Dear Editor:
December 31 affordable housing deadline, which required towns to resolve any challenges to their Fourth Round affordable housing plans. RISK losing? so this is why Parsippany Lame Duck Council, threw in the towel, and gave 30 year PILOT Deals for minimum affordable. No one had the due diligence to look into the illegality of this tactic, even though Highlands Communities have legal shields? State Legal Authority should look into this, how can a Town be punished for doing that?
The intention and spirit of the Mount Laurel decision have long lost their meaning. The need is: “affordable,” not what the market will bear. This whole market scenario is based on profits for corporate real estate developers, not on the need for housing as a fundamental passive right of citizenship.
Market Will Bear, does not met the need in an economy that serves few, and where builders determine land use, no matter the land character, be it farmland, wooded lots, or groundwater recharge, flat-earth type proposals, and threats from developers unscruplious lawyers, like the developer that took Waterview Landscape. Types like John Inglesino for example, allowed his way here in Parsippany under former Mayor Barberio.
Much of what we call Parsippany-Troy Hills, including its various services and departments and their employed staff, is a result of the Corporate Tax Rateable Chase. Now, suddenly, this phase of dependency is ending in favor of real estate developers’ new phase of the land speculation use, which is based upon office space, abandoned for housing in our time. So people of Parsippany need to accept the fact that this over-reliance on the “rateable chase” has left Parsippany an outlier in that it is subject to this Housing Need.
Land lost is lost just about forever once overdevelopment has occurred; property can then easily become the enemy of nature and of community character and oneness.
So PILOT capitulation to Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) deals for communities center on reduced funding for essential services like schools, a potential increase in property taxes for existing residents, and a lack of transparency and accountability in how the funds are managed and distributed. We say this lack of transparency and sudden lame duck sudden PILOT tactic at the end of this last Mayoral term. In 30 years much can change in how much funding the Municipality will actually receive.
PILOTs are intended for poor underserved blighted communities, not places like Parsippany. Whatever happened to the “Parsippany being the idle location”? In time the consequences of the PILOTs, and the disenfranchisement of the Federal Power in favor of corporate profits over democracy, and community itself, will further impact the taxpayer.
This senseless development for development’s sake, without providing the actual need for affordability, must come to an end. Spaces created within the realms of these significant developments will or must be made to lower their rents and fees in the spirit and intention of Mount Laurel, and rents will also need to be frozen, so they never exceed a percentage of the occupants’ actual income. The landowner will not suffer, for he owns the land, which nature (or god) created free. Rents and Fees are unearned income for that land, a form of exploitation when allowed. Federal tax dollars not invested in housing needs also shows extreme flaws in our system.
Never in the history of democratic societies has the populace been more removed from the decision-making process than it is today. Our Collective Global future is being made behind closed doors by trade representatives and appointed officials, with the blessing of amorphous, transnational corporations. As a society under unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, we have turned our Republic into a Corporatocracy, and now a Kleptocracy, a government of thieves, billionaires making life worse for the rest of us, a “Don’t Tread on Me” mentality; I got mine, and screw you.
When we see all the tax free church property that abounds here in Parsippany, we must ask, what good is any religion, if economic equity and justice is mistaken for democracy or government as intended. In 250 years we have failed in our quest for a republic toward a common good for all, within the realm of Nature, and its laws of sustainability. Economics is a political decision, not some science or market in a vacuum. Only Nature makes us great, and we have replaced Great Nature, and become Earth’s stewards, and in this we are failing. We have not learned the Ecology of Freedom, and have replaced nature itself, and our way of life to financial jargon, and endless growth. We keep proving we are a flawed species, and the market has replaced political honor and integrity. All things have limits, and capitalism as a way of governance has outlived any good it has or may have brought to this world. It has disenthralled our species from nature, from hence all life came and is sustained; hence all life came and is sustained. Thus community includes, air, soil, indigenous fauna and flora.
Nick Homyak
