Of Plans and Planning
This essay is being written in mid-winter, 1999, while citizens are waiting to see legislation that will implement the Governor's open space spending plan, and against a growing national backdrop of anti-sprawl sentiment and federal rhetoric about it. NJAS supported the Governor's plan as the best that could clear the Legislature in a reasonable time frame in 1998, but cautioned in our Green Gram of October 12, 1998 that it was no substitute for a State Plan with teeth, that it was not going to re-vitalize our urban areas or systematically save endangered species and their habitats in the rural areas of our State. Indeed, no one knows how well the Whitman model will work because its implicit underlying premise is that nothing happens without the permission of the private landowners. With interest rates staying low and the economy still booming, those with serious building dreams are in the game for keeps now. And make no mistake about it: for us this is only Plan "B" in land use strategies. Our preference instead is to have ecological science and sound land use planning for the long term good of the State guide the decisions on where to build, not the development interests of private landowners and the powerful state-wide interests that make up the building and real estate lobby. We want to tip the balance in favor of the broad public interest in land use outcomes, and away from the very specially interested parties that now dominate. Our working assumption is that more than half of Planning Areas 4 and 5 (farmland and environmentally sensitive land under the categories of the State Plan) is owned by speculators, developers or farmers intent on selling for development (and of course these categories overlap ). That estimate might well be low, because no one has offered an estimate of what percentage of the approximately 1,200,000 acres in these Planning Areas is under secret private contracts with developers - called "options."

Now the major fault line distinguishing effective land use plans from ineffective ones is whether they deliver predictable and meaningful protections to the areas the plan highlights as worth saving. Thus Oregon and the NJ Pinelands Commission are effective, and the NJ State Plan is not, because the former have clear regulatory standards for protection, are mandatory, and have penalties for failure to comply - and our voluntary State Plan, now going on its seventh year, is still waiting upon municipalities to carry out the protections. 99% of the rural lands in Planning Areas 4 and 5 are zoned for suburban densities or worse, averaging about one house per three acres. The truth of New Jersey environmental history is that when we have had effective land use reforms and programs, they have been mandatory ones carried out at the State level (The Pinelands Protection Act in 1979 and the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act in 1987) . The NJ State Plan has not been effective in achieving its major goals, the two most important of which are to "Revitalize the State's Urban Centers and Areas" and "Conserve the State's Natural Resources." While it is true that there are certain instances of progress in parts of some cities like Newark, Trenton, and Jersey City, on the whole they are failing to attract the private sector commercial ratables that all the other jurisdictions covet, and the land use development pattern outside of Trenton and Phillipsburg, to cite just two examples, continues the same old patterns of suburban sprawl - patterns the State Plan was supposed to correct . And we would also argue that these bright spots are happening quite independent of the State Plan itself.

Politics and Markets
It should be apparent to any fair observer by now that the State Plan can't implement itself along the lines of more effective models (we provided an outline of some of the major changes that need to be made in our Peoples Petition's Green Gram of April 22, 1997) because the Commission members and the Governor do not want to engage in the difficult politics of land use. As a matter of fact, even groups specializing in the State Plan seem reluctant to hold full-fledged debates on its effectiveness. By its own admission, the State Plan ratifies and pays homage to the forces of the market and the existing trend of suburbanization, and calls for growth in all its Planning Areas. Rather than battle the trends, the State Plan was going to be bend them a bit, urging everyone to build more compactly, in Centers, so that we could save land and economize on infrastructure costs. But we have very little to show for 13 years of trying, since 1986. But if The Plan wants to realizes its own stated goals, it's going to have to reign in those market forces to the extent that they conflict with its own sometimes worthy stated goals. Our view is that the market forces in real estate, which lead in places like New Jersey to nearly all land owners trying to maximize financial gain by building to the max under the environmentally terrible municipal limits, will deliver results that nearly everyone will deplore, especially as communities approach physical build-out, taxes soar, and infrastructure bills come due. While all discussions of land use should start out acknowledging market forces, the market should be a tool rather than an end in itself. Good planners know when to rely on market forces and when to substitute other values. Ecological protection, farmland protection, scenic-landscape protection and urban revitalization are all values that may not be delivered by pure market forces. And of course rational traffic patterns. What build-out means for traffic congestion can be seen along the Route 1 corridor, between Lawrence Twp. and New Brunswick. Land use and traffic nightmares are closely connected.

Hollow at the Core
If a land use plan is going to call for areas of denser growth (called Centers in the NJ State Plan), especially when it does so for planning areas delineated for special protections, it is critical, as a matter of planning integrity, that effective, predictable protections for the areas to be "saved" be delineated and enforced. This our State Plan fails to do by leaving the solutions to local government. Since the state Legislature delegated land use powers to the municipalities and they have demonstrably used them to promote growth but not protections, the Legislature and the State Planning Commission have every right to correct the failures. But of course land use policy is a very political matter, and it's the politics of land use that is hardest to talk about candidly in New Jersey. It urgently needs a full debate.

Strong Wind from the Right
There is no question that there has been a strong political wind blowing from the right side of the political spectrum since at least 1980. Its ideological home is the right wing of the Republican Party, which is certainly a factor in New Jersey Republican politics, but perhaps not the determining factor it is in other parts of the country, like Texas or Georgia. Since this conservative force is very anti-government and anti-regulatory, it was bound to eventually have an effect on land use politics, which relies heavily upon both tools to be effective. But as late as 1988-89, it was still possible for Republican Governor Tom Kean to propose a regulatory commission for the NJ coast, which got a very cold reception in the Legislature. (The Jersey coast is a special case in land use politics, and you don't win there by preaching only in the backyards of coastal legislators.) No doubt that since the passage of the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act in 1987, the shift to the right in American politics has made it harder to propose and move effective land use regulations in the New Jersey Legislature. That's the conventional wisdom, and a comfortable one for both parties right now.

What NJ Citizens Think
Yet it is not clear that citizens have given strong endorsement to it. The most extensive polling we've seen on how citizens felt about land use in NJ was done back in 1992, prior to the passage of the State Plan. It was done by the Eagleton Institute of Politics for the Center for Analysis of Public Issues. It contained some remarkable results. When asked whether State Government should be actively involved in Determining How and where the State Grows, 78% said yes; asked whether they were willing to give up some Home Rule in return for Coordinated Growth, 61% said yes; when asked what the best way to conserve Open Space was, 67% said Regulate Land Use to 29% who said do it through Government Purchase. Our sense is that citizens will rally to those elected leaders who will present them with clear alternatives. They overwhelmingly supported the Governor's voluntary willing seller pot of money because that's all that was presented to them and it made sense not to pass up a helpful measure. Home rule is often evoked by those who don't want anything to happen on land use. But home rule and its hold over minds was there, strong as ever when Pinelands legislation was passed, and wetlands too. As these poll results hint, perhaps citizens themselves, on environmental issues, are less in love with home rule than local officials and legislators would have us believe.

Where the Whitman Administration Is
The land use moment in New Jersey requires stronger medicine. And it seems likely to us that the Whitman Administration will not supply it. When the Governor gave a speech on what NJ was up to at the Smart Growth Conference in Austin, Texas, recently (Dec., 1998), it was the anti-regulatory, voluntary nature of the Plan that got the emphasis. (Small wonder to a Texas hosted conference; Texas is notorious for anti-regulatory land use attitudes.) NJAS has been closely monitoring the tortoise-paced revisions to the rules governing water and sewerage infrastructure at the NJDEP - where the State Plan must be implemented if it's to be more effective. However, while implementing the State Plan there is absolutely necessary, without other changes in the Plan itself, DEP regulatory changes will not be sufficient to make it successful. And the Administration has been postponing the tough questions, especially for Planning Areas 4-5. We were posing them in the summer of 1996, and again in March of 1997 and they were obvious ones. Yet the State Planning Commission and DEP were only framing up the issues (no answers yet) in late summer, 1998.

We think the DEP will punt on Planning Area 4, agricultural lands. Yet how can anyone talk about sewage plant expansions/line extensions on a rational, predictable 20 year basis when public land use policy there consists of waiting to see whether land owners want to buy into the Governor's big pot of money? It seems likely the Administration will try to limit sewerage infrastructure expansions in Planning Area 5, but it is not clear at all that they want to tackle a glaring loophole: much residential building in the best rural areas takes place in upscale single family residences built under 50 units at a time, on individual septics and wells. They don't need any DEP wastewater approvals under current regulations. It's the inland version of CAFRA's 25 units loophole, which the Legislature refuses to close. And while the DEP doesn't look like they're going to solve this problem, the question of land areas inappropriately called Planning Area 1-2 needs attention over at the State Planning Commission (Urban and Suburban Planning Areas).

Suburban townships 8-12 miles from Trenton, like Washington Township, have piled up the PA-2's acreage - they've zoned for some 28 million square feet of office/warehousing space in that township alone. That's the equivalent of nearly three set of Manhattan World Trade Center Towers! There's tens of millions more on other municipal planning board maps. Trenton, which watched the Route 1 corridor boom of the 1980's pass it by, is now watching others occur in nearby suburbs, like Hopewell, and is, unbelievably, willing to sell its sewerage capacity off to help the ratables land somewhere else. Same with Phillipsburg and its surrounding Townships in Warren County. This turns the values of even our weak State Plan on its head. Crime is down in our urban areas. Toxic sites are being cleaned up. There are good signs and local development projects in many places in Trenton. But the private commercial office sector is not coming. One of the reasons is because the State Plan has no coherent highway corridor policy. It sends the signal that the land along highways is appropriate for development, but sets no limits. And how many areas in the state, even the most rural ones, are far from a highway? Trenton is losing ratables to municipalities 8-12 miles away, lining all the major highway corridors. Take a look at a map of the corridors near Trenton. Where's the limit? So something is wrong at both the rural end and urban ends of our land use state.

In fact, we believe that it is very difficult for the Whitman Administration, and indeed any likely Republican Administration, to remedy the defects in the State Plan and push a more aggressive urban revitalization program...After all, what have been the practical effects of Governor Florio's last minute (Jan. 1994) Executive Order, and DEP Commissioner Robert Shinn's Administrative Order in the summer of 1996, to begin to implement the plan? Very little. The NJ Builder's, by their legal challenges to the Administrative Order and the DEP's strange pronouncements on "conditions" to the Hopewell-Trenton Sewer Line, are likely to supply us with more clarification about the limits and possibilities of State Plan implementation through the agencies than any sessions we've had so far with the Whitman Administration. And to the Republican right, land use regulations are anathema. Even moderates like Bill Schluter have shown no inclination to put teeth in our State Plan (Bill declined an opportunity to endorse our Petition , as did all the Republicans we asked).

The Cities and the Plan
As we've heard it said repeatedly in front of the State Planning Commission, the attitude towards cities seems to be that "it took 40 years to get the cities in such a sad state and it's going to take 40 years to get them back." That always struck us as an attitude easier for a suburbanite to hold than someone actually living amidst urban afflictions. Yet we don't see systematic urban protest or alternatives being advanced, nor do we see many urban leaders appear in front of the State Planning Commission. Under the present voluntary State Plan, that's not an illogical response, because it simply isn't capable of changing or even challenging the bad underlying realities furthering suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment. With so many life and death issues surrounding any NJ urban leader, should they be spending time in front of governmental bodies that are politically hamstrung? And we guess some urban mayors are fatalistic too. Trenton never had a game plan to seriously land a company like Merrill Lynch, and it's pretty clear Merrill Lynch can't imagine itself in Trenton either. We have to, as a State, do much better. But it just seems to us that what needs to be done goes against a very politically successful Republican game plan centered on the suburbs. By staying with a very voluntary "land use" stategy, which insures an ineffective State Plan, the signal is no tough new land use restrictions in rural areas and no rearrangement of the weak financial incentives to come back to cities. There will be some targeted dollars and programs for very specific urban sites and causes, and those are good and needed, but it's the overall pattern that needs more serious medicine. Good intentions and better planning have to be implemented by tough regulations and a greater commitment of public resources on the incentive side.

The World Turned Upside Down: The Trenton-Hopewell Sewer Line
The proposed Trenton-Hopewell, 9 mile, $25 million dollar sewer line issue is a microcosm of what's wrong. We knew something was askew when they proposed a 9 mile sewer line, one of the longest in DEP history, not to the adjacent suburb (Ewing), but to the next one out. That certainly wasn't going to save on infrastructure costs, as the State Plan promised. The south side of Route 95 should have been a growth boundary, the lands on both sides of Scotch road should have had a different Planning Area designation to reflect their status as farmland with few suburban intrusions, and their value as headwaters protections for local streams and aquifers; and the enormous State subsidies being offered to forgive Merrill Lynch the sales tax on its furniture and equipment (the original $135 million dollar bond sale authorization is being supplemented in February, 1999 by another $90 million or so; the publicly financed sewer line loan and the road improvements costs push the public subsidies into the two hundred million price range) and to go to the wrong place should be reserved only for companies who agree to commit to helping us revitalize our cities. Since even under our tougher plan version and vision no one can "order" anyone to go to urban areas, decisively protecting lands that shouldn't be built upon and vastly restructuring our infrastructure spending and other incentives are going to have to carry the burden. When one realizes that the City of Boston received more than $17 billion in public money to revitalize itself over the past decade, you can begin to see the difference between paltry NJ urban help and real commitment. But the public moral/value dialogue about location decisions is going to have to change as well. Companies can't be ordered to Newark or Trenton. But suburban and rural invitations don't have to be laid out so lavishly - and the informal signals have to change as well. We applaud those companies who have stayed the course or are reinvesting in places like Newark, New Brunswick and Jersey City. But for every Pubic Service Electric and Gas, Prudential or Johnson and Johnson who has stayed, there are many more, like Merck and BASF, who sent the wrong signal, no matter how environmentally friendly their individual site plan was in their new rural location. We say in all sincerity to Merrill Lynch: your employees would be safe in Trenton, near the main rail line of the northeast , and in the good company of thousands of scientists and lawyers, and other professionals who work in the public sector in Trenton.

The Infrastructure Wars
It has been said that saving the best rural land and revitalizing cities are separate problems, separate strategies. We don't agree. Again, Hopewell illustrates the problem. Since under the Whitman voluntary "1,000,000 acre" program we don't know where the land is going to be saved, there are going to be very powerful development interests who don't want to sell, and want to build in the wrong planning place. Guess what? For the bigger projects, they're going to want infrastructure, and perhaps more in the way of public subsidies. Since the cities are under-funded with investment, they're not going to get what they need because public resources are finite. And the private sector is picky. In urban areas they want the best sites, clean and ready to go. To get the scale of the site Merrill was interested in Hopewell done in Trenton was going to cost in the tens of millions. It wasn't done. And needless to say, as Hopewell illustrates, the public is going to have problems when it realizes that some of the key land it would like to save is not in the hands of willing sellers. That means the protracted land use battles and legal struggles that New Jersey is infamous for are going to continue. We predict there will be neither rational allocation of scarce infrastructure resources or legal predictability for developers.

The Missing Coalition
It is clear to us that to remedy these two major problems, and to have a truly effective State Plan, we're going to need an urban-suburban-environmental coalition. We posed that challenge to Governor Whitman's staff on Valentine's day, 1997. We got Reverend Reginald Jackson's phone number, and we made the call, but nothing came of it. But we didn't get the Governor or other Republican leaders bringing key players together in a direct hands-on-way, the way only Governors and ranking political leaders can. After all, that's their specialty, and the power of office. But then again, we don't see Republicans unhappy with the status-quo. But we're scratching our head about the Democrats we've contacted on this issue. Why in the world would they be so indifferent?

The time seems ripe to raise the issue. Some urban leaders are not very happy with the Governor's budget, especially since there is the feeling that this is as good as the surplus and economy are ever going to get, so if there's not much for urban areas under these conditions, what's it going to be like in "normal" or recession times? And the Democrats are clearly searching for a political identity to work positively for them. Senator McGreevey was a good counter-puncher on property taxes and auto-insurance, but since then the party itself hasn't put much of a reform program or vision together. The response to the Whitman property tax relief program was hardly anything citizens could rally around. And we understand that on smaller but symbolically important spending issues, like a license-fee increase for hunting and fishing that would help meet DEP's Fish and Game budget woes, the Democrats are playing out their 1991 tax bitterness by vowing no new taxes, apparently even when it's a form of self tax.

Democrats and Sprawl
But here comes the sprawl issue out of Washington, and Democrats who hadn't won in twenty years in Hopewell won in November 1998 by taking a stand against the growth implications of the Trenton-Hopewell sewer line. Why wouldn't a party that has an aging urban base, and that is at least competitive in the older suburbs, but that does very poorly in the new suburbs like Hunterdon and Ocean Counties not see this as a perfect opportunity to go places the Republicans can't on the State Plan and land use? The time is ripe for Democrats to reconsider their basic "me too" strategy on the State Plan. Of course nationally, they have been very careful not to appear to be too friendly to cities and the minorities who live there. Careful gestures and very limited, targeted programs is what the cities have gotten. Nothing to alienate suburban voters. But in New Jersey, it is clear that many of the suburbs don't want the level of growth that their local plans call for they've had to stage revolts in Pohatcong, Bethlehem and Hopewell to make themselves heard, and it has cost thousands in legal bills to do it, especially in Hopewell and Pohatcong. But what we're beginning to hear in New Jersey, what we're not hearing across the nation, is why some of the growth the suburbs don't want isn't turning instead to our cities. We read that to mean that policy can be shaped to get tougher in the protections and to increase the financial benefits to urban areas without causing a suburban reaction. That makes a lot of political sense for Democrats to explore, and we have painted the outlines for some of their members, but so far we can't see much interest. But back to the question: why are Democratic leaders so content with the status quo, when they're in a deep hole in the Legislature? When we ask this question persistently enough the answer does get whispered back, off the record, with an air of secrecy and resignation: "it's the builder's, and the builder's money that's why they can't move ."

Stuck on the Shoals of Builder Money?
So we thought we'd take a closer look. Not a bad time to do so either. The air in Washington was at least partly filled last year by talk of campaign finance reform - soft money variety - and it's spreading to New Jersey. So we've been busy at several web sites to see what we could find. We thank Neil Upmeyer and the Center for Analysis of Public Issues for the article "Pay to Play, Special Interest Money in the 1997 New Jersey Legislative Elections." (www.crp.org) Among experienced political folks, and even at the folk wisdom level of average New Jersey citizens., significant giving by builders shouldn't surprise anyone. But Upmeyer's focus on the soft money shows alarming trends and sums that we hope jolt even the jaded among us:

Developers (including real estate, construction, and engineering firms) gave a total of $2.6 million in large contributions to the statewide Republican and Democratic committees last year. The largess of the development community more than doubled compared to 1993 ($1.2 million).

Interstate Properties, its partners Roth, Mandelbaum and Wright and the affiliated Vornado Investments and Vornado Realty are mall developers and office building investors. In combination, interests associated with Interstate Properties have given $350,000 over the past five years and $75,000 last year - all to Republican committees - making them the largest donors from the real estate development industry.

Other large donors representing the development community include: Builders PAC ($312,00 over the last five years), Kushner Companies ($301,000 - all to Democrats), Hovnanian companies ($262,400) and Braen Stone Industries ($203,000)….

Over the last five years, development interests have given a total of $7.3 million to the statewide party committees - nearly a quarter of all the special interest money raised in sums of $5,000 or more by those committees. The Realtors and Builders PACs have given another $881,000 directly to legislative candidates during this period bringing the grand total of giving by developers to more than $8 million and making their industry the largest special interest donors in New Jersey.

If anything, Mr. Upmeyer understates the scope of development interest/building giving. He reports that "Lawyers and their firms have given a combined total of $5.2 million in sums of $5,000 or more to the statewide committees since 1993, including $1.7 million last year alone." We think a significant percent of this money leans in the builders' direction, because of the scale of the work development interests and builders give to law firms.

So where does that leave us? Both parties taking heavily from the building interests - is the relationship that crude and that binding that it has put brakes on getting an effective State Plan, an effective anti-sprawl, pro-urban policy? We don't want to bring back vulgar economic determinism, but then again no one should underestimate the influence of these sums of money. When one stops to perform just a few simple math calculations on the sums here, one can see the clear outlines of the influence and the scope of the problem. If that $2.6 million had to be raised by small contributions, say of $25 dollars, it would take 104,000 donors for both parties to do it. And if that were the reality, wouldn't it be good for democracy in the sense that there would have to be a broader base of support and interest in the parties to do it? But instead, the fund raising and power that goes with it is vastly more concentrated. Of course, the linkages are not always direct or the policy connections explicit, and there are other ideological and political factors coloring the spirit of the times, especially the anti-government and anti-regulatory climate…

But all in all, we think the hurdles to effective land-use reform ought to pose less of a problem for Democrats than Republicans, and we say that despite the poor Democratic showing on NJ's last significant land-use reform, the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act in 1987. But they certainly were not shy in the regulatory realm when they took the lead in passing the nation's toughest water pollution law, the Clean Water Enforcement Act of 1990, passed under Governor Florio. When we were sharing our People's Petition to get teeth in the State Plan with likely Legislative supporters in 1997, all six endorsers turned out to be Democrats: Senators Shirley Turner and Gordon MacInnes, and Assemblypersons Reed Gusciora, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Bob Smith and former Hunterdon Prosecutor Sharon Ransavage. We think these endorsements show that there is much less an ideological hurdle for the Democrats than the Republicans, at least in the very late 1990's, assuming that giving up building interest money is an equal obstacle to each party.

The Democrats' Self Interest
But we have higher hopes for the Democrats for other reasons: it is really in their party's own current best self interest to tackle the State Plan /urban revitalization issue. As Hopewell's municipal election should have made clear, semi-rural suburban communities' citizens don't want to duplicate the Bergen County experience (Bergen is how they will look if they are lucky under current local zoning: no farms, at best one house per 1 acre, with a scattering of 3-5-7 acre parcels, surrounded by traditional commercial sprawl along the highways). But the citizens usually don't mobilize until the threat is at the door. They are not going to march down to the esoteric, jargon laden State Planning Commission meetings where so much time is spend going around in circles that change very little. And who can blame them. But we think they would respond to a major political party serving up something that promises to really make a difference on sprawl. In that category we do not include the various current legislative measure to make builders pay their fair share of infrastructure costs, or to encourage inter-municipal zoning decisions /development reviews, and various forms of faux (voluntary) Transfer of Development rights, all of which have the character of too little, too late to change the terrible template of local-municipal zoning. No. We think tough anti-sprawl measures that will preserve the best features of rural and semi-rural suburban life, protect the remaining ecological integrity of forests, watersheds and large contiguous areas of farmland, and save taxpayers the school and service driven property tax increases they so greatly fear are winners for any party in the suburbs. And the Democrats badly need to be competitive there on the State level and local contests. Only by getting a handle on building densities - by protective zoning standards set at the state level - can this be done, and the Democrats are the only ones that can currently cross that big ideological hurdle. But that is not enough. They and we as a state have to go further. At the "other end" of the state, our cities, including our older suburbs, need help.

These areas form the core of the old Democratic base. When they are taken for granted, voters tend not to turn out, just ask Governor Florio. Every urban leader in the State ought to be upset over the outlines and meaning of the Trenton-Hopewell 9 mile sewer line. The ratables and the subsidies belong now in the cities, not the distant suburban edge. Ewing Township, an older post World II suburb which now has significant vacant land due to the abandonment of the Naval Air TurbineTesting Station and the General Motors Plant, surely shouldn't be content to see corporate ratables eyeing Hopewell and further north, the Route 78 Corridor.

An Urban Confluence: Where Liberals and Conservatives Can Meet
We don't think environmental groups can pull off the necessary urban-suburban coalition by themselves. But the Democratic Party can be the catalyst because it has leaders who straddle both worlds and therefore it is the logical convenor and bridge builder. And it has the historical role in this state and country of rallying citizens to an active role for government, supplying a clearly articulated goal and vision which is certainly going to be needed on this mission. But let us be clear: much of the successful, hands-on, small scale neighborhood housing and revitalization work, anti-crime work, and social infrastructure building work that is now the dominant trend and most visible form of urban revitalization, must continue. Making our cities thrive again should be non-ideological work, really, combining the best of conservatism and liberalism in this sense: using conservatism's focus on individual responsibility for self, family and immediate neighborhood, and liberalism's ability to analyze and challenge the maldistribution of societal resources - they need to be combined to get at the forces at work in driving our cities down. The fact that urban gardens can bloom, sports teams return to Trenton, and crime rates go down - and yet still the private sector stays away - ought to worry everyone.

Mt. Laurel & The Cities: Coming or Going?
Some who ought to know better have really given up on revitalizing our cities. They think the only solution to ghetto woes is to break the ghetto up, and give all its residents a shot at a suburban landscape. As a safety valve, for some, that's the way Mt. Laurel housing seems to operate. And we don't support reducing the COAH numbers, as some Republican legislators now propose. But those who see this program as the solution to urban problems really are getting it backwards. We want to see the opportunity for poor urban folks to move where other New Jersey residents can, but we also want to see a genuine reverse migration back to our wonderfully scaled urban areas. The most telling comment we heard at a Mt. Laurel conference held at Rutgers a few years back came from a law professor who wondered whether all the focus on Mt. Laurel wasn't misplaced - and no substitute for an urban "Marshall Plan." And Jane Jacobs, one of the shrewdest and least ideological observers of urban life in her 1961 masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities, would certainly be surprised to learn that one revitalized struggling ghetto neighborhoods by encouraging the strivers and achievers to move out at the first opportunity. We agree with Jacobs: the trick is to keep some of the achievers there, and to make the life and the surrounding context of the urban poor more humane.

The Private Sector: Missing in Action
And we think the private sector jobs have to lead the way. Then residency for those holding those jobs, and the support industries that spring up to support them, is more likely. But as a matter of common sense, if it's true that there is a great unspoken fear of urban areas based on crime and safety, then its much easier and logical to ask someone to begin by working in an urban area than living there 24 hours of day. Isn't it strange? In 1999 the American private sector is held up to be the epitome of knowledge, resources and savvy, within our own society and around the world. How come we don't expect them also to lead the way in the great task of urban revitalization? What's the unspoken message to urban youths in Trenton when the Mayor there, and the urban planners, don't even dream of landing firms like Merrill Lynch?

Private Dreams Won't Suffice: A New Public Purpose in New Jersey
We have a very unique opportunity here in New Jersey. We have a state with a high level of environmental consciousness. And one of the nation's most innovative environmental records, especially on land use and pollution controls. Our cities are rather unique, too. Because none of them have the size of a New York or Chicago, the scale of the problems is not as overwhelming, even as the character of urban suffering and ills seems shared with the larger cities. But our cities have the potential to trade on their wonderful, under 100,000 population scale and the location along riverfronts and waterfronts (Patterson, Camden, Trenton, Newark, New Brunswick, Perth Amboy, Bridgeton, Jersey City and Bayonne …) and along major rail and highway connections - and of course, between the great cities of New York and Philadelphia. When we think of what San Antonio, Texas has done with its dynamic "Riverwalk" stretch along their sleepy, slackish stream of the same name… its makes us angry to think that neither Camden or Trenton along the mighty (relative to the San Antonio River, that is) clean and free-flowing Delaware has anything remotely to match it… but the potential is there. And because there are so many abandoned buildings, vacant lots in our cities, they have the chance to transform themselves into some of the greenest cities in the nation… But none of this is going to happen on a time scale to make a difference in so many human lives - in time - unless it is given a much higher policy priority and becomes a rallying cry and distinguishing feature of our New Jersey political and civic landscape. We challenge the Democrats to make it happen, to be more than an reflex and weak chorus to Republican open space initiatives… and by all means we invite the Republicans to beat the Democrats to the issue.

We make an appeal of self-interest and logic to the Democrats, a way to help themselves compete now where they have trouble, and to do something great for their urban base that has so many troubles… but we hope they will do it for the people and environment of New Jersey too, because it is the right thing to do, and citizens need a powerful public purpose and vision as well as their own personal dreams. And that, it is occurring to more and more citizens, is what's missing from the boom time of the late 1990's: something that can rally citizens, and factions and interests around a great public purpose. This work needs to be done at both ends of our diverse State, and in crucial nodes in between. Who is equal to the challenge? We're ready here with ideas, tools and commitment; when do we get together?