Continued...

After NCC favored Booker in his failed 2002 mayoral bid, the James administration rejected the group’s proposal for a $35,000 community block grant that it had previously received. Municipal interference also killed a $100,000 federal grant for NCC’s transitional housing program. Zdenek describes NCC as “a growth model built around borrowing, leveraging, and the developing fee that is a huge part of the revenue stream for NCC.” “When the pipeline slowed down,” Zdenek said, the giant organization faltered, and the city’s actions compounded NCC’s internal difficulties. NCC’s debt was mounting; and, after decades of skilled but firm administration, NCC lacked a deep bench of alternative leadership that could deflect James’ backlash. The strain showed, and in 2006, PSE&G sued NCC for $1.8 million in unpaid utility bills. NCC’s challenge, Zdenek says, is to devise a “contraction model” that allows the organization to adapt to a new climate of diminished opportunities while continuing to serve the tens of thousands of very low-income residents who depend on its services.

Julio Colon, director of community and economic development for La Casa de Don Pedro (LCDP), says that NCC’s experience served as a warning to other CDCs and nonprofits about the pitfalls of political engagement. LCDP was founded in 1972 by a group of civic leaders that included Ramon Rivera, a former member of the Young Lords who had been at the forefront of the Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention that helped elect Gibson.

At a time when the polarization between black and white residents dominated Newark politics, LCDP brought the needs and political vitality of the city’s growing Hispanic population into focus. At the same time, Colon attributes LCDP’s success to “senior management that has an ability to get things done and—to be candid—to be apolitical.” Colon says that LCDP encourages political participation through voter registration programs, but does not “take on allegiances with politicians.” Colon says, “I think that’s what to a great extent maintained some stability for the organization.”

LCDP has more than doubled in size over the past decade and is now involved in nearly $35 million in construction, including a 19-unit housing development, a new office and retail complex on Broad Street that is financed with a New Markets Tax Credit, and a partnership with UVSO to build a combined senior housing and adult daycare facility in Vailsburg.

Newark’s CDCs have faced many obstacles to collaboration and political reform, but they have also persisted in trying to coordinate action across the borders of ward and neighborhood. Since the late 1970s, organizations have come together in what is now called the Newark Community Development Network (NCDN). The need for coherent planning in Newark—frequently cited by scholars of the city and its residents—is of deep concern to NCDN members. Inconsistent standards and outdated zoning regulations have proven vulnerable to political manipulation, resulting in haphazard development, selective enforcement, and, in some cases, insufficient (or nonexistent) environmental protections.

In 1997, the James administration began revising the city’s Master Land Use Plan, which hadn’t been substantively updated in decades. CDCs in the NCDN responded by forming the Master Plan Working Group and pressed for public hearings that brought thousands of residents into the process. Some of their recommendations were incorporated into the revisions approved by city officials in 2004. But four years later, persistent delays and the city’s failure to pass necessary ordinances have stalled the implementation of the plan and left nearly a decade of work by municipal officials and community activists in what Zak called “a legal limbo,” while construction continues unchecked.

The Booker administration appears to have made comprehensive planning a priority, hiring Stefan Pryor, formerly of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, as Deputy Mayor for Community and Economic Development and Toni Griffin as planning director. Griffin, Tri-City’s Caldwell says, “understands community development. She comes to NCDN meetings, Master Plan Working Group meetings, tells us what she’s planning to do; she’s been on a tour with us, so she could get a better sense of the community.”

Zak agrees. “The city has a planner now—that’s good—and some planning staff.” But as long as the master-plan implementation remains in a holding pattern, she fears changes will come too late to protect the Ironbound from overdevelopment. “It’s moving slowly, and new development proposals are being approved left and right.”

At the same time, Newark’s CDCs have found themselves at ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. UVSO, LCDP, and Tri-City all provide foreclosure counseling, although Tri-City offers the most extensive, HUD-certified program. Caldwell said she and other Tri-City leaders could see the crisis coming. ”...[W]hen all the development was going on people were becoming overleveraged just to own a home. Not just in West Side Park, all of Newark,” says Caldwell. “The worst of it is not over. Newark gave five-year tax abatements that are going to expire. And people are already overleveraged. Even if it ends up being an extra $200 to $300 a month, you just don’t have it. We’re very happy with the physical change in West Side Park, what were vacant lots now have structures…. Our concern is that 10 years down the road these may have to be demolished or they’ll be abandoned because people can’t afford them.”

In both his campaigns, Booker leaned heavily on a familiarity with Newark’s vulnerable neighborhoods he had gained not through lifelong residency but by tirelessly canvassing the streets and living in public housing. Booker’s administration has promoted Super Neighborhoods, an adaptation of a program created in Houston, Tex. that aimed to streamline city responses to quality-of-life issues. Super Neighborhoods calls for block associations, nonprofits, and other grass-roots groups to draw up a covenant with the city government that ranks the urgency of problems and specifies the solutions each party—neighborhood residents and municipal officials—will try.

Zak calls Super Neighborhoods “positive as a networking thing,” but Caldwell recalls that some community leaders were at first puzzled because “Super Neighborhoods was not discussed with any other community development organizations before it became an initiative. There was a press release, everything was out there before anything was said to a community development group…. You have to talk to the people that are there, or all the initiatives they’re creating are going to fade away once he’s [Booker] out of office.”

In the case of the Ironbound, Zak says, “when the decision was made by the city to implement Super Neighborhoods, we stayed in the middle, wrote the application, and invited everyone that needed to be there.” But Zak noted “vast differences among Super Neighborhoods in different parts of the city. Some are getting stuff done and others are not.” A few of the original neighborhood designations presented by the city used outdated maps, while others “were just too geographically large to be a good Super Neighborhood.” The challenge now, according to Zak, is to make Super Neighborhoods function consistently and effectively across Newark.

Super Neighborhoods attempts to fulfill Booker’s promises to unite residents around a larger vision for their neighborhoods and enable them to solve everyday problems. It also offers his administration a means of regaining residents’ trust in City Hall—after all, James was the third in a succession of three mayors to end their terms with indictments on charges that included conspiracy, misconduct, fraud, and corruption (Gibson was the only one to be acquitted of the most serious charges.) And Super Neighborhoods gives Booker a chance to strengthen his political base, offering supporters a means of building a citywide network to replace the James machine.

During James’s five terms in office, Newark’s veteran CDCs established what amounts to a parallel government at the frontlines of poor and working-class families’ struggle for jobs, dependable services, and affordable housing. It remains to be seen where these organizations will fit in the new political and economic reality of Newark—one marked by promise, as well as longstanding paradoxes that constrict the possibilities for the city’s residents.