Other Business: Squalor

Building inspectors raided a house on Reed St. near the tenement where five Jersey City police officers were shot two weeks ago. Officer Mark DiNardo died of his wounds.

"The building was a neglected property on that corner and it's a quality of life issue for residents, especially in that neighborhood in light of what happened," Mayor's Task Force Chairman Mark Redfield said today of Thursday's inspection.

When city officials entered the building at Reed Street and Bergen Avenue at about 1 p.m. police detectives with them quickly arrested two people who are not residents of the building after finding them doing drugs, Redfield said.

Inspectors found the three-unit building at 678 Bergen Ave. had been illegally converted into four units and they cited it as being an illegal boarding house when they learned rooms in the fourth apartment had been rented to three separate tenants, Redfield said. (Jersey Journal)

Inspectors fined the building's owner $50,000.

This is a bad joke. Does it really take a shootout with military weapons for Jersey City inspectors to do their jobs?

The city is full of buildings with illegal units. In the neighborhoods around Journal Square, from first-hand experience--I have worked canvassing the area for a government agency--I would guess that somewhere around fifty to sixty percent of the houses and apartment buildings have illegal units. Many of them are unoccupied, but they are there, ready for the first comer.

And these units are no deal. They are almost always leased at the market rate.

The government does nothing to stop it, and it does nothing to ensure that the illegal units meet even the most basic safety requirements. It never cracks down on the slumlords trying to soak every last penny out of their derelict properties from their poor, usually foreign, tenants.

Two guys shooting dope in a vestibule is a nuisance. Thousands of landlords collecting millions of dollars in rent from poor tenants forced to live in squalid conditions because of the combined malfeasance of the landlords and the indifference of the city is a scandal.

In a very real way it's a sick bargain between landlords and politicians, the only folks who seem to matter in the city. Landlords don't mind so much when taxes go up year after year after year when they can milk the properties for extra revenue. (What's worse, when rich developers need favors, as I might have mentioned, they can go to nearly any official in the city--say, the mayor and the president of the municipal council--and offer him some money for some extra consideration of tax breaks and variances. When it's the typical property owner, he has to get by with such petty cheating.)

It's a problem to be ignored until there's a major crime that's on all the newscasts. Then, code inspectors come in and find enough violations that they can fine the owner about a fourth of the building's probably value.

But, why this building? Surely all the buildings on Reed St. could use a visit from the buildings department. It is not a very nice street.

D.C.