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But, if the light rail people aren't going to have any personnel at the stops, they should at least have people monitoring security cameras and do what they can do if they seem crime occurring.

Example: if the victim had been standing on the platform, and the killer started killing him, maybe a security cam watcher could at least have said, "Stop! You are being watched!!" in a really scary way. Maybe that wouldn't have helped, but maybe just the mere act of saying something through a loudspeaker in a booming voice could have prevented the murder.

Another possibility: maybe the light rail folks could, for example, install remotely operated sprinklers or extremely loud sirens in stations. If a guard monitoring security camera video saw a crime in progress, s/he could start sprinklers, set off loud sirens, or do something else that might stop an attack by freaking the attacker out.

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Did it seem as if they guy wanted to be rescued?

I got to swim once in the Hudson River. I wouldn't want to swim close to shore, but, once you get a little ways out, it's fine. I'm sure it has all sorts of horrible chemicals in it, but not anything that kills people instantaneously.

Also: New York is a little far from Jersey City, but I don't think it's that far, from the perspective of a good swimmer.

The hard part would be just staying out of the way of the ferries.

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What the police here really have to do is adopt the same kind of "zero tolerance" approach to speeding, loitering and other quality of life crimes that the NYPD took in the mid-1990s.

Vigilantism may make us feel good -- part of me wishes the storekeepers had blown those thugs' brains out -- but I don't think it would do anything whatsoever to improve overall security. Everyone in Baghdad, for example, has a gone, and they might still cut some thieves' hands off, but there is still plenty of crime in Baghdad.

On the other hand: one of the main reasons we have courts and police is to prevent vigilantism.

If the police lose control of the city, they shouldn't be surprised to see that a lot more people here try to take the law into their own hands.

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The real problem here is the economy. If the economy gets a lot worse, a lot of Jersey City could become more dangerous than it is now.

If the city keeps on the track that it's been on, I think the Junction would be an OK area to buy in, if you are happy with the block.

I don't know about that specific block, but I have a white friend who lived a few blocks to the west of there, on Bergen, and now lives a few blocks to the east.

When she lived on Bergen, her bike was stolen and gang members killed each other in front of her place, but no one ever broke into her place or mugged her or anything like that. If anything, maybe people were more polite to her because she was white.

And I think it was very obvious, even on lovely afternoons, that her block was a challenging block. You didn't have to go there at midnight to see that drunken people were hanging out on their stoops glaring at people; the drunken people were there with their bottles at 2 p.m.

Now that my friends leaves a few blocks east of the Junction, on a block that looks much calmer at all hours, she has no problems whatsoever. So, in general, the farther east you are and the calmer the block looks during the day, the better off you probably are.

Also: if you are looking in a certain area because of cost concerns, chances are that lots of similar people are,too. If that trend continues, the level of law-abidingness that prevails where you live now probably will spread to wherever it is that you move to.

If that trend doesn't continue, it will be because the housing market collapse has brought properties in places like Van Vorst Park into your price range. In that case, you might as well buy in VVP.

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Oh. That definitely undercuts LCCS's case.

On the other hand: One way to get similar results would be to offer the space to The Ethical Community Charter School people, and make the space offer contingent on them providing enough seats to accommodate, say, 60 kids per grade. If all downtown developers combined would simply create 200 good seats per grade, that would help a lot.

I think the real problem here is that the people at the Jersey City Police Department let union rules, kindness, etc. screw with staffing on weekends and late at night.

The department probably has plenty of officers out on patrol at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, but not enough from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. on weekend nights/early mornings.

If we were listening on the scanner, we'd probably here the dispatcher essentially auctioning off different 911 emergencies. We'd here about the emotionally disturbed person, the rowdy group by Dickinson, a breaking and entering in the Heights, etc., and a couple of pleasant police officers in patrol cars trying to handle all of these different calls.

Possible solutions:

- Make sure that the pay for night work is much higher than the pay for day work. Maybe department recruiters should go to dinners at 4 a.m. and specifically recruit people who naturally like to stay up late.

- Figure out a way to provide extra child care/life care support for officers who work nights and have kids and/or working spouses.

- Downtown, continue to emphasize foot patrols and bike patrols, and increase the number.

- Put an ultra-tough police call box by the dog run in Van Vorst Park.

- Make sure that the police understand that stopping street fights involving suspected members of gangs is a top priority. Start prosecuting suspects based on medical evidence even if the victims (e.g., members of rival gangs) won't testify.

- Recognize that, even if the families of these kids mean well, the parents probably have no serious ability to control the kids. Once these kids are convicted of any violent crime, then put them in house arrest ankle bracelets for a long time, so that the parents or others have some ability to control them, but they're not in jail or prison learning new techniques for jacking cars.

- The JCPD needs to work with cool, hip hop-oriented marketing agencies to figure out how to get kids to see joining a gang as an act of self-humiliation and self-enslavement, rather than as a chance to join a band of brothers who happen to rob liquor stores.

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I've generally been pro-LHN, but someone told me yesterday that Peter Mocco flat out refused to let Learning Community Charter School have any space there.

Given that LCCS has about 10 applicants for each slot, and that most LHN families will want to try to send their kids there, it was absurd of LHN not to find a way to accommodate LCCS.

Or, if Mocco is someone who has concerns about the charter school concept, then he should have offered space to P.S. 16 or P.S. 5. Both of those are fine schools with fine kids, and it seems as if both schools make sure that kids behave themselves while coming to and leaving the schools. So, there was absolutely no reason for LHN to shaft schools.

Maybe the argument would be that LHN residents won't have kids. But I've already met a new LHN resident in Van Vorst Park who was wondering what she and her husband would do about school when they have a child.

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How would you define liberal, in this sense, and why would Grace Van Vorst Church not meet that definition?

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The way to get good pizza from Helen's is to order thin-crust pizza and pick it up yourself. Their thin-crust pizza is great.

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a) Again: if I had a choice, I would rather that the condo not have any new parking. (I also would strongly prefer that the developer not put a new tower behind the church.) But I think a lot of time Jersey City folks assume an all or nothing position: either I get my way and kill the bad parking (or bad building, or whatever), or I wash my hands.

If the planning board ends up say the condo project should go ahead and can and should have parking: OK, in that situation, what do you do to minimize the damage done? Even if, say, a parking lot or garage is going to be kind of ugly, how do you limit it to being sort of ugly rather than exceptionally ugly?

b) Another possible compromise solution: arrange for Grove Pointe, the Newport Mall, or some other place with a lot of parking to make parking spaces available to St. Boniface residents for, say, $200 per month. Then require any St. Boniface resident who owns a car to rent a space and park the car in that rented, off-street space (or some other off-street space). Aggressively ticket any St. Boniface residents who use ordinary on-street spaces for more than a few minutes.

Given that most of the people who park on First Street are police officers who shouldn't really be parking there, anyway, maybe the officers could compensate for their illegal parking by spending a few minutes each day ticketing illegally parked St. Boniface residents.

c) Downtown parking situation: One thing to keep in mind is that people have totally destroyed existing off-start parking in downtown Jersey City for decades.

I think it's pretty clear if you look carefully at our "backyards" that our "backyards" were originally part of a system of alleys. Horses, apparently, could get into the alleys by going through carriage houses at the ends of the blocks. (Or maybe there weren't any buildings at the alley entrances.)

These days, you see 1-story or sometimes 2-story carriage houses (or maybe early garages?) at the entrances to the alleys.

So, people have eliminated off-street parking (especially, horse parking) by converting the carriage houses into homes, and they've eliminated a lot more potential off-street parking by turning the alleys into backyards. If the alleys were still alleys, people would have choice of using their backyards as backyards or as off-street parking.

But I think you could argue that people making efforts to putting in reasonably attractive parking downtown are just compensating for all of the decades of urban decay and depopulation, when the city ignored the need to protect the existing parking infrastructure.

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The south side of the stretch of First between Jersey and Erie doesn't look very historic now, and I doubt it looked historic when the neighborhood got registered.

Anyhow, I don't really want a garage, either, but, if I had to choose between St. Boniface sitting vacant for 20 years and a carefully designed garage, I'd take the garage.

Do you know if there's any practical, legal way for a developer like that to just sell to non-drivers? Would it be legal, say, to sell units only to people who've had their licenses revoked? Or maybe the developer could focus on marketing to affluent people who happen to be visually impaired?

a) Is St. Mathew's Lutheran Church on Wayne liberal? It seemed pretty liberal when I took my daughter there for the playspace that used to be there.

b) Temple Beth-El, a synagogue near Kennedy and Communipaw, and B'nai Jacob, a synagogue a few blocks from the West Side light rail stop, are pretty liberal. If you aren't Jewish but happen to like Jewish services, for whatever reason, you could just go there on Friday evening or Saturday morning and enjoy the service. No one would be trying to convert you; you'd just hear a lot more Hebrew than you would in a typical church.

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I don't have a car and I wish there were fewer cars downtown. But, if people really think that the St. Boniface development has to have some parking, here's a possible solution:

The city and Bank of America have parking lots right across the street from St. Boniface.

If people really want more parking in that area, I think the solution would be to make the property owners work together and build a parking garage on one of the existing parking lots, and maybe to hold down the total number of cars by requiring that a specified number of St. Boniface residents share a number of Zip cars. (Zip car is a car-sharing company.)

Also: I think another solution might be to work with the state to create special car registration rules for congested urban areas. Simply forbid residents of some congested areas from registering a car unless they have an on-street parking permit from the city or can show that they've arranged for a space in a nearby parking lot or garage.

Finally: one reason people who move to a place like St. Boniface might want cars, or fight over Zip cars, is that they want to do things like going antiquing in upstate New York or camping in western New Jersey, and it's really hard to figure out how to get out there without a car. I guess there are some bus tours, but they seem to be aimed at 80-year-olds who want to play the slots in Atlantic City, not 30-year-olds who want to swim in a lake.

Maybe one way the city could cut down on private car ownership downtown would be to subsidize the creation of a "Fun Bus" service.

A Fun Bus van could make a bunch of trips to and from the big regional malls on weekends.

A big bus could take people out to a campground, Jersey Shore town or other tourist-y place on Friday evening and Saturday morning, then bring people back on Sunday evening.

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I think the real story here is that, if you go into the offices of the Jersey Journal with a mind reader who can read everyone's minds, the old-time editors and reporters there think they do a wonderful job of covering politics. They think their political reporters are their ace reporters.

The reality is that, given that the Jersey Journal is a small daily with limited resources, the general assignment/police beat coverage is terrific and the arts and human interest features coverage is fine.

But the coverage of education, business and politics is truly abysmal.

I think the coverage of education and business is so bad because the beats are probably not really assigned to any specific reporter, or they're assigned to interns or new reporters who don't get much informed guidance from their editors.

But the political coverage is wretched because the reporters are lazy, unimaginative hacks who don't know how to do anything other than write up a city council meeting, an indictment or idle gossip. The results end up being reasonably entertaining, anyway, because Jersey City is a fascinating city, but other Newhouse papers do this sort of thing a lot better. Why not bring someone in from the Star-Ledger to do a seminar or something?

Some examples of how weak the coverage is:

- The Jersey Journal never really does much of a profile of anyone in politics here, except mayoral candidates. Because it doesn't really tell us who these politicians are and flesh them out as "characters," the hard news stories they do about these folks have no context.

The editors and 25-year veteran reporters know who Viola Richardson really is, but I really don't. To me, she's a just a name. I think she occasionally half-way sides with Fulop, and that's great, but I don't know what that means.

- Reporters in most cities spend a lot of time covering the top people in the planning department and other administrative departments.

When I use the Jersey Journal archive search engine, I see that the Journal has been mentioning the city planner, Robert Cotter, an average of about once a month, but I didn't know the Journal had ever mentioned Cotter till I used the Journal search engine. I don't think the Journal covers that guy or other city administrators very well.

- The Journal doesn't do much to cover community leaders who aren't already running for office, and it doesn't do much to profile, or even briefly describe, candidates in elections such as school board elections. Essentially, if you're not on the council, you aren't a huge developer, and you aren't Louis Manzo, the Journal has no interest in you.

Since 2001, Shelley Skinner has been working hard to try to improve the Jersey City public schools for several years, but the Jersey Journal mentioned her in substantive articles only 3 times before she announced she was running for ofice.

Althea Bernheim has never been mentioned except in one caption.

Mahaley Stewart Bowles, who's the only person I know who's organized parents well enough to actually bring about concrete changes in the regular Jersey City zone schools, has appeared a few times as the signer of letters to the editor, but the Jersey Journal reporters have only mentioned her 3 times.

Karen Westman, who went to heroic efforts to start and run Waterfront Montessori, a private school with an enormous waiting list, has never been mentioned in an article that the Jersey Journal actually reported. (Her name shows up in one single a tiny announcement that appeared when the school started up.)

Ben Wilson, a JCPD community relations person who runs eye-opening gang awareness seminars, could have been on Torres's list of up and coming young African American community leaders. But, of course, Torres wouldn't know about the guy. Op-ed authors have mentioned the guy, and a Jersey City resident who participated in a "person on the street" survey story mentioned Ben Wilson, but Jersey Journal reporters have only mentioned Wilson's involvement in catching a criminal once, and the only other time they've mentioned him in a story that they've actually reported (as opposed to a routine event notice) is when the guy's son (!!) got arrested and tried for gang violence.

I think the Jersey Journal has mentioned JCList's Dan Falcon in 16 or 17 separate articles, but, keep in mind that the guy has a really highly trafficked Web site. He has a lot of potential influence, but he's only getting into the Jersey Journal about two or three times per year.

In contrast, the Journal seems to be on track to mention Healy about 600 times per year, Lipski about 150 times per year, Fulop about 100 times per year and Viola Richardson about 70 times per year. (I'm estimating because the basic Journal archive cuts off the results after finding 50 matches.)

Conclusion: the politics reporters at the Jersey Journal talk to the same obvious suspects again and again and, especially when writing about politics, make no effort whatsoever to talk to anyone new.

So, it's open for debate whether Torres's original column was racist or just ignorant, but I think it seems likely that Torres doesn't know enough about anyone outside the Hudson County Democratic Organization machine or its periphery to write a good article about up and coming community leaders without doing quite a bit of reporting. I'm sure he could call up 10 smart people and come up with a decent list, but there's no way he could produce a list like that off the top of his head.

And he may be annoyed at the machine hacks in City Hall, but he needs to understand that he works for a paper with a machine hack approach to covering City Hall.

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Er . . . Viola Richardson is not Willie Flood.

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The sad thing is that just 10 years ago, Moe's was a beautiful new deli. It was really clean and nice. Now it looks as if it's a thousand years old.

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Are you Catholic, or could you fake it? (I don't really know how Catholic churches work, so I'm not sure how easy or hard it is just to go to a church and start praying there on Sundays.)

Anyhow, if you're Catholic, I think the best way to get an affordable apartment would be to attend mass at St. Anthony's of Padua (around Sixth and Brunswick, I think), or maybe the Catholic church on the north side of Hamilton Park.

I have a feeling that some of the older people who bought two-family homes decades around Hamilton Park years ago are still in the neighborhood, and that you find them by going to mass and playing bingo at St. Anthony's.

This could be totally wrong, but, knowing how my grandmother operates (in a different city), I suspect that a lot of elderly people leave second apartments vacant because they don't really need the money and don't want the hassle of having to deal with bad tenants. If you could show that you're a nice person who would look after an elderly person a bit and maybe help a bit with shopping and that sort of thing, maybe you could get an apartment in a two-family west of Hamilton Park for pretty cheap, or even for free.

(Note: if someone here attends St. Anthony's and really knows what the older parishioners do with their second apartments, I'd love to hear your thoughts.)

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It's really beautiful. The reservoir (pond) is way bigger than you'd think it is.

Also: the locker rooms at Pershing Field are clean but spartan, but the pool is very nice and heated pretty well.

When the ice skating rink is open in the winter, it's also great.

You should probably bring a lock to lock up your stuff, in case some kid is going through a kleptomania phase, but, in general, the people there are a nice, polite, diverse group of Jersey City people.

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For some reason, I think the house in the middle picture looks a lot better than the top and bottom one.

Anyhow, thoughts:

a) Have the city sponsor an architecture contest to pick a few "model house plans" for future new, moderately priced Jersey City homes, and make a deal that permits the city to give the plans to builders for free, or distribute the plans through architects in a way that makes the plans very cheap for the developers and helps the architects make a living. That way, builders wouldn't have to spend a lot on architectural plans, but they'd be using plans that most people like, not plans that most people hate.

b) I prefer older buildings, but I think trying to make a cheap new building "match" old residential buildings produces hideous architecture.

The solution (which seems to be common in Hoboken): instead of trying to mimic 1800s residential architecture, mimic 1950s/1960s commercial buildings.

Emphasize rectangular building shapes, flat roofs (or flat roofs with penthouses with slanted roofs), and siding that "keeps it real."

Real gray corrugated steel, for example, would look a lot better in a lot of the city than fake pink brick would. On the more suburban streets, stucco would probably look a lot better than the fake brick.

Other ideas:

- If builders use big flat panels of siding, they ought to somehow incorporate the seams between the panels into the design of the siding, not try to ignore the seams. I think it looks awful when builders pretend that the seams aren't there and that their buildings really have brick siding.)

- The city should try to get developers of big properties to put the parking behind the houses.

- Have good designers figure out how to handle the windows, doors, garage doors, etc. I think just putting one big window under another big window makes a modern house look cheap. It's probably better to mix big windows with small windows.

- Builders should be required to put in at least one nice tree in front of every new home. The neighborhoods without trees look really harsh. Whereas, there are plenty of war-zone streets in Greenville that look gorgeous, partly because they have beautiful trees.

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Well, what about $10 per gallon? I think gasoline is already about $10 per gallon in Europe.

Suburbanites might not move to the projects to save $600 per month, but some might move to into the downtown brownstone land and into Newport.

Obviously: better international relations, better solar power systems, better windmills, etc. could make the economic situation look better in a year or less.

If, on the other hand, gas prices keep going up, and rising gas prices and other environmental challenges continue to push up the price of food grown elsewhere in the country, the story might go something like this: edge suburbanites would move to places like Newport and Jersey City brownstoneland. Prices in downtown Jersey City would rise while prices elsewhere fell, but the rising price of commuting to jobs in New York City would cause the total price of living far from a train or bus route to skyrocket.

Some current moderate-income downtown Jersey City residents would move to the Jersey City Heights, Bergen Lafayette or Greenville, but some would stay downtown by converting affordable housing units into market-rate units, either through illegal sublets or official conversion programs.

Some low-income people would stay downtown by doubling up, but, if food prices continued to skyrocket along with gas prices, maybe others would move out to edge suburb ghost towns and start small fruit and vegetable farms in the yards out there, to compete with the food trucked in from Florida and elsewhere.

Finally, you might say, "But affluent people don't want to live next to poor people!"

I think the answer is: look at Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harsimus Cove and Van Vorst Park. Poor people already live right by middle-income and high-income people all over the place. The only time the moderate-income and high-income people really care is when the young poor guys deal dope or the old poor guys sit on their stoops and yell at people. Otherwise, the practical effect of having poor people live by higher income people is that the higher income people have easier access to maids and babysitters.

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Probably people with slow reflexes who weren't quite sure if they understood what they were seeing.

I once had to help look for a friend's misplaced son in that area. The copy at the MLK shopping center was TERRIBLE (just berated my friend for losing her son; didn't get on his radio for one second to try to find the kid), but the intimidating looking guys hanging out on the street tried to be helpful, and a church worker came marching up the street with the boy about a minute after I began walking along the street trying to find him.

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First, this lead testing article is a lot better written than the other Jersey Journal lead testing articles.

Second: this level of lead contamination is not THAT high. It's comparable to the amount of lead that would enter a wine if you spent a meal drinking wine from a leaded crystal goblet.

See this Canadian health agency link.

The CDC carries an abstract of a 2004 paper indicating that no children tested who grew up in homes with tap water with lead contamination over 300 parts per billion showed signs of high blood lead levels.

On the other hand, about half of the homes involved in the study reported using a water filter.

The CDC published an addendeum with the abstract emphasizing that the people should try to eliminate any known sources of lead in children's environment.

Here's a NYT article that says drinking water lead contamination really should be under 10 parts per billion.

Third, P.S. 5 is actually a really well run school with good teachers and terrific, suburban-quality standardized test scores, and, for the most part, the kids there seem to be well-behaved. This is a case of an old school building in a city with old infrastructure, not an example of the failures of the Jersey City School District.

Conclusions:

- The level of lead from the worst water source at P.S. 5 is high, but not really THAT high, especially if it comes out of a sink, rather than a drinking fountain. Parents should be pressing to learn more but don't have to panic.

- To be prudent, the district should order lead tests for the kids at P.S. 5.

- To be prudent, the school should install a filtration system that reduces the level of lead below 10 parts per billion, or else switch to bottled water.

- No matter what is or isn't in the drinking water at P.S. 5, the school is right under the turnpike and right by a bunch of active construction zones. The district really ought to pay to test a random sample of kids for exposure to a wide range of pollutants every year, and to make the tests available for a fee for parents who are willing to pay for the tests, then order schoolwide testing if some kids in the small sample turn out to have problems.

Personally, I find it's really hard to get doctors to prescribe contamination tests, even if I'm willing to pay for the tests out of pocket. I think it would be extremely helpful if the district would arrange for the tests.

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I know I'm the queen of giant typos, but I think the way the Journal writes up the lead test results is confusing.

Example: this article says tests were conducted at McNair, Ferris, etc.

Does the article mean that water outlets at each of those specific schools tested positive for lead? Or that outlets at one or more of those schools tested positive? I

s it possible, for example, that P.S. 3 and P.S. 15 have all 13 of the outlets that tested positive for lead?

Also:

- How sensitive are the tests? Are the "elevated levels" here very high, or just a little bit high? If a 3-year-year drank about a cup of the water per day, would that actually have a noticeable effect on the child's exposure to lead?

- How elevated are the lead waters compared with the water coming out of our taps, and the water coming out of our Brita filter jugs? Assuming a 3-year-old drank 3 cups of water a day from the worst fountain, would that likely increase the child's overall exposure to lead by 1 percent? 5 percent? 20 percent? 1,000 percent?

- Given that you can go to any hardware store and get lead test kits, and that this is the sort of thing you could have the kids in a science class do, why did it take so long to get these tests done? Who's directly responsible for testing, and why hasn't that person been fired?



- How

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I'm having a hard time picturing the LHN geography, but I think there's a fairly easy solution here: have the Little Lady ferry boat stop right by LHN as well as at the foot of Warren Street.

If, say, you live at Portside these days, you could always shell out a little extra money to take the Little Lady to the World Financial Center when you don't feel like walking to the PATH station.

It seems to me that the Little Lady tends to be underutilized. The owners probably would love it if they could get some LHN traffic.

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Spam is a pain, but, seriously, given the way the overall real estate market is, I can't really blame a developer for grasping at straws and doing any old crazy thing to bring in business.

I'm not sure how the Jersey City market is right now -- my impression is that it's really not all that terrible -- but I really hope the developers who've put up new buildings end up with good buyers and/or tenants and don't end up with a bunch of half-finished ghost town buildings.

I remember in the late 1990s, when parts of Paulus Hook looked as if they were sets for a war movie, and that was sad.

Of course, if that kind of market comes here, it will hit a bunch of jerks who have it coming, but I'm sure it also will hurt nice people, too.

Anyhow: I think that one issue is that prices are still out of whack. I think that, in the real world, with a 30-year fixed mortgage, the price that most middle-income people around here should be paying for a home is something like $200,000 to $300,000 (for, say, a 2-bedroom with a living room and closets), but it seems as if the actual price is more on the order of $400,000 to $600,000, or about twice as high as what people can really afford.

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From the outside, the place looks nice. What are the people living there saying about it?

Normal new/half-deserted property type stuff (the shower doesn't work right! Something leaks!!!!) or serious stuff?

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I think the tables will turn if and when gas prices get higher. Then, a lot of the "edge suburbs" will become ghost towns and eventually get turned into low-income housing by default. People with decent incomes will be paying money under the table to live in housing projects with good access to public transportation.

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The lack of a way for pedestrians to get out is also a problem for people who don't have cars and are trying to decide how to get out of the city in an emergency.

Example: if a giant hurricane were coming, I'm sure I'm healthy enough to walk to Newark, if that would help, but I don't know how to get over the river. At least it sounds as if it's theoretically possible to walk over the Witpenn.

The carjacking in the story in the Jersey Journal today happened about a block away from Kennedy and Harrison.

So, on the one hand, the neighborhood is not the wild wild west. On the other hand, it's probably not a neighborhood where you want to keep $100,000 in jewelry in your dresser.

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One huge service Lefrak has done for the community is to provide low-rent space at Newport for the old Cornerstone school, which got taken over a couple of years ago by Stevens.

As far as I know, Lefrak is the only developer in the whole area who's made any concrete effort to provide school space for tenants' children or the children of people from the outside community.

In Paulus Hook, the managers of Portside have created room for the Waterfront Montessori, but my understanding is that Waterfront has to pay market rate rent.

I think another issue maybe the level of fundraising skills in Jersey City. I know, for example, that I should go to Lefrak and ask for money for my daughter's school, but I'm just plain too chicken to do so?

Shane612: it's possible that you have actually gone to the LeFraks yourself, so you know exactly what happens. If so, do people talk to you but give you the run around; simply refuse to talk to you; or, say, give you a $50 check, but a lot less than you expected?

Finally: fundraising requests made during the past year aren't necessarily a great indication, because the economy has been terrible, and, right now, the LeFraks may figure the most charitable thing they can do for Jersey City is to avoid going bankrupt.