NBC on Newarkers 'Making a Difference'

Each Friday, NBC Nitely News broadcasts a segment called "Making a Difference" (pair to ABC's "Person of the Week", shown around the same time, the end of the half-hour evening broadcast). Yesterday, a preview before a commercial break showed a scene that looked a lot like Newark's ubiquitous new housing, so I checked back after the break. Sure enuf, NBC reported on three principals of a Newark development firm that recently completed five new two-family homes in the West Ward, "affordable homes, marketed to police, nurses, teachers — residents who are the city's lifeblood". The 2 minute and 22 second video is currently online (after a brief commercial), but I don't know how long it will remain online, so you dasn't dally.
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The report, by Ron Allen, says that assistance with down-payments is provided by a nonprofit organization, but a sign on a chainlink fence for The Community Preservation Corporation is on view only instantaneously; I was able to read it only by Pausing the video. Then I could look it up online to show a link to it here.
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The three young men are named in the report: Jeff Montgomery, Victor Baker, and Hassan Keith. That allowed me to find their company, Mid-Atlantic [Investment] Alliance (the website shows "Investment" in the title bar and at various points in the text, but not in the large-type logo on the main screen). That website shows that the college at which the reporter says they met twenty years ago was Rutgers. Newark? Or New Brunswick? The Mid-Atlantic website doesn't say. One imagines R-N. That site also uses the term "infill", which may be the term I remembered as "backfill", for building in vacant spaces within old towns rather than sprawling out onto undeveloped land. Either term makes sense, linguistically, and both make better sense politically, economically, and ecologically than continuing to ravage the countryside when we have building sites available in areas that long ago were very well provided with all the infrastructure needed for housing and businesses.
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One of the principals of this infill-housing venture was born in Buffalo, the other two in Newark. Baker's family might have carried him with them in a move to NJ when he was a child., but perhaps he, individually, moved here after he found he really liked it, while attending college. We can expect a lot of current Rutgers-Newark students to move here after graduation too, if we can provide the housing and youth-culture excitement they crave. I was surprised, in checking Dictionary.com to make sure that "Buffalonian" is correct (it is; are you surprised that I'd be correct? But I still check, even when I'm fairly sure), that Buffalo's population is now substantially less than ours! And if the Mid-Atlantic group and other developers keep building fine new houses, Newark's population will continue to grow by addition of good people.
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The NBC report was a tad less positive than I'd have liked. Ron Allen described Newark as "a tuf city", and not in the flattering sense of ambitious and self-assured, able to overcome all obstacles. Further, one of the principals says he knows what Newark's reputation is, but instead of saying that that reputation is out-of-date and largely wrong now, he says merely that if we who are from here don't work to improve things, who will?
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Still, Newark gets so few even vaguely favorable mentions in major media that we have to be grateful for this report. Maybe the report will itself "Make a Difference" to the perception of Newark elsewhere in the Nation.

The description that comes up alongside the video when you hover the cursor over the thumbnail about this report reads:

In one block in Newark, N.J., affordable homes now stand in place of vacant lots, thanks to a group of entrepreneurs hoping to change a neighborhood and make a difference.

What block might that be? I heard "South 9th Street", then found an address (#78) for one of the buildings on the Mid-Atlantic website, then Mapquested it. See all the work I do to find these things for you? It turns out to be little more than one block from the abandoned United Medical Center/NJ Children's Hospital site.
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Coincidentally, Joan Whitlow of The Star-Ledger today wrote about that complex in a column that decries mismanagement by Essex County and loggerheads between the two co-owners, the County and a corporation, over how to develop that large site, whose buildings are crumbling while the owners squabble. I left the following comment:

An "agreement" is a "contract" only if a court says it is, and in order for there to be a contract, there must be "a meeting of the minds". If Essex County MEANT that ideally the site should be used for a healthcare facility, but if that proved financially or otherwise impossible, some other socially useful purpose should be found for it, the failure of the lawyers drafting the document to say that in so many words should not consign the property to perpetual disuse, as a cancer in the community.

Many other cities have understood healthcare to be an industry of the future, and created world-class institutions that bring people from all around the Nation and indeed planet to receive cutting-edge medical care on the frontiers of science. If the City of Newark, County of Essex, and State of New Jersey are not willing or able to work together to create a "Newark Clinic" on the level of a Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, they can at least arrange with Pemberton to cut everyone's losses and create SOMETHING of value at the United site.

Further, there is a parking structure at the United site that could be used, with a free shuttle to Downtown, to bring shoppers to Downtown areas where there is now almost no parking during business hours. Can't Pemberton and the County agree that the parking structure can be used AS a parking structure (and not itself as a healthcare facility) to benefit Newark businesses? (See the fourth foto at http://newarkusa.blogspot.com/2008/08/newark-2025.html.) That would be a start. And once you find a way to agree on something, the pattern of headbutting is broken, and maybe the parties can find other things to agree on.

Everyone agrees that Downtown is very short of parking, and that the absence of parking is crippling the core's revitalization. We don't have to build hugely expensive parking structures, nor level large areas of Downtown for parking lots, if we already have unused parking structures and space for parking in areas not so far away that could be used with the mere addition of frequent, free, shuttle-bus service. As against building multi-level parking structures Downtown, how much could a free shuttle bus cost? And as against the architectural and quality-of-life costs of turning Downtown into a patchwork of parking lots, stitching together outlying parking facilities thru a network of smoothly operating, free shuttle buses is an obvious and very low-cost solution to Downtown's parking problems. Even so, might some former manufacturing or warehousing structures be strong enuf to be converted to highrise parking structures? It's all well and good to think about converting some of them, such as the Graphic Arts Building, to residential lofts, artists' studios, and the like if we concede that they will never again be used for the types of businesses they were built for. But if there is as yet no market for such things, and there is a severe, current need for parking, I for one would much rather we have garages there than either empty buildings with broken windows or parking lots if long-term vacant buildings were demolished.
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Might some Federal economic-stimulus money be secured for parking structures and/or shuttle buses with plenty of room for shopping bags and other large packages (modeled on the shuttles at airports), especially buses that run on natural gas, electricity, or some other "green" motive power? Newark could ask for money for parking structures, and if that weren't approved, go back and say, "Well, then, how about shuttle buses to bring in shoppers and diners from distant parking lots? That would cost a lot less. How about it?"

I showed this picture May 20th, but show it again today as an example of a great big building, centrally located, that we might use now as a parking structure — if with elevators instead of ramps — if it is strong enuf and realistically has no other use. Nothing precludes, mind you, converting a highrise parking garage to lofts or other uses down the road (so to speak). Recycle, reuse, resurge.