Councilman Newlin needs to Quit Race-baiting and Serve Public Honestly

To the Editor:

As an originator of the signs seen across Princeton, I’d like to correct some misinformation. The signs could have read “Defend Historic Princeton from Rapacious Development and a Complicit Town Council” but that wouldn’t have fit. No matter the wording, “Protect” or “Conserve,” Councilman Newlin would have distorted the facts and hurled ugly accusations.

It’s shocking to see an elected official cynically condemn large numbers of his constituency as racists.

Worse, Newlin knows our concerns have never been about Black people or Brown people or poor people. From Day One the issue has been greedy overdevelopment, involving two key points: 1) A luxury high rise with eye-watering market rents with the densest development in all of Princeton, and with environmental damage and exacerbated traffic that will destroy a quiet, historic neighborhood; 2) minimal and temporary community housing, a fig leaf on luxury development, that evades long-term affordability in Princeton. Newlin knows this but chooses to dog-whistle about race.

Newlin doesn’t mention that residents presented the Council with an architect-designed plan for a less-dense, environmentally sustainable, 100 percent affordable development, with more total low-income units, attainable with some vision and creative financing. Instead, our elected officials opt for an easy fix that just happens to award a local developer tens of millions of dollars at Princeton’s expense.

I was raised in Princeton by a single mother who, even with an Ivy League degree, could never afford to buy a home. We moved each time the rent increased: from Ewing Street to Greenview Avenue to Moore Street (for six months until we found an apartment on Pine Street) with a brief stint on Littlebrook, until we landed in a duplex on Jefferson Road, where my mother sublet our bedrooms while we were away at college. Even in the 1980s, Princeton was unaffordable for single working parents. After a divorce, I was fortunate to a move my own children into a Princeton Community Housing unit at Merwick. No one in Princeton cares more about affordability than I do. I’ve lived it.

Councilman Newlin needs to quit race-baiting and serve the public honestly.

Caroline Cleaves
Edgehill Street