By MICHAEL YUN

Every new development casts a shadow over all of Jersey City, and not one is built in a vacuum. As elected officials, we should not and cannot refuse the responsibility of considering, in the broadest sense, how a new project will shape our city’s future.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in development. I don’t believe in subsidizing developers that refuse to take the same risks that every new homeowner takes, refuse to make the same contributions to our schools and county that every resident makes, and create projects that further economically segregate our city. Displacing the blue-collar residents that built this city and replacing them with richer, less diverse residents is not a success story. But when we make sweetheart deals with developers that subsidize high-rent highrises with taxpayer dollars, that’s the story we end up with.

A disturbing argument I’ve heard is that abatements are just the way that things are done. This makes no sense to the general public. We have elections in order to set new precedents. My neighbors, my constituents, come to me and say, “We don’t want the waterfront.” They want to live in their neighborhood, they need reasonable taxes so they can afford to, and they deserve a government that puts them first with a responsible tax policy. The “Journal Square” project, unfortunately, is not going to serve Jersey City residents. This abatement subsidizes a 70-story, 1,840-unit high-rent bedroom community steps from the PATH train with taxpayer dollars, and then bonds $10 million to create the infrastructure improvements for that development.

Property taxes and the cost of municipal services will dramatically increase throughout Jersey City over the next 35 years — and this developer will still be paying a fixed service charge. It’s tough to see where the benefit to residents comes in.

Phase I of this project has an average rental price of over $2,000/month, increasing to an average of $2,838/month in Phase III. Journal Square’s per capita income is $24,555. It’s not rocket science — these are not prices that Jersey City residents can afford. Instead of putting in affordable housing units, this developer is making a contribution of less than 0.4% of the total construction costs to the affordable housing trust fund to build affordable housing elsewhere .

This developer will be making a profit of over $277 million on this project over the term of the abatement — at least $11 million per year after expenses — and they’re telling us that they can’t put 20 percent affordable housing on site out of fear that it will lower property values? They want to be rewarded with an abatement for directly making Journal Square unaffordable for most Jersey City residents? That is not contributing to the community — that is displacing it.

The community, in this case, is substantial. Journal Square is a transit hub, with PATH trains to Newark, Downtown Jersey City, and New York, and seven bus companies with destinations all over the state. It is the physical center of the second-largest city in New Jersey, one of the densest areas of Jersey City, and home to at least 300 stores and over 8,000 linear feet of storefronts. The Journal Square PATH system at rush hour is already overloaded. Residents already pack rush hour NJ Transit buses in both directions. This project will put an enormous additional load on already overtaxed and aging infrastructure.

More importantly, continued reliance on bloated abatements sustains a system of economic segregation, where the wealthy live where they want to and the poor live where the wealthy don’t want to. If our elected officers, as leaders of the city, want to change our future as we promised, then it is our responsibility to build one Jersey City, together, instead of continuing the tale of two cities.

Michael Yun