Jersey City Gentrification

Yuppie Mayor Bad News for Black Youth, Labor

The new Democratic Party mayor of Jersey City, former Goldman Sachs equity trader Steven Fulop, has wasted no time in his bid to make the town appealing to professionals and big bankers of the New York metropolitan area. Intent on quickening the pace and broadening the scope of gentrification in the small city, Fulop has unleashed the cops against residents of the poor and heavily black south and west sides. The message: get out of the way. A series of sweeps were carried out involving not only the Jersey City police but also the Hudson County Sheriff’s Office and prosecutor’s office and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. One raid involved more than 40 uniformed and another 40 plainclothes cops; 159 people were arrested.

Fulop has hired James Shea, a former deputy chief of the New York Police Department, to become Jersey City’s Public Safety Director. Besides running the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Shea helped devise training for the NYPD’s notorious stop-and-frisk program, which has victimized hundreds of thousands of blacks and Latinos. Fulop also created the Public Safety Department that combines firefighters, who heroically provide public service, with the cops, the hired thugs of the ruling class, under one command.

Sitting across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, Jersey City was never an appetizing location for the affluent. It was the first stop after Ellis Island for millions of immigrants on their way to somewhere else. Those without the means stayed put. As Helene Stapinski put it in Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History (2001), “The Statue of Liberty pedestal may have read, ‘Give me your tired, your poor,’ but if Jersey City had had a statue in the harbor, it would have said, ‘Give me your completely exhausted, completely broken, completely hopeless and weak, who have no train fare to go any farther’.” Today Jersey City is one of the most racially and nationally diverse cities in the country, including immigrants from all parts of the world. In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jersey City residents from Egypt, Pakistan and other Islamic countries felt the lash of state terror, with many rounded up and packed off to detention centers.

For some time, Jersey City authorities have tried to lure companies and upscale residents from NYC. After September 11, 2001, quite a few Wall Street firms whose operations had been disrupted moved across the river, taking advantage of the far-cheaper real estate. And they stayed on, to such an extent that the waterfront section has been called “Wall Street West.”

A political climber, Fulop padded his résumé by trumpeting how he took a leave from his job at Goldman Sachs to join the Marines after September 11 and did a stint in Iraq. Back in Jersey City in 2004, he made a failed bid for U.S. Congress but later reconciled himself with a seat on the city council. In a town notorious even in the state of New Jersey for its extreme venality, Fulop won the mayoralty in large part by promising to clean things up. (His predecessor, Democrat Jerramiah Healy, saw many of his political allies arrested as part of a federal sting.) In other words, he was ready for business with Goldman Sachs, and who needs a middle man?

A major obstacle to attracting young professionals is the wretched state of the public schools, which have been run by the state for almost 25 years. With a graduation rate of 67 percent, it is hard to get the wealthy to stay in town after their kids grow to school age. So, as in other municipalities across the country, teachers are being made scapegoats. Fulop’s pushing of tenure “reform,” more stringent teacher evaluations and expansion of charter schools is a direct threat to the teachers union. It’s no surprise that billionaire financier David Tepper’s political action group “Better Education for New Jersey Kids, Inc.” chipped in $250,000 for his election: this outfit calls for getting rid of teachers’ seniority and pushes other anti-union measures.

Even in the snake pit of county and state politics, Jersey City stands out for its history of corruption and official violence. This was epitomized by Mayor Frank Hague, who from 1917 to 1947 ruled the then-industrial city with patronage, anti-Communism and the iron fist of a 900-strong police force. Hague was also in charge of the Hudson County Democratic Party, and thus helped determine the fortunes of state and national Democratic politicians, including Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the 1930s, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) tried to organize in Jersey City, Hague mobilized anti-union thugs as well as the cops to keep it out. Socialist Party national chairman Norman Thomas, who was hardly a red revolutionary, was driven out of town when he tried to address workers. The repression was so intense that Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon referred to Hague at the time as embodying incipient American fascism.

Today, most of Jersey City’s industry is long gone, some of its structures replaced by luxury condos and office towers. The gleaming Goldman Sachs building on the waterfront is located where the Colgate soap factory used to be. Most of what remains of unionized jobs in the city is comprised of teachers, medical workers and transit workers. The decaying shells of factories seen from the crumbling Pulaski Skyway and the impoverished neighborhoods far from the new luxury pet boutiques are a testament to the stark inequality and racial oppression at the core of American capitalism. This situation will only be addressed when the U.S. working class takes power and expropriates the banks and industry, using that wealth to rebuild this society for the benefit of the masses.