CHAPTER 9
Immediately following Amazon’s decision to cancel its plans to locate its second North American headquarters in the Long Island City section of New York City, Newark mayor Ras Baraka took to the pages of the Washington Post to urge the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to take another look at his city. One of twenty finalists in bidding for the right to host the new Amazon facility, Newark, Baraka claimed, could incorporate the level of change such a decision would entail without sparking the kind of intense community opposition that prompted Amazon to abandon its plans for Queens. Referring to reports of his city’s own revitalization, Baraka pointed to compensating actions included in Newark’s bid that would mitigate the inevitable pressures on rent and housing prices that would come with such a high level of new investment. If Amazon had the power to transform Newark, Baraka audaciously asserted, Newark could also transform Amazon. “Newark is early enough in its revitalization that we can curate the city we want,” he stated. In setting conditions for Amazon in advance and getting widespread city support for those conditions, Baraka claimed that Amazon’s investment, supported as it would be by $7 billion in state subsidies, would ensure Newark’s trajectory as a model for equitable development. Coming from the decidedly leftist Baraka—who was described as the anti–Cory Booker, alluding to his predecessor’s close ties with both financial and high-tech corporations—Baraka’s promise of a public-private partnership that could work equitably represented a long step from the politics and policies that had defined Newark’s struggle to recover from the uprisings and associated developments of the turbulent 1960s.1
The son of poet and activist Amiri Baraka, Ras Baraka could have been expected to carry forth his father’s legacy forged in the years just before and after his birth in 1970. He was educated in Newark’s public schools and served as principal of Newark Central High School during his term as a member of the city council from 2010 to 2014. When he became mayor, Baraka blended militance with pragmatism. Utilizing the broadly representative Newark Alliance to draw up the Amazon proposal, Baraka’s pitch included what he described as “intentional” community benefits through the creation of employee-owned businesses, development of an on-site STEM school, investments in on-site home services and facilities, and creation of incubators providing access to local entrepreneurs. The proposal had the approval of major city business and educational enterprises and built on a vision of equity for city residents Baraka hoped would follow from “wealth-building initiatives” already under way, including inclusionary zoning, minority contractor development, anchor institution collaborations, and a possible universal basic income experiment.2 With city residents holding only 18 percent of city jobs and Newark’s poverty level well above the national average, Baraka’s vision for an Amazon partnership revealed both high ambition and considerable challenges, given a structure of regional inequity every bit as deep as it had been half a century earlier.
Shadowed throughout much of its history by its close proximity to New York City, Newark nonetheless maintained a position of proud independence as New Jersey’s largest and most important city in the twentieth century, reaching a peak population of 442,337 in 1930. Boosting the state’s largest port and a vital manufacturing sector, it matched a wide range of immigrant workers with sufficient capital for production to generate both growth and prosperity into the 1950s. Despite a small drop in population in the 1930s, the city continued to serve as a center of opportunity into the 1960s and 1970s, when the population declined by over 13 percent as industries hemorrhaged and whites fled the city. Undoubtedly critical in the transition were the July 1967 civil disturbances—since described most often by members of the city’s remaining Black majority as an uprising—which resulted in twenty-six dead and hundreds injured over four days of turbulence. Following a period of transition in which African Americans gained a real measure of power despite the sustained resistance of the city’s remaining white ethnic residents, the disturbances brought temporary attention and relief to the city’s poorest and rigidly discriminated-against residents. And yet, even as Black power advocacy materialized as actual power, survivors discovered what came to be called a “hollow prize,” a city without the resources needed to meet its growing social needs as poverty concentrated in the absence both of adequate sources of paid employment and of government aid.
Despite its sustained reputation for postindustrial decline,3 Newark garnered attention in the latter 1990s as another city on the rise. Sparked by the highly successful opening of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 1997, downtown Newark attracted considerable new investment, prompting complementary assessments and renewed hope for the city’s revitalization.4 Among the cities hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis that accompanied the 2008 recession, Newark attracted renewed attention for its rising prospects in the following years. Although Mayor Baraka made clear his intent was not to foster “the next Brooklyn,” he too seized on the presence of new investment to proclaim that the city’s fortunes were rising. “For decades, Newark has been a symbol of America’s decaying cities, with every box on the list of urban ills checked off: violence, entrenched poverty, vanishing jobs, struggling schools, blighted blocks,” a reporter for the New York Times admitted. “Those problems certainly persist, but they mask a sunnier view of the city: Newark’s slow but steady transformation into a hub for the arts and higher education and the growing vibrancy of its bustling ethnic neighborhoods.”5 Was it possible that Newark—so often cited as the epitome of urban division and decline—might be able to fashion a balanced road to urban revitalization? With former mayor Cory Booker promoting Newark at the time of his February 2019 announcement for president as “the greatest comeback story for any American city right now,”6 could the city actually overcome the paradox of urban revitalization?
It was the novelist Philip Roth who possibly did the most to bring to national attention the sense of loss of a once thriving immigrant city. The son of a leather tanner, Roth in fiction and in public comments deeply regretted the economic decline that put his father out of work and the social shift that undercut the sense of stability he felt growing up in a well-established ethnic neighborhood. Even as he famously portrayed his character Portnoy’s overreaching desire to escape to the pleasures of nearby suburbia, Newark was emptying out, as sixty thousand whites left the city for the suburbs between 1960 and 1967.7 Joining that departure was the family of Richard Florida. Driving into Newark with his father at age nine the day rioting erupted, Florida traced his lifelong commitment to urban improvement to that time and place. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was witnessing the unfolding of what would come to be called ‘the urban crisis,’ ” he later wrote. Although Florida family members still remained in the city at the time, they left soon after as factory jobs, like the one his father held, disappeared forever.8 For the city’s growing Black population—only 17 percent of the total in 1960 but more than 50 percent at the time of the city uprising—prospects were less promising.
The city’s growing number of African Americans inevitably prompted challenges to the white ethnic-dominated political machine that ran Newark on a strict patronage system. Although elected with Black support in alliance with Italians seeking to break the Irish hold over local politics, Hugh Addonizio’s tenure as Newark’s mayor from 1962 to 1970 proved problematic for activists seeking greater representation for African Americans. Although Blacks found positions within Addonizio’s administration, the advent of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, most notably its Community Action Program, strained that relationship to the point of rupture. In addition to the robust presence of civil rights organizations—not just the moderate NAACP but an increasingly militant chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—Newark attracted a pioneer organizing effort from Students for a Democratic Society. Convinced that it was necessary to put to work the criticism embodied in that organization’s founding documents, Tom Hayden and a handful of colleagues settled in to the Clinton Hill neighborhood, where they set to work encouraging poor Black tenants in the neighborhood to fight for their rights.9
Never well-defined nor fully embraced by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty’s commitment to “maximum feasible participation” of poor residents in crafting programs intended to serve them became both a boon to activists anxious to capture federal funds to advance their agendas and a bone of contention with the Newark mayor and city council. Newark was the first city in the country to receive major funding under the new program, and the United Community Council (UCC) quickly formed as a new coordinating organization to direct the use of federal funds. In an effort to incorporate local leadership, the council consisted of a number of community leaders, even as the mayor and other elected officials served as voting members. Almost immediately, however, the issue of representation became contentious as activists argued that the poor residents who were the intended beneficiaries of the program ought to be more fully represented. Moreover, as different neighborhoods formed advisory councils to the UCC, many organized under the leadership of existing activist organizations, including Hayden’s Newark Community Union Project, and the issue of whether programs should be simply administered at the local level or devised and directed there became a further point of contention.10
The struggle in Newark over the direction of antipoverty funds took place in the larger context of urban renewal, constituting seventeen projects and more federal investment than in any other city in the country after Norfolk, Virginia. Most contentious was Mayor Addonizio’s effort to lure a small medical college in Jersey City to Newark, where a new and much-expanded facility would provide a range of services. Responding to demands for space from the college, the city earmarked an area at the heart of Newark’s predominantly Black Central Ward. Such an expansive offer covering land largely populated by poor tenants was considered a gambit to call the college’s trustees’ bluff of choosing an alternative site outside the city. According to testimony later taken from a spokesperson for Mayor Addonizio, the maximum land the city thought was needed was 30 acres, but in order to preempt the college’s demand for 150 acres, the city offered 185 acres in an area where “we were going to proceed with renewal in any case.” With as many as 3,500 residents facing displacement under the plan, newly energized community organizations, including the UCC and CORE, rose to residents’ defense, even prompting a warning at one council meeting that the threat of massive displacement was inviting violence.11
As the government went ahead with its plans anyway, the stage was set for the uprisings that ignited on July 12, 1967, across from the area’s Fourth Precinct police station. Seeing a Black man beaten as he was arrested and dragged into the station, a crowd, bolstered by the presence of an expansive public housing complex across the street, quickly formed. Already burdened by a history of poor relations with a police force that was 90 percent white, onlookers became increasingly testy, as they sought unsuccessfully to learn the fate of the man in custody. Despite efforts by community leaders to mediate tensions between onlookers and area police, the situation escalated overnight and into the following days, as youngsters pelleted police with missiles and looting and gunfire followed.12 Despite his anger about police violence, Tom Hayden in his own account of the event maintained his faith in community participation. “Violence can contribute to shattering the status quo,” he asserted, “but only politics and organization can transform it. The ghetto still needs the power to decide its destiny on such matters as urban renewal and housing, social services, policing, and taxation.”13
Inevitably linked with the civil disturbances in Detroit, the violence in Newark helped prompt creation of not just the National Commission on Civil Disorders but a state commission that was equally damning of the social conditions that underpinned Black discontent. Unique to the situation was yet a further state report, from the Police Benevolent Association, largely exonerating the police from culpability in the twenty-six deaths that resulted and further fueling white backlash in the city, which took the form of vigilante organizations defending not just the city’s remaining white neighborhoods but depicting the police as the central city institution worth supporting as the upholder of civil society. That position was further politicized by Victor Imperiale’s successful drive to parlay his position as organizer of citizen patrols devoted to maintaining a line between white neighborhoods and the Central Ward into a seat on the municipal council. From there, he pressured Addonizio not to accede to any further Black demands. So, while the aftermath of the violence resulted in some modest new commitments to address the underlying inequities so obvious in predominantly Black neighborhoods, the pendulum swung decisively away from the kind of participatory programs activists had been pressing for. Office of Economic Opportunity funds for community action were withdrawn, as other programs shifted to the control of elected officials. Johnson’s successor Model Cities program contained provisions for citizen participation but under much more tightly circumscribed conditions.14 UCC continues as an organization today, but only as a social service agency administering programs authorized and acted upon through approval by city government. The living memory of the uprisings served as inspiration for further organization and agitation,15 but even as such activism flowered, the resources it sought to empower local communities dissipated.
Most visibly, the organizational work and accompanying public education that materialized in the mid-1960s had its greatest success in 1970 with the election over Addonizio of Kenneth Gibson as the city’s first Black mayor. Trained as an engineer, Gibson had actively sought the democratization of the UCC and its accountability to neighborhood concerns. Failing to beat Addonizio in his first run for the office in 1966, Gibson owed his election four years later to high expectations for change and further exodus of whites from the city following the uprisings. His initial priorities lay with directing resources to those most in need, but shifts in national policy under Richard Nixon and at the state level diminished resources for social programs, forcing Gibson, like other first-generation Black mayors, to fall back on development to sustain city government. By the time he had served four terms, with the Reagan administration further reducing resources for cities, Gibson, although presiding over a city that was now 52.4 percent Black, was vulnerable to the charge that he had not done enough for those he had championed after his early success. Now another activist known for his efforts to address poverty in the 1960s, Sharpe James, assumed the mantle of social welfare, as he defeated Gibson for mayor in 1986.16
Figure 29. Poster created by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Newark rebellion of 1967, a major marker in the city’s history and in public memory, 2017. Newark Public Library.
James campaigned on a platform devoted to overcoming the legacy of “two cities”: one, downtown, had been the beneficiary of Gibson’s largesse in the form of subsidies and incentives to business, while the other consisted of neglected neighborhoods, including the Central Ward whose commercial spine along Springfield Avenue had been slow to recover from the effects of disinvestment that had followed the uprisings. Able to maintain his position in power through the astute application of city patronage, James managed to become Newark’s longest-serving mayor through five terms. Although he utilized public funding when available to serve needy constituents, overall his administration continued to favor business investment when opportunities arose. He took full credit for the success of the performing arts center, as well as the decision, facilitated by a deep subsidy from the Prudential Company, the city’s largest business, to stay in the city. Typifying James’s approach was his drive to secure a facility to accommodate a professional sports franchise for the downtown.
The initial target for a downtown arena was the New Jersey Nets basketball team, which was playing in an outdated facility in the Meadowlands, some miles outside the city. James’s hopes for luring the team to Newark rose in 1998 when Newark philanthropist Ray Chambers bought the team together with Camden-area businessman Louis Katz. A force behind the construction of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and a leading investor in the building of arts facilities downtown, Chambers pushed hard for the team’s relocation to his hometown. But New Jersey governor Christie Whitman resisted the subsidies that would be involved, and it was not until the election in 2001 of James McGreevey, who owed his nomination to last-minute support from James, that a deal seemed possible. Because planners insisted that the new facility be located within easy walking distance of Newark’s Penn Station, a fight ensued that was spurred both by residents who had built their own unlikely community amid underutilized buildings devalued by downtown decline and by the businesses remaining there. James was unrelenting in his effort to clear the way to development. Although he was no longer mayor and the Nets had dropped out by the time the facility opened in 2007, the location of the Devils hockey franchise in Newark was widely praised, and James took much of the credit. Of the $375 million cost, the city paid $225 million. A grant to the Devils of the surrounding land was one of the largest ever made to a privately owned professional sports team. Before the arena was completed, the city’s public housing agency, which served as the arena’s developer, diverted $3.9 million in federal funds allocated for housing vouchers to pay for twelve privately owned lots needed to make way for the facility. Only a public outcry revealed and reversed the decision.17
Among the critics of the proposed arena was the New Community Corporation (NCC), which aided area residents in suing the city to block the site selection, an effort ultimately dismissed in court. Formed in January 1968 in response to the city uprising of the previous year, the NCC thrived as a multiservice organization at the heart of the city’s Central Ward. The organization constituted best practice in the field by putting the needs of the area’s poorest constituents at the heart of their housing and community services, including child care, job training, and medical treatment.18 The NCC did not like the way the city was ramming its plans through the permitting process without due consideration of neighborhood objections. In its opposition, the organization spoke out of a powerful tradition of community self-determination fostered especially in the 1960s. But even as Newark was promoting development downtown, the environment for community development was shifting in ways that privileged for-profit development over mutual aid and self-determination. Looking at West Park on the city’s western border, two scholars identified a shift in the state and city funding environment aimed at taking advantage of undervalued land to encourage new housing development for middle-income buyers and an attendant deconcentration of poverty by encouraging current residents to use housing vouchers to move to other locations. In what the authors identified as a neoliberal turn, they asked, “Have the rhetoric and aspirations of broad-based community revitalization been hijacked and used to mask a new process of gentrification?”19 Although the authors offered no immediate answer to their question, their concerns and those raised from residents displaced at the arena site appeared to have found one possible champion among local officials: Cory Booker. As a member of the city council, Booker intervened on behalf of those facing displacement downtown, even as he fought to protect affordable housing options for city residents.20 With city poverty still the highest, along with Camden, in the state and the school performance low enough to initiate a state takeover in 1995, James was vulnerable to the same criticism he had directed at Gibson, that he had failed the majority of his constituents.21 And in this Booker appeared a possible voice for those left behind.
Facing considerable skepticism for his upbringing in the predominantly white suburban community of Harrington Park and his credentials as a Rhodes scholar, Booker nonetheless created a stir by confronting a number of festering social problems after moving to the city while he was in his last year at Yale Law School. Elected to city council at the age of twenty-eight in 1998, Booker consistently tackled tough issues, including gun violence and poor housing conditions, only to be outvoted on specific programs by entrenched members of the council. To highlight his commitment to social justice he staged a hunger strike in support of increased police patrols, and he moved into a dilapidated and underserved public housing complex, Brick Towers. Challenging James’s effort to take credit for a “Newark renaissance,” based largely on reinvestment downtown, Booker insisted, “It’s time for a renaissance for the rest of us.” Thwarted in his effort to unseat James in 2002, despite a wave of favorable publicity, much of it generated outside the city—including a glowing Academy Award–nominated documentary, Street Fight—Booker finally gained the position in 2006 after James, under a cloud of possible prosecution for corruption, declined to run again. Booker signaled his continued commitment to social justice during the campaign when he joined fellow tenants in protesting James’s charged decision to proceed with the demolition of Brick Towers, even as residents, including Booker, were still in place.22
Although he often invoked his success as mayor of Newark while running for president in 2019, Booker’s tenure as the city’s chief executive was decidedly mixed. Stressing the urgency of the situation the city faced, he announced an ambitious set of plans for his first one hundred days in office, prompting the New York Times to editorialize, “His urgency is understandable. Newark’s moment is now. If the city is to rid itself of corruption and shady dealing, if its demoralized police force is to be reinvigorated, and if businesses are to be convinced that the city is a sound investment, Mr. Booker cannot afford to linger.”23 Behind that push lay a mandate both for justice and for economic recovery.
As a first step, Booker reorganized the city’s largely dormant city planning office and hired Toni Griffin, fresh from her work as a planner in Washington, D.C., to head it. The capstone of Griffin’s effort in Newark was a revised master plan released in 2009. Reflecting Booker’s own values, the plan, according to Griffin, was capable of lifting the city from the disaster that had continued to reverberate from the 1967 uprising, putting the needs of residents above those of private profit by providing them “sustainable and equitable access to opportunity.”24 To do this, the plan detailed a number of employment and neighborhood investment strategies, but the core of the proposal—important enough to be released as its own “Living Downtown Plan” a year earlier—was the determination to make Newark a “city of choice,” primarily by drawing investment to the central city as a location to live as well as to work and shop. Reflecting Griffin’s six years working with Washington mayor Anthony Williams,25 the plan called for the addition of fifty thousand residents by 2025. The plan and Booker’s introduction to it were very frank in pointing out that success in such an endeavor could prove threatening to existing residents who had stuck it out during hard times. “These fears touch upon the deepest challenges of race and class and they should not be dismissed,” Booker admitted. But in language that clearly laid out the rationale for privileging development aimed at higher-income beneficiaries, the plan argued that rebuilding the city’s fiscal health required attracting more of the region’s higher-income households, starting with millennials. It was their presence that would increase revenues that could then be invested in infrastructure that would help everyone else.26
Even as recession devastated the city, driving foreclosures up and deepening poverty,27 investment flowed downtown. Due at least partially to Booker’s own charisma and connections, some early success owed as much to circumstance as earlier investments had under James. Among the contributions he elicited were a number of large checks to help buy equipment for the police department and financing for a housing project from the rock star Bon Jovi.28 Most visibly, he induced NBA great and Newark native Shaquille O’Neal to underwrite a $7 million renovation of the city’s only movie house and to develop the first residential high-rise to go up in fifty years, an $80 million building called 50 Rector Park. Located near the performing arts center and described on a city rental portal as “downtown’s hottest new living located steps from Whole Foods, Ironbound, Newark Penn Station, the Prudential Center, NJPAC, Military Park, and the new riverfront park development,” rents for one-bedroom units were offered at between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. Besides O’Neal, Goldman Sachs was a major investor, contributing $50 million toward construction. With all units going at market rate, the building remained without subsidies for affordability.29
More broadly, spurred by the 2005 official state declaration of Newark as “an Area in Need of Rehabilitation,” and the 2008 Living Downtown Plan’s robust endorsement of reducing regulations and heightening incentives, the concept of living downtown materialized as a stream of companies relocated to the city. Among these were Amazon’s audio book branch Audio.com., Pitney Bowes, and Manischewitz. Most notably, the Panasonic Company announced that its U.S. headquarters would move into a new office tower in downtown Newark from nearby Secaucus, and the city’s most prominent business, Prudential Life, announced it would build a new $444 million office tower a few blocks from its existing downtown headquarters. Notably, both Panasonic and Prudential took advantage of state tax credits, $125 million for the Panasonic building and $250.8 million over ten years for the new Prudential tower. Panasonic also received a thirty-year tax abatement. Of the twenty-five projects in development in 2011, twenty received public financing.30
Social issues proved more difficult to resolve. Seeking a breakthrough in public education, Booker partnered with Republican governor Chris Christie to secure a commitment from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of $100 million for the city’s beleaguered school system. Announced on the Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago, Booker with his backers Christie and Zuckerberg, promised not just to repair education in Newark but to save it in all of America. Zuckerberg’s commitment appeared to open up a hopeful chapter in a long history of inadequate inner-city education. But the promised changes exceeded the performance. Booker’s closely associated decision to name Cami Anderson, a rising star under Chancellor Joel Klein in the New York City Department of Education, as the new superintendent of schools and to advance the prospect of further choice outside neighborhood schools, proved both divisive and ineffective. Anderson, who was white, was paid $300,000 a year, and after a number of contentious encounters with residents she refused to continue to attend school board meetings and floundered in the position. Dale Russakoff’s thorough assessment of the experiment revealed both Booker’s naïveté and the unfortunate results of his experimentation.31
As a presidential candidate, Booker unveiled a bold and detailed affordable housing program,32 but in his own term as Newark mayor, neither the amount of public housing nor the pool of affordable housing units expanded. While the expansion of Brick Towers, where Booker lived until the complex’s demolition in 2006, was announced in 2008, construction on a new replacement facility did not begin until 2017. Similarly, Booker, who took a lead in the U.S. Senate on carceral reform, made the issue a central feature of his presidential candidacy, but his actions and the results that followed were neither as successful nor as progressive as he claimed. He did bring down the crime rate his first year in office as Newark mayor, relying in large part on the no-tolerance strategy his choice of commissioner, Garry McCarthy, brought with him from his tenure under New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Newark residents wanted greater safety in their neighborhoods, but for many, the high incidence of stop and frisk and racial profiling, in the words of a New York Times report, “four decades after the riots … were akin to throwing gas on a smoldering fire.” A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union prompted intervention by the Department of Justice and Booker’s ultimate accession to a less inflammatory approach.33
From the start it was clear that Booker was neither as invested in neighborhood justice as Gibson had been nor as interested in orchestrating daily government operations to maintain support there as James had been. His idealism, longtime activist and critic Robert Curvin concluded, remained strong throughout his two terms in office, but his understanding of the depth and complexity of urban problems remained shallow. His promise, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike contended, “was to save a city that had been hemorrhaging residents, industry and hope since the riots that ripped it apart 45 years ago. But a growing number of Newarkers complain that he has proved to be a better marketer than mayor, who shines in the spotlight but shows little interest in the less-glamorous work of what it takes to run a city.”34 Challenged while still in office by the more militant Ras Baraka after his election to the city council in 2006, Booker made the expected bid for higher office with his election to the U.S. Senate in 2012. Baraka assumed Booker’s seat as mayor two years later.
Baraka’s political career was built in considerable degree by contrasting himself to Booker, whom he alluded to at the time of Booker’s own inauguration in 2006 as one of those “political leaders who are more adept at pleasing Hollywood than the people of Newark, and who would sell our precious assets away to people who only want to exploit the city.”35 The asset Baraka had in mind particularly was the city’s water system, which Booker was attempting to privatize, but more generally he remained hostile to tax giveaways to business when so many residents continued to suffer from poverty and its effects. Baraka maintained his stance on the council and in his successful 2014 campaign for mayor, when he was opposed by Seton Hall law professor and Newark native Shavar Jeffries, who drew his support largely from Booker’s most visible backers.36 In an eloquent eulogy for his father delivered in January 2014, just months before his election, Baraka invoked his father’s determination “to speak truth to power,” encouraging fellow Newark residents “to build and control their neighborhoods not destroy them. To read more and write more to get them to see the world with themselves in it. The same way my father did for many of you.”37 Proclaiming at his inauguration that the city needed a radical mayor, Baraka went right to work on the signature issues of his campaign: restoring city control over public schools and addressing the housing crisis brought about by the recession and the wave of foreclosures that followed.38
As a candidate, Baraka had embraced a controversial approach to restoring home ownership to those who lost it during the recession. With nearly seven thousand properties in foreclosure and a loss of $1.8 billion in home value, Newark’s housing instability was among the worst in the nation. Under a plan supported by the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the city would use a kind of “reverse eminent domain” whereby it would appropriate foreclosed or “under water” properties, claiming the action was in the public interest, then work with a third party to resell them at a reduced rate to the original owners or others in need rather than allow them to fall into the hands of speculators. Embraced by the adjacent city of Irvington, and pioneered nationally by New Jersey Community Capital of New Brunswick, a nonprofit housing group, the idea appealed to Baraka even though it was fought by the banking industry and opposed by some progressives fearing misuse of eminent domain.39 Even as Baraka took office, Irvington abandoned its plans to embrace the tactic under the influence of a new mayor. Baraka persisted, however, with a plan to test the project in two areas of the city hardest hit by recession. Conceived as part of a “model neighborhood” initiative in the West and South Wards announced in 2014, the plan to use eminent domain fizzled in the end. With so many forces lined up against the approach, the city’s redevelopment program for the West Ward, when finally approved in 2016, was entirely conventional, prompting Baraka’s progressive allies at NJ Working Families, who had been promoting the approach, to express bitter disappointment.40
Baraka had more success in restoring city control of the schools, when Governor Christie agreed to end state control in 2016. Significantly, however, it was now Booker, who had failed in his term as mayor to achieve that objective, whose enhanced power as senator enabled him to secure Governor Christie’s approval. In fact, Booker and Baraka made up not long after Baraka’s first election as mayor, as each man recognized the importance of a good working relationship.41 Most notable, however, was the way the self-described radical Baraka effectively built on Booker’s campaign to attract business to the city. As the prime developer with Shaq O’Neal of the city’s new office tower on Rector Street, Waseem Boraie declared, “I came because of guys like Cory Booker bringing excitement to Newark and my project got done because of Ras Baraka’s administration.” Indeed, Baraka was sounding a lot like other mayors of cities recovering from postindustrial decline when he told a group of regional business leaders, “We want to make downtown a neighborhood. Millennials want to live in a downtown next to trains and entertainment, and we have to provide for them. The country is turning back to cities, and the city is where it’s happening.”42
Having inherited a $93 million budget deficit at the outset of his tenure, Baraka might well have been excused for giving priority to seeking new tax revenue. He managed, however, to maintain an inclusive agenda. Even as he announced the conversion of the long-shuttered Hahne’s department store into a vibrant commercial and academic space hosting Whole Foods, Barnes and Noble, a Rutgers University arts incubator, and apartments, Baraka declared that 40 percent of the residential units would be affordable. Well after Booker left office, Shaq’s Rector Street development committed to training local residents for unionized jobs on the project. Eighteen were placed as apprentices.43 Baraka could also highlight his approach at Teacher’s Village, a $150 million mixed-use project near Penn Station aimed at providing affordable housing and a rich living environment for the large number of educators commuting into the city to fill its more than 50,000 educational jobs. Constructed from the accumulation of 77 different parcels of land along 11 blighted blocks of Halsey and William Streets, the heavily subsidized project included 200 apartments designed by Newark native Richard Meier and 65,000 square feet of retail. Its success in filling apartment units renting from $1,800 a month was inspiring possible construction of similarly focused development, for fire and police, as further incentives to draw their residences back into the city. More broadly, Baraka pushed for and secured from council requirements for the inclusion of Newark residents in all contracts with the city, including construction, and affordable housing in new residential development. Under an ordinance Baraka signed in October 2017, no project could receive a subsidy that did not include provisions for affordable housing. Henceforth larger projects would be required to set aside 20 percent of their units each for tenants earning up to 40, 60, and 80 percent of area median income. As of 2019, 923 of the 4,200 market-rate units in the development pipeline fell under affordable categories.44
Revitalization during Baraka’s tenure did much to realize the vision of the city’s Living Downtown and master plans. Representative of the newcomers to a booming downtown was the 256-unit luxury apartment complex known as Vibe. Checking off every need a hip new resident might want to live and play as well as work downtown, the board chair of developer Strategic Development Partners described the $80 million project as a “technology-rich environment with abundant lifestyle amenities for Millennials who prefer the energy and convenience of cities like Newark.” Promising on its website “resort-style amenities in every detail,” the building was to include a rooftop pool and whirlpool spa, indoor and outdoor yoga and Pilates studios, and a covered dog run.45 Beyond individual investments, renewal extended out from the “four corners” at the intersections of Broad and Market Streets to the adjacent Ironbound sector and to the Passaic River, as envisioned in the city’s planning documents.
Long known for its Portuguese and Brazilian settlement and its affordable housing and dining establishments, the Ironbound was a logical target for new investment. A minor league baseball stadium in the area had served as the third pillar of downtown transformation at the turn of the century, along with the sports facility, subsequently named the Prudential Arena, and the performing arts center. One of seven such minor league facilities constructed in New Jersey in the late 1990s—and at the cost of $34 million in public funding the most expensive minor league park ever built—the six-thousand-seat facility attracted crowds for a while, but attendance declined sharply as the novelty wore off. Like the Camden minor league park, the Newark facility was torn down to give way to a higher use. The decision coincided with the city’s commitment to the conversion of underutilized land along the Passaic River, opening the area to pedestrian recreation as Riverbank Park. That amenity, combined with a city zoning adjustment allowing greater building heights in the area, prompted plans for a new mixed development on the twelve acres where the stadium had stood.46
Conceived by the New York–based Lotus Equity Partners, Riverfront Square was anticipated to include up to 2 million square feet of Class A office space; 1.4 million square feet of residential space, including up to 2,000 apartments; 100,000 square feet of retail; 185,000 square feet of hotel and conference space (including 240 hotel rooms); and 30,000 square feet of arts and cultural space. Describing the project on its website as “twelve acres of transit-oriented, work-focused, bold play, and enhanced-living,” the company touted its connections to the city’s rapidly growing technology and business center, adding that over 800,000 educated millennials resided within 45 minutes of the development. Although a largely self-contained city within the city, the project nonetheless planned to incorporate a supermarket and a hall for taco stands and brisket trucks as a means of connecting with the neighborhood. The arrival of additional related facilities included 3rd Space, describing itself as the “first boutique luxury co-working space in the heart of Newark”; Blink Fitness; and the 109-room boutique Pestana Hotel.47 “If a city geek could wave a wand and cause only wise urban changes, that spell would place apartments, stores, offices, and entertainment within walking distance from one another and close to public transportation; make sure that housing isn’t just for the rich and that pedestrians feel safe from both traffic and crime,” Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Justin Davidson observed. “Many cities are chipping away at a few of those goals; Newark is tackling them all with a mixture of policy, legislation, and incentives. So long as builders need subsidies and permissions, the mayor wields power and demands a measure of trust, so that every chance to make a buck gets rolled up with a nugget of social good.”48
Baraka insisted on balancing redevelopment with human investment, but such a goal proved hard to maintain. Nearby, quite a different situation was playing out. Even before the advent of so much new investment, public housing residents in the area’s Terrell Homes dating back to 1946 faced the prospect of unwanted relocation. As the facility deteriorated over years of neglect due to underfunding, public housing officials considered tearing it down, a position that drew Mayor Baraka’s support in 2017. With some 75 of the 196 units still occupied and without clear options for alternative apartments available, residents objected, drawing at least a temporary reprieve from the new director of the housing agency. But the arrival of upscale development nearby—and the fears of gentrification that came with it—were not lost on tenants. “When they printed up the blueprints for that park, those blueprints were made for us not to be here,” one resident asserted. “If they close this, it reduces the Black and brown population. They don’t want us in the Ironbound District. They’re getting rid of the Blacks and Hispanics.” Following a revised plan to retain 60 units through rehabilitation and adding another 215 units of new construction, city officials sought private investors through the Opportunity Zone feature of the federal tax bill of 2017. The city received support from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund personnel to manage the program, but with an immediate price tag of $24 million and an additional $46 million in maintenance needs projected over the ensuing twenty years, success was not guaranteed. In the meantime, only a portion of the remaining residents were eligible for vouchers that would allow them to find alternative housing either for the long term or while construction was taking place.49
Uneven development required a robust public response. Promising in his third state of the city address, in 2017, “that this renaissance that all of us have been waiting for, leaves the station with Newarkers on the train,” Baraka announced a novel Hire.Buy.Live initiative “to advance equitable and inclusive economic development strategies in Newark.” Aimed at increasing the low number of city jobs held by Newark residents from only 18 percent by connecting the unemployed to full-time living wage jobs in participating anchor institutions, and increasing their commitment to purchase locally and to provide incentives to their employees to live in the city, Newark officials described the program as the first time an American city “has sought to transform its economy by combining employment, procurement, and residential strategies.” The initiative stemmed largely from the Newark-based New Jersey Institute for Social Justice’s 2017 Bridging the Two Americas report, which urged the creation of a robust training and apprentice program connected to the city’s premier corporate and anchor institutions.50 Hosted by the same Newark Alliance that coordinated the Amazon proposal, the ensuing program featured an anchor collaboration devoted to “leveraging their philanthropic assets, organizational assets, and business capabilities to drive inclusive community economic growth, create more economic opportunity, build a healthier community, and generate a richer quality of life for all Newark residents.” In addition to providing incentives to employees to live downtown, member institutions determined to increase their purchasing from local vendors from 11 percent to 20 percent.51
Forward Newark, a 2018 report commissioned by the mayor and directed by top officials at Rutgers–Newark and the Essex County Urban League, amplified the strategy with further proposals for stemming tenant evictions, turning abandoned properties to good use through the creation of a land bank, and insisting on community benefit agreements for new development, among others. Identifying the city’s overarching goal as “equitable growth,” the report declared, “we seek to be a city in which every child has the opportunity for a world class education, every person has a decent affordable home and a living wage job, every neighborhood is a safe neighborhood, and no individual is poisoned by a toxic environment.” To ensure compliance with its directives the committee recommended the establishment of a widely inclusive Equitable Growth Advisory Commission charged to “help ensure that Newark’s redevelopment activity promotes inclusiveness rather than inequality and is a model for fair housing in central cities.” Mayor Baraka embraced the idea and announced formation of the commission in December 2018.52
Figure 30. Newark mayor Ras Baraka presenting his 2019 state of the city address. “Passionate and at times fiery,” Karen Yi reported for New Jersey Advanced Media March 13, 2019, “Baraka underscored the idea of building together—building new pipelines to educate young people, building new programs to hire locals and building opportunities for homeownership.” Courtesy Mayor’s Office, City of Newark.
In his state of the city address in March 2019 shortly after his reelection, Baraka reminded his audience of his days as an activist but nonetheless declared, “I cannot afford to be just an activist. I have to have a mind to build. And I have to do all that I can to get all of you to agree to be builders with me as well.” Yes, he admitted, “Newark is growing, Yes, people are coming here. Yes, it can be a scary notion as we watch what has happened to cities experiencing rapid growth around the country, but the status quo is also a scary notion, one we have lived with for decades. We do not have the privilege to do nothing to rail against development in our city, while those that can, go shop, play, and vacation and enjoy in other cities while opposing them in Newark.” To assure his audience that he was working to direct new development in equitable directions, he cited the passage of the city’s new inclusionary zoning ordinance, stronger rent control, establishing the right to counsel to protect residents facing eviction, home foreclosure assistance programs, and appointment of the commission for equitable growth.53 A land bank, modeled after Detroit’s initiative, gained state authorization with his strong support only months later. Newark also received support for reducing income inequalities when it was one of ten cities selected to participate in a new national initiative to identify, pilot, and measure the success of interventions to accelerate economic mobility for city residents.54
Steps toward equity could not disguise the ongoing challenges faced by a city burdened with the costs of supporting so many poor residents and so many deferred needs. In what proved to be a major challenge to the city, inspectors discovered in 2017 high levels of toxic chemicals in the drinking water. Baraka made the mistake at first of assuring residents that the problem was manageable before its vast extent became clear. Even as critics cast blame on multiple parties, the problem festered. It took a commitment in the form of a $240 million loan from Essex County executive Joseph DiVencenzo Jr. to resolve the issue by providing enough money to replace the city’s lead pipes on an accelerated twenty-four- to thirty-month schedule. “You could hardly ask for a starker example of the bifurcation that is plaguing American cities: a glass tower on one block, poisoned water on the next,” Justin Davidson wrote. “As faucets in Flint, Michigan, and subways in New York have proven, in a nation with an old and brittle infrastructure, the most basic services can be levers of inequality.”55 The crisis was serious enough to further compromise the lives of those already living in Newark but also to raise fears about prospects for sustaining Newark’s revitalization. “For Newark’s redevelopment to continue at the pace seen in recent years,” an assessment from New Jersey Spotlight concluded, “the city will have to work at rebuilding something more daunting and delicate than lead service replacement lines: trust.”56
Even as Newark joined other cities including Detroit and Chicago in the first signs of sustained revitalization at the turn of the new century, Rutgers University’s Kathe Newman warned of the challenges ahead. “Demolishing poorly constructed and maintained high-rise public housing, breaking up areas with concentrated poverty, and building new “affordable’ town homes in formerly devastated neighborhoods all look positive and exciting for lovers of cities,” she conceded. “But the transformation of the urban façade does not address cities’ challenges, which are more difficult to assess and address, especially in an era of federal devolution and so-called compassionate conservativism. As cities embark on what is each day more clearly a new page in their historical evolution, it is necessary to ask about the real costs of urban revitalization.” To their credit, Newark’s leaders, most notably Ras Baraka, recognized those costs and sought through multiple initiatives to address them. For an astute observer like Justin Davidson the fear remained that “maybe the market will heat up and follow its usual ruthless logic, sweeping away compassion and well-meaning policy.” For the moment, however, he chose, as many in Newark did, to believe “Newark has a shot at getting the urban future right, a prospect that excites even the jaded.”57