Writing Rebuttal to Message in Advertisement Placed by Ad Hoc Committee of Historians
To the Editor:
This is a rebuttal to a paid advertisement “Historians In Defense Of Historic Princeton,” published in Town Topics on April 23 by the Ad Hoc Committee of Historians in Defense of Historic Princeton.
I write as a citizen and resident of Princeton to express deep concern with the severe decline in housing affordability, an attendant decline in socio-economic diversity, the absence of constructive discourse, and the acutely polarizing politics these have all helped to engender throughout our nation.
Our historians’ plea in defending historic Princeton describes the targeted development as “destructive,” inciting fear. I believe otherwise: Nothing is to be eliminated or even obscured. Indeed, the project is additive, even palliative, as I describe further below.
Further, the authors divert and agitate with “privately built” and “luxury” descriptives.
Fundamental laws of economics require some balance between supply and demand to ensure probity in pricing. When demand exceeds supply, scarcity drives prices higher. Housing demand across the U.S., New Jersey, Mercer County, and Princeton, have all risen. The requisite supply of housing
has not. Affordability has suffered greatly. Our school teachers, police officers, health care workers, store clerks, inter alia, can no longer afford to live in our town.
As a longstanding resident of Princeton, I observe how trends in rents and housing prices have led to a sharp decline in affordability, echoing and augmenting a problem endemic to our nation. The socio-economic diversity that once characterized our community has given way to an increasingly atomized homogeneity. To my mind, this is poisonous to our culture and our democratic heritage.
Preserving history is but one dimension of a problem we must address. The defense of our democratic institutions is another, more pressing, one. I view the current challenges to those institutions as grounded in a backlash against gaping disparities in living standards. Housing is a key element of those imbalances.
What restrains us from providing more, desperately needed, housing along with preserving the better parts of our history? How else, economically, can we incentivize provision of more and affordable housing absent the indirect subsidy provided by market-rate units?
“Few if any American towns are as distinguished as Princeton, connected as it is to the breadth of our history. Its landmarks, beloved by tourists as well as townspeople, are many.” I agree. Yet I also note that, as part of that same history, certain cohorts of our citizenry were once restricted to specific parts of town and unwelcome on campus.
While our nation’s laws have corrected for these moral transgressions, our economy, misguided policies, and learned behaviors secure their repetition by other means.
I appeal to our community to look beyond parochial, single-issue concerns and reflect more deeply upon our mutual and collective needs as a nation.