Sermon: Low Income Housing in Summit

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Low Income Housing in Summit?

By Charles Rush

October 16, 2005

used to have a cartoon on my door from the New Yorker. It featured a guy about my age, looking rather befuddled, standing before the Courts of the Almighty at the Pearly Gates that lead to Heaven. God is speaking and God says, "In order to enter herein, you must renounce all earthly ties." The guy my age is wearing a Princeton Alumni Tee Shirt. The caption at the bottom says, "Tough Choices." Tough choices indeed.

You gotta be true to your school, no question. But in the ethic of meritocracy that defines this decade and the one going forward, elite schools are just one of many markers that post the pathway of success. They are intrinsically fulfilling and they also define for ourselves the sense of who we are in important ways. I suspect that the most common feeling that people have when they move out here from Manhattan or Hoboken is that they have hit the jack pot and they feel that way with reason, the median house costs close to $800,000. It is a great accomplishment to afford that and what a wonderful place it really is.

I remember when we moved here and I was dropping the kids off at Franklin School. My brother-in-law who lived in Manhattan was giving me the business about all those beautiful Mother's dropping off their kids in front of our clean, orderly school. He is leaning out of the window exclaiming "Norman, Norman Rockwell is that you." I'm walking away as fast as I can from him… distance, distance.

I get back to the car and he says out loud to anyone who will listen, "I thought you said this was New Jersey because it looks a whole lot like Connecticut."… It is true to a point. I know when we moved here, I had an irrational desire to buy a dopey Golden Retriever or Yellow Lab so I could have an animal that wouldn't obey me on the sidelines of the soccer field. I figured I could just blend in with compassion and understanding with all the other parents around me.

But, if you live here a while, particularly by the time that your children get to the Middle School, you begin to see that there is a much more diversity to Summit than this narrow experience I just described.

It is true that Summit is about 84% European. But it is about 4% African-American, 4% Asian and 10% Hispanic, the largest group being from Costa Rica, but also folks from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Cuba.

Not completely surprising, our town is very educated. 75% have attended college an astonishing 30% have graduate degrees. At the same time, 7.5% haven't finished high school, 20% of our homes speak a language other than English at home and about 10% of our homes report that they speak English less than 'very well'. Sadly, that would include my children as well, but I digress… You might be surprised to learn that something like 25 different languages are spoken at home in our town and that we come from at least 30 different ethnic groups.

I might also point out that 18% of our town's residents were born outside the United States and about half of those people have come to the U.S. in the past decade. Of the total of people born somewhere else, about half of them come from Europe and Asia and the other half come from Central America.

Income is also more diverse than you would think. 30% of our families live on $200k or more; 60% live on 100k or more. But 40% of our families live on less than $100k and 18% of our families live on less than $50k. I could determine the figure exactly for this week, but it appears that about 10-12% of our school age kids qualify for free lunch or reduced lunch. This reflects the fact that 75% of our town cite their occupation as either, management, finance, or professional and about 10% are in construction, maintenance, transportation, etc..

Finally, when you drive around town, your first impression is that we are a town of single family homes that are very handsomely appointed. That is true but it is also the case that 1/3 of all housing in Summit is rental property. I don't know about you, but I've lived here for more than 10 years and I found that statistic surprising.

Here is a couple more statistics you might find interesting. About 2/3 of homeowner's have a mortgage and 1/3 have paid it off. But of those that have a mortgage, 18% of them are paying more than 35% of their total income on monthly owner costs. You can understand why they would be concerned about property taxes and other cost of living issues. They are up to their neck but they are making it.

Unfortunately the same statistic is also true for the lowest income residents in our town and their safety net is considerably less secure. Of those people in Summit who rent their apartments, 32% of them are paying 30% or more of their household income in gross rent. The figure of 30% is important because that is the percentage number to determine 'affordable housing' in the state of New Jersey.[1]

Our town is more interesting and diverse and frankly, it is a characteristic that keeps people here because they realize at some point that while we want to live in a solid community, homogeneity is boring and not helpful for raising children to become holistic. By the way, our crime rate is exceedingly low compared to the national average and I also discovered in the course of my research that Meryl Streep was born here and that the actor Danny DeVito went to Oratory prep school. So you can't say you didn't learn anything new in church today.

I mention all of these statistics because we have before us the issue of affordable housing in Summit at the moment. And this is not only a legal and political issue, it is, more broadly a community issue and moral and social issue of what kind of community we are going to become.

You probably know that in the early 80's the Supreme Court in New Jersey issued the Mount Laurel decision that essentially required each an every township in the state to devise a plan for the responsible inclusion of the poor in their towns. The aim of the decision was sound. They sought to prevent the clustering of poor people in our inner cities like Newark and Patterson and Camden that create uncivil conditions of social turmoil. The aim was to distribute poverty on the assumption that each township shouldering responsibility for a few should be a better solution that would likewise preclude de facto exclusionary zones based on income.

In the late 80's the legislature in Trenton passed the Fair Housing Act that sought to implement that court decision. It came up with a rough formula that for every 8 homes that were built in a given township, one had to be for low or moderate income. And they put a limit on how many of these could be built for Senior Citizen housing.

As one of the proviso's, they allowed a town to sell a certain number of their 'low/moderate income homes' to another township. In Summit, we have pursued this for the past decade. Instead of building all of our low/moderate housing in Summit, we have given the money to Plainfield and Elizabeth and build low/moderate housing in those townships. However, we are rapidly reaching the end of our allotment to transfer and now we are faced with the prospect of solving the issue of Affordable Housing within our town going forward.

To this end, the Town Council is in the midst of formulating a Master Plan for housing development. Part of that plan is determining the number of Affordable housing units to be built and factoring them in over the next decade.

Essentially, we will have two ways of doing this going forward. We can come up with a rational plan on our own and see that it is implemented. Or a developer will come up with his plan and we will be increasingly forced to accept it with minor modifications. You may have recently read in the papers about the proposal to build a series of Condo units on Glenside Avenue into the side of the hill that is wooded at present. There were a number of issues that the Zoning Board and the Town Council did not like about the proposal. But the developer had set aside the requisite number of units for low and moderate housing, so when the Zoning Board balked at approval of his plan, his group was able to sue the City of Summit for non-compliance with the Fair Housing Act. In this case a settlement was reached but the point is that these kinds of suits will keep coming and coming. We will find ourselves spending tax dollars on lawyers if we do nothing going forward.

That is the legal issue. But I am hoping that the legal challenge opens before us a moral and social vision that is more positive. Because really, when we start to think together about a Master Plan for the next decade, we are asking ourselves what kind of community we want to become, what kind of place is it that we want to raise our kids.

In the Bible, in the scriptures that we read today, we are simply commended to be considerate of the poor in our midst. In Exodus, we read that we should not discriminate against poor people just because we have the power to do it. The Israelites were commended to do this out of compassion remembering that it wasn't too long ago that they were also slaves in Egypt and people made arbitrary decisions on their behalf about which they could do nothing but live with it. So Moses tells them to remember the poor, even as God remembered their Mother's and Father's.

And in the Book of James, we are told to look on people's hearts or their character, rather than their status in life. Don't inordinately kiss up to people that are wealthy because God has made a place for everyone at the table. We need to find a way to include everyone that makes sense.

What God has simply commended, the State of New Jersey has commanded. "You shall not implicitly discriminate against poor people by pricing them out of your township and relegating them all to Elizabeth." Truth be told, if we weren't forced to address this issue head on, we probably wouldn't. But rather than simply look at it as a negative, we need all of us to come together with a constructive moral and social imagination, and together devise a vision of our common life together that is inclusive, constructive and realistic.

This is not the first time that we have dealt constructively with the inclusion of low income housing in Summit. It is just the first time, we have been legally constrained to do it. In this century, there have been two or three other significant housing developments and in two of the three the houses of worship played leading roles in advocating for the proposals, providing the leadership to manage the project, and even raising some of the money to make it happen. In the third case, our Senior Housing Center, people from our houses of worship were important advocates to make it happen.

Going forward, our challenges are more difficult, more expensive, and more complicated. We no longer have any open ground that we can easily develop. And, as all of you know, the ground is so expensive that it dwarfs the price of what you put on top of it pretty quickly. As you know, all the houses of Worship together built a house for Habitat for Humanity in Newark last year. That was made possible because the City of Newark had given Habitat a city block in order to build homes on and that gift made those homes affordable.

Mayor Glatt had a great idea to try to build a Habitat House in Summit. And we would like to do it. It would bring us all together in a great way. But it is not so easy. If we find a lot and put up even the most modest home on it by the time we are finished the total price on the house is high enough that the taxes are large enough that people on limited incomes cannot afford to live in it.

This is why I do not come to you today waving my righteous right arm demanding action and social justice. The solutions will not be easy or cheap and it will take all of us working together constructively to devise something with vision and inclusivity.

It is one of the more profound affirmations in the Bible that God not only cares about the poor, but, according to Jesus, cares especially about the poor. As Gustavo Gutierrez once noted, God appears to have a preferential option for the poor in the Bible. It is the mark of a just and well-balanced community that they include poor people even as they work to eradicate the root causes of poverty itself.

The reality is we are always evolving as a community. Last week I attended the funeral of one of our former Police Chiefs John Sayre, who died in his mid-90's. It was interesting to listen to the Chief describe his family farm down on River road or the Flower nursery's over on Blackburn Place or the Dairy farm on Division avenue just up from the Towne Deli. That was the Chief's memory from the early part of the Century up through the Second World War.

Then you hear people describe the Summit of the 60's and 70's as a town of middle class families. Slowly by slowly, we have become defined by the Exurbia of our Great Metropolitan City, replete with all of the virtues and vices, all of the social antinomies that make New York New York. Who will we become going forward? What unique role will we play amid the myriad of villages and suburbs that compose our great Metropolis? How can we find weave together our diverse talents and traditions into a tapestry that makes us all strong and beautiful? That is our common life together. I look forward to hearing from you in the next hour and over the coming years. Amen.

[1] These all come from tabulations taken from the Census from 2000. You can find the actual tables by going to www.census.gov and selecting "fact finder" on the left hand, drop down menu. Then type in Summit, New Jersey and the full range of material will display.