moving some place by the Garfield or MLK light rail stop, and I think the merchants trying to operate small businesses by those stops would be much better off if there were big, recession-resistant public employers at those stops. The MLK light rail stop area has been redeveloped very well, and a lot of the nearby residential blocks and the commercial blocks just north of that area on Monticello are gorgeous, but it looks as if it's hard even for a fast food restaurant to survive in that area. Partly, it must be because of the open-air drug supermarkets, the gangs and the out-of-control projects and Section 8 buildings, but the area isn't really THAT out of control. It's not that much worse than downtown Jersey City was about 15 years ago. I think another problem is just there isn't a big enough presence of people in that neighborhood who can, say, pay $5 for lunch every day in the neighborhood. Even 15 years ago, Jersey City had some bank employees, Pershing building employees, etc. who could afford to go out to buy a cheap lunch a few times a week.
Posted on: 2008/11/10 12:49
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Fulop says Housing Authority director should be stripped of position (over Montgomery Gardens) |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
I think the secret about Fulop is that he means well but depends heavily on the information he is getting from people in the community. He's only as knowledgeable as the people talking to him are. Whatever the guy's faults, he's definitely someone who wants to hear what knowledgeable people think and takes what they say seriously. So, if you think Fulop is taking a dumb position, and you think you have first-hand information about what the situation is, try e-mailing him directly and setting him straight. You might have more influence over his position than you think.
Posted on: 2008/11/10 12:41
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Can anyone in local goverment hold thier drink (Lipski this time)? |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
What is a little bit sad about this is that it seems as if Lipski might be one of the more responsive city councilors other than Fulop. I think Fulop is a great guy, but I just don't think I understand Jersey City enough to know whether his pure pure pure strategy makes political or practical governance sense. One possibility is that maybe a bright city council member with a good, honest heart could get more important, good things done if he flattered the old fossils more and figured out ways to let them have their pork barrel and improve trash clinic, the police department, etc. at the same time. And I don't know if that thought is realistic or not. But to me there's a question about whether someone like Lipski or Vega might actually be doing a lot more practical good for the people of Jersey City than a guy like Fulop who makes a point of confronting the fossils whenever possible. But then, when Lipski goes out and whizzes on people, that tends to support the Fulop argument that the Jersey City fossils are so corrupt that trying to do business with them is mostly pointless, or maybe counterproductive.
Posted on: 2008/11/10 12:32
|
|||
|
||||
Re: ox restaurant |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
Maybe the mac and cheese is aimed at kids. To me, the decadent Marco and Pepe mac and cheese is wonderful, but small children tend to want their mac and cheese pretty plain.
Posted on: 2008/11/7 23:36
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Is the rental market downtown crazy slow? |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
Maybe I'm misremembering. The flier I saw was in the window of the real estate agency right by the McDonald's.
Posted on: 2008/11/7 23:12
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Is the rental market downtown crazy slow? |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Idea: put "real fresh apartment, not old spam" in subject line, so people know it's not a spam fake. Maybe people are burning out because of the spam.
Also: I saw a flier for a 2-bedroom apartment in Grove Pointe for something like $2,600 per month. Maybe the renter is rich and doesn't need to get a whole lot, and maybe the unit is a crummy unit, but that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. If the number of ads for cheap units has dropped, that could be because demand is strong, but it could be that the brokers can't afford to advertise them as well, or that brokers are marketing them through some Web site other than Craigslist that people here aren't mentioning. Example: I haven't looked that hard at Google ads lately, but does it have apartment ads on there somewhere.
Posted on: 2008/11/6 19:55
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Liberty Harbor |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
I like the look of LHN, but the bad thing Mocco did is refuse to build a school building for Learning Community Charter School, or an equivalent charter school. LHN will end up attracting quite a few families with children. I've already met a baby mom who lives at LHN who is thinking about starting some kind of company that would serve children. Apparently, LCCS has begged Mocco to help it get a building, and he hasn't. Even if Mocco didn't want to help LCCS, because he knew it would be hard for his residents to get in there (although, if the school were a lot bigger, getting in would be a lot easier), he could have offered to build a new building or an annex for P.S. 16, which is a few blocks away and is a good neighborhood school. I come from Republican land out in the Midwest, and the money-grubbing, politician-buying developers there at least set aside land for schools and may have helped pay for building the schools, because they knew that made good business sense. The problem with the developers here is that they don't have the vision to understand that young yuppies and hipsters eventually spawn little yuppies and little hipsters.
Posted on: 2008/10/28 14:40
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Bus shelter suggestions |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
a) Possible shelter location, if there's enough sidewalk space: Jersey Avenue and Newark Avenue.
b) Other bus stop issue: As DanL said, having bus maps and schedules at each stop is critical. The main reason buses are not as busy as, say, the light rail is that it's so hard to figure out when a bus is going to stop or where it will go. c) I think it's critical that NJT and Jersey City improve the routes connecting the Lincoln Park/Kennedy Boulevard area with downtown Jersey City. It seems as if real estate prices are very low in Lincoln Park, even when compared with the Jersey City Heights, simply because it's a pain in the neck to get between there and the waterfront, and really, really awful to try to get between there and Hoboken. If, say, NJT would create a free or cheap shuttle connecting the Lincoln Park area with the Martin Luther King light rail stop, maybe that would help real estate prices in the Lincoln Park area, reduce competition for parking in the Lincoln Park area, create the opportunity for someone to start a (very carefully monitored) pay parking lot near the MLK light rail stop, and generate extra business for MLK merchants.
Posted on: 2008/10/26 23:29
|
|||
|
||||
Re: incident at Dunkin Donuts |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
Quote:
First, for what it's worth, I'm Jewish. I would rather not see anti-Semitic graffiti all over town. Second, I'm not a huge stickler for keeping threads on topic, but you should really put the item about the anti-Semitic graffiti in a separate thread. Maybe some people didn't respond to you because your response was simply off-topic. Third, you were really tough on Amy. Different people here are reading her original comment in different ways, but maybe some people are more inclined to help someone who is at least trying to write in a thoughtful, nonconfrontational way than to help someone who seems to intentionally be on the attack. Fourth, even though the incident you wrote about is an actual crime and not just an ambiguous encounter, Amy was personally involved in the incident she described. You were just a witness to something that had already happened. So, her account has more of an emotional zing to it than hers does.
Posted on: 2008/10/23 13:20
|
|||
|
||||
Re: Little Smiles Preschool JC Hights |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Home away from home
|
One thing to look into for next year, at least, is the public school pre-K program.
I have run into a couple of parents who are furious about the public school bureaucracy, but even they agree that the pre-K teachers and the pre-K curriculum are great. My daughter was in a pre-K program downtown, but the curriculum is supposed to be the same throughout the district, and the school district pays high salaries throughout the district. My guess would be that the pre-K programs in the Heights are very good. The big challenge is that there is a lot of bureaucracy. To get in this year, your child would have had to be 3 on Oct. 1. To get in next year, your child would have to be 3 by Oct. 1, 2009. I think that the rules state that kids can't get into the program mid-year. But, if you have a child who's old enough, maybe you could try going to a school you like and see what's really possible.
Posted on: 2008/10/23 11:44
|
|||
|
||||