Hoboken Reporter Picks Up SaveTheProjects Story

The story of HHA residents opposed  to Vision 20/20 called 'SaveThe Projects'-- first broken on the blogs, was picked up today by The Hoboken Reporter: 

The 'value' in this coverage is that any Dark Side narrative to discredit SaveTheProjects as blog-chatter has been blown up.   

This is now a mainstream media story.  Presumably vetted and granted worthy of mainstream coverage.   (Dean DeChiaro did a fine job; GA has found him to be one of their best reporters in memory; both fair and somehow able to keep the insipid Caren Lissner from gutting his work)

Now that it's hit the HR-- HHA Executive Director Carmelo Garcia was called for comment,  the Vision 20/20 t-shirt wearing protesters at the City Council can save their best slings and arrows for the mainstream media, not  bloggers.Maybe Dean will do a follow-up story, and interview the gal who slandered Councilman Dave Mello a few weeks back with the despicable lie he'd called the HHA residents "monkeys".

Sadly, the specter of race first pulled by Carmelo Garcia, who insisted anyone opposing Vision 20/20 was "racist", appeared again in the rhetoric of SaveTheProjects, calling an agenda of Vision 20/20's architects "to make Hoboken all white and rich."

GA heartily disagrees.

The only color driving the architects of Vision 20/20 is GREEN.   Green, green and more green.  An alleged deal with a West New York developer for a piece of the Vision 20/20 17-acre re-development.  A $1.5 MILLION developer's fee for ONE 44-unit building to be SPLIT 50-50 with the HHA. (The concept plan shows 25 buildings... ka-ching ka-ching). Carmelo Garcia's refusal to part with his legal and accounting 'team' who effectively block oversight by his own Board of Commissioners. 

How you GET there is another story.

You get there by displacing current poor black, white and Hispanic residents, replacing their homes with luxury and moderate income buildings. Garcia presented proposed Vision 20/20 housing as 1/3 luxury, 1/3 moderate income and 1/3 low-income--  rental agreements for low income housing will be restructured.  As SaveTheProjects pointed out in the WBAI radio interview, how does one take residents from 806 demolished dwelling units and relocate them into 1/3 of 1,002 new units of low-income housing?

You CAN'T.  Displacement or homelessness of HHA residents is a guaranteed result of Garcia's Vision 20/20.

That's the greening of Hoboken-west.

Oink!  Oink!

Sorry, Save The Projects, what is driving Vision 20/20 is not to turn Hoboken "white and rich"- it's to turn it GREEN.  ANYONE who can afford to in the proposed redevelopment will.  But it won't be the low-income residents now living at the HHA.

They'll be long GONE.

At the end of the day, minus unhelpful rhetoric,  SaveTheProjects is a courageous resistance movement in an environment where 'allegedly' such actions trigger retaliation: eviction, bodily harm, property damage, threats to one's children,  the dispatching of goons.

Let's see what Mike Russo, Beth Mason, Finboy (the real 2nd Ward Councilwoman), Tim Occhipinti  and Terry Castellano have to say tomorrow night to the black and Hispanic residents fighting to keep their homes from being demolished.