Kenschaft Co-Organizing Rally to Save Wildwood

Environmental activist Pat Kenschaft has put out a note to her followers and members of the Occupy Montclair listserv, asking them to join in a rally Saturday morning to protest development — either at full price or for affordable housing — of Montclair’s Wildwood tract.

The rally, weather permitting, will be at the corner of Bloomfield and South Fullerton from 10 to 11:30 a.m. on Saturday.

The issue of what to do the township-owned property on the Brookdale Park block of Wildwood Ave. has been a contentious one since the council, with 1st Ward councilor Rich Murnick absent, voted last summer to turn it into affordable housing. Murnick opposes the plan and has lately been joined by 2nd Ward councilor Cary Africk in his opposition. Two motions on Wildwood were tabled at the last council meeting.

Kenschaft and co-organizer Roger Pardiso have a third idea, which Kenschaft discussed with Mayor Jerry Fried during his office hours yesterday: keep Wildwood wild, using Green Acres funds to have Essex County buy the tract from the town.

“I want it preserved,” Kenschaft says. She believes affordable housing should be made available in Upper Montclair, but says it should be done by converting existing homes.

The issue, for Kenschaft, comes down to trees — and she doesn’t want to see a single one cut down unnecessarily. “I’m just very scared about climate change. I don’t want the human race to go extinct,” she said.

She also wants the tract, now fenced off, to be available for recreation: “Playing in the woods was so important to me.”

Kenschaft said that Fried told her yesterday that the planned affordable housing project on Wildwood is also intended as a environmental demonstration project. “He wants this to be an educational project for the town to see a green house being built,” Kenschaft reported.

But again, Kenschaft thinks that goal — showing how to make houses more environmentally friendly — could be better served with existing houses rather than by building new ones.

Kenschaft wrote to the council in December expressing her views on the affordable housing issue:

Jerry,

If providing one more house for a low-income family is a complex issue, why is the township council squandering time on it? The Council was elected to make policy decisions for Montclair, not to provide housing for ONE low-income family. It should be working on larger issues such as the township budget, how to provide adequate housing for MANY in this depressed market, and facilitating low-cost transportation by allowing bus stop signs.
Fred thinks that the current drive to develop the Wildwood properties is a vendetta against the first ward. What have they done to deserve it? As a resident of the second ward, I feel more insulted by the Council’s fixation on putting low-income housing in the first ward. Why not the second ward? We have a very nice neighborhood with little or no low-income housing. What makes the first ward so preferable? Why have the advocates of a township subsidy for one house overlooked the house for sale a few blocks from me offered for $359K? It is nearer to public transportation.
Obviously, jobs in Willow Brook and Newark are much more accessible via the busses along Bloomfield Avenue, which happens to run through the fourth ward. How would a low-income family get to work from the first ward?
Cary cogently explains why a house built on a Wildwood plot could not be “affordable” even if Montclair sells the plots at half the market price. Is that what the Council is contemplating? What right does the current council have to sell irreplaceable township property at half the market price? Since Fred and I can almost pay our living expenses in the second ward from our social security payments, I haven’t been on the keep-taxes-down crusade as much as others, but this proposal seems in downright opposition to your responsibilities as publicly elected officials.
If taxpayers of Montclair subsidize a house for one low-income family, what stops that family from selling it at a significant profit? It surely would be tempting for the recipient to do so. Why not just give that lucky family a gift of money? I wonder how the family will be chosen.

You write that there are other ways of preserving the environment. Trees are fundamental to stopping the ravages of climate change, and Montclair lost many on October 29, which I interpret as one more warning of what is coming if Americans don’t tame their ways. The film shown at the MPL in December, “The Age of Stupid” was of a survivor in 2050 wondering why the people of our time destroyed our habitable planet. “Other species have behaved in ways that led to their extinction, but ours is the first to do so knowingly.” If his warning is valid, you can be sure that low income people will be the first to die, as they already are in African and Bangladesh by the thousands.
I have a proposal in response to your statement, “I have found that in this economy there are few good options for creating units of affordable housing while there are countless opportunities to do good things relative to environmental concerns.”
Building new buildings is environmentally costly in many ways, not just cutting down trees. Why not start a township-wide program to convert long-empty current houses to two or three-family condos? There are many such already within our township limits, and they are attractive. This would require some zoning changes, but so would the proposal for four houses on the Wildwood property. Allowing ONE multiple-family building on each block could provide MANY low-income families adequate housing in the first and second wards. One such conversion would not change the ambiance of a block. Such a zoning change would require considerable discussion, but with so many empty buildings, it might fly.

If, as you say, there are “countless opportunities to do good things relative to environmental concerns,” why has the current Council taken so few?
Why hasn’t it allowed NJ Transit to install bus stop signs, as it has offered to do? This would help low income families find and get to jobs and help the rest of us as well.
Why has it renewed the contracts on Dodge Chargers, which are much more fuel-consumptive, expensive, and trouble-prone than similar vehicles that can do the job?
Why does it allow police to idle vehicles for hours and play loud “music” to support one religion that many of us find not only disturbing the peace but also religiously offensive- all at taxpayers’ expense?
Why don’t police vehicles stop idling when guarding places after taxpayers paid for LED light bars? Why can’t they use cell phones for communication? Others do, and they are far less expensive and environmentally damaging than idling a vehicle.
Why has no tree ordinance been passed?
Why have solar panels not been installed on public buildings? Nutley found a system to get them widely installed with no outlay by taxpayers.
Why are lights allowed to burn at night in unused public buildings and parks?
Why doesn’t the township recycle all plastics and aluminum, at least offering a special bin for each on the North Fullerton property if curbside collection is impractical?
Why are bottlenecks tolerated at overly long lights in Montclair that frustrate drivers and damage the environment in many ways?
Why isn’t the state law against idling for more than three minutes enforced in Montclair? Why is such illegal behavior so common among township employees?
Why haven’t leaf blowers been banned in Montclair? You were among the four current Council members who said at the candidates’ meeting sponsored by the Interfaith Environmental Coalition four years ago that if elected, you would abolish them. Why were the four landscaping services then serving Montclair without leaf blowers never included in the Council’s surveys of landscapers? The users of leaf blowers are not rich people, and a national survey that had been concluded before you came to office indicated that a tenth of those using leaf blowers with ear protection go totally deaf in four years leaving the township open to an expensive suit some day, similar to those against tobacco companies.
Can you understand the growing campaign for a “green council”? All of the above would require some effort to preserve the environment, but the proposal to destroy the Wildwood woods is taking effort in an attempt to destroy it.

Clearly, there is much going on that I do not understand. It’s easy to see that changing some zoning patterns to allow more two and three family houses in the first and second wards could yield far more than one low-income home. Why destroy trees for just one? I have known you and Renee long enough and well enough to be very skeptical about the charges that you must be getting bribes from builders, but I can see why some people believe I am nave to deny this possibility. Your proposal simply doesn’t make any sense economically, environmentally or for the purpose of spreading affordable housing around Montclair. If you genuinely care about providing low-income housing, a zoning change that permits one multiple-family dwelling per block will yield that for many without greatly changing residential neighborhoods. Please, please preserve the Wildwood Tract!

Your Petulant Patricia(n)

Earlier this week, she sent a note out to her followers detailing how existing houses could be converted to affordable housing using the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Fred (my husband) did some searching on the Montclair township website and made some interesting discoveries with, we believe, basic implications for the current proposal of the Council.
First, he discovered an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that can be used for rehabilitation of dwelling units occupied by low and moderate income households, including vacant and foreclosed houses — but no statement that it can be used for new construction. With so many vacant houses in Montclair that are eligible for rehabilitation, why should the township consider building more?
Also, we have wondered about the definitions of “low and moderate income.” The website says that the annual income of a family of two is “low” if it is about $32K, and it is “moderate” if it is between about $32K and $57K. Let’s examine, therefore, the implications for a family with income of $57K.
The rule of thumb these days is for a family to spend no more than a third of its income on housing. A third of $57K is $19K. By good fortune I happened to talk with a Montclair friend whose two-bedroom condo was just assessed at $270K and who pays $8K in real estate taxes. $19K – $8K = $11K.
How much can one borrow for $11K? The lowest possible rate these days is about 4%. If we borrow $M (M for mortgage), and pay the interest only, we are wondering how big M can be when $11K = 4%M. Doing some math, we get
11,000 = .04M Multiplying by 100:
1,100,000 = 4M Dividing by 4:
275,000 = M
This is assuming that one is paying down NOTHING on the principal and that heat and electricity are not included in “housing.” Of course, we assume that the bank will want a down payment of at least 15%. Assuming our hypothetical family has this, we see that the house can’t cost much above $325K. There may be homes available in Montclair for that, but not where one pays over $300K for the land itself.
The Wildwood properties have been assessed for $335K, so there is no way that a house built on them will be available to a moderate income family. According to Cary’s very convincing computations, that won’t happen, even if the township sells the property at half its value.

For a family of four, the top annual incomes for “low” and “moderate” are higher: $45K and $72K respectively. The lower income family is still worse off than indicated in the above computation.
A third of $72K is $24K to be spent on housing, perhaps $10K of which must go for taxes. This time I’m going to use some serious mathematics to get a more realistic estimate. Let’s assume that after heat and utilities are included, the family has about $1000 a month to pay off a mortgage. How large a mortgage can be obtained with this monthly payment? The arithmetic is much easier in the complicated formula if I use 4.8%, which is still a good rate. A 15-year mortgage will allow homeowners to borrow only $138,427, but if they pay the $1000 per month for 30 years, they can get a mortgage for $219, 952, still not a lot with Montclair housing prices. Larger monthly payments allow a proportionately higher total mortgage.

In these days of limited township resources and soaring taxes, it seems to me that it would not be ethical for the current Council to sell township property below market value. As I observed before, there are properties in Upper Montclair that have been vacant for some time. Rehabilitating them with the help of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund would be fiscally responsible, and has the possibility of helping many families, not just two.