Luxury Living, Boutique Retail and the Quiet Erasure of Working and Middle Class NJ

Commentary

I grew up in a NJ Neighborhood with families just like mine – blue collar, many of whom broke their backs to send their kids to Catholic private schools (even if they weren’t Catholic because they were cheaper) and eventually buy a home.  The folks who owned the apartment buildings weren’t perfect, but they weren’t faceless management companies who threw money into political machines.  

It was a town most people I knew didn’t want to stay in, but they still loved and had pride in – if they worked hard enough, they could still provide a good life and had a shot to work their way up to a better one.  The jobs were also there to help make that happen.  We had meaningful access to all sorts of cultural experiences because we worked together, played together, and went to school together. The biggest sign of wealth one would see might be a slightly nicer Buick or a BMX bike instead of a Huffy.

The opportunities these families worked for in New Jersey are disappearing, and Berkeley Heights is exhibit A- a local version of what is occurring across the state and a local government that pushes ‘happiness narratives’ as wealthy developers, law firms, engineering firms and a whole host of other consulting groups have their hands in municipal and city pockets while throwing a pittance of affordable housing that is more of an insult than the solution that was promised as they layer one luxury complex over another.

Throughout the state this development machinery enters agreements that offer no money to our schools while donating millions to political committees who mask money to local politicians that provide lip service and bemoan state mandates while doing little to nothing in exercising the actual flexibility they do have in making a better deal for every day families.

For example, our local debate centers on how much should be donated from these developments based on the number of kids attending.  Do young working families without children who are just starting to build their lives and seniors have the luxury of negotiating on those terms?  Can they say ‘well we don’t have kids so we shouldn’t have to pay school taxes’?  Who else in NJ has the luxury of not supporting schools because they don’t have children?

Then we have the symbolism – the names of families who donated to parks falling under bulldozers, cultural and religious celebrations being relegated to smaller spaces.

Towns with multifaceted ethnic and economic features are being replaced with monolithic high-end plug and play luxury apartments and retail with no culture, no connection to the soul that made our communities great, and affords no real solution to the housing affordability crisis

Again and again, we are told our communities need to change – that density is coming. We are told affordable housing obligations are real, legal and unavoidable and that office parks must be reimagined, aging commercial sites revived, and communities must adapt to a new artificially mandated housing landscape.

All done under a banner of affordability as communities and their local environments are mutilated, while the folks who are waiting for their shot at a better life get pushed back down the line because what’s being built isn’t in their reach.

But who is this actually for?

Because what many towns are producing, what Berkeley Heights looks to be on a path to, does not feel like a serious pathway for working and middle-income families trying to move up into safer neighborhoods, better school systems and more stable communities.

Luxury apartments.

Boutique retail.

Wellness branding (because no town can possibly exist without a high end Hydration IV Spa -or whatever the hell it’s called)

Redevelopment packages designed to attract a higher-end market.

Affordable set-asides that may satisfy legal obligations on paper while leaving a vast middle group untouched in practice.

That is the problem.

A more expensive New Jersey is not the same thing as a more open one.

At the local level, this debate shows up through the Connell site, the affordable housing framework, the Nokia-related questions along with the the broader shift in how redevelopment is being presented to our community.

Each piece of this massive overhaul gets introduced as its own technical matter.

One item is about compliance.

Another about zoning.

Another about economic development.

Another revitalization.

Another about housing obligations.

And when you put all that together, it is a very familiar pattern.

Officials present large-scale changes as if they were mostly inevitable, while working families are expected to work through layers of technical material on compressed timelines for plans that were clearly in the works for years behind the scenes.

Major policy choices wrapped in legal jargon, planning language, and procedural complexity.

And somewhere in the middle of all that in between getting the kids to all their activities, working our job or jobs, caring for our older relatives, making dinner and helping with homework – we’re supposed to accept that this is just how it goes – that this is what good government and sound housing policy looks like.  That this is how a competent, transparent government operates.

Three minutes in a couple of meetings to take all this in and ask questions about it is enough.

Three minutes – two meetings.

Our own Township page is just a soup of happiness jargon and feel-good slop with little to no information on what is being decided.  We will probably get some sort of article just before or soon after it’s all voted through with a one-sided narrative that justifies the decision.

You are not wrong to push back.

You are not crazy or misinformed.

So if they say you’re just angry, let them know any reasonable thinking person would be.

What is being built across New Jersey is not designed for the people who need a fair shot.

Not the EMT
Not the Construction Worker
Not the Day Care Worker
Not the Barista at your coffee shop.

Not the small business employee, or young family that earns too much to qualify for the deepest affordability tiers but nowhere near enough to buy into a decent neighborhood.

These are the people who fall into the gap. The people who are always invoked in broad language about opportunity that’s used to sell this version of NJ but somehow never seem to get the opportunity they were promised.

Just ‘Let Them’. Right?

The signals are not subtle.

When the storefronts being rolled out look less like a ladder to opportunity and more like a background to a tik tok video about upper-income living, residents are not wrong to question who the town is really being built for.

The public is told this is about inclusion, opportunity, and adapting to the future.

But who are they including, who owns this opportunity, and whose future is being considered?

Submitted directly by the author; content reflects their own views