To the Editor:
It’s become standard practice these days to label one’s critics casually as terrorists, antisemites, libtards, white supremacists, and more. Predictably, Councilman Leighton Newlin, has smeared opponents of the high-rise luxury Stockton Street project — a wide swath of his own constituents, from all across town — as elite racists out to exclude Blacks and Hispanics from Princeton.
As the councilman well knows, the townsfolk he misrepresents want more low-income units than the plan he backs. Concealing that, he twists the slogan “Defend Historic Princeton,” directed against destructive overdevelopers, into a racist battle cry. His blatantly false and purposefully inflammatory accusations discredit him and his office.
In trying to dupe a well-intentioned public, Councilman Newlin proves easily duped himself. Profit-hungry developers, compelled by law to provide a minimum of affordable units, routinely silence criticism by posing as champions of social justice. Credulous local officials then hawk their luxury projects as heroic.
My late relative, Chief Justice Robert N. Wilentz, crafted the 1983 decision that forced New Jersey developers to expand affordable housing. Betraying his intentions in order to unleash private luxury development is beyond cynical.
Defending this latest betrayal, Councilman Newlin plays the race card in order to line the pockets of local players, lauding a scheme that, with its 4:1 ratio of luxury to affordable, will replicate, not reduce, Princeton’s glaring economic and racial inequities.
The councilman claims the project is for “working people who contribute to the life and labor of this town.” Projected market rate rentals, including parking and an unspecified “amenity,” range from $45,192 to $62,664 annually. Try living there on a schoolteacher’s salary in the Princeton public system, let alone the much lower salaries of the other workers in our schools.
Councilman Newlin scorns urgent townwide issues —matters we elected him to address — as racist subterfuges. How, then, will he, a registered real-estate agent, explain to constituents his vote for a sweetheart $40 million PILOT to develop some of the choicest property imaginable — at direct cost to all Princetonians, Black, Hispanic, and white, well-off and working-class?
How will he explain voting to worsen Princeton’s out-of-control traffic mess by adding hundreds of cars right next to Route 206? What about threatened widespread environmental damage by a super-dense project with a massive underground garage?
How, finally, will he and any other Council members explain voting to inflict these harms while awarding a windfall to a private developer who has contributed financially to their own election campaigns? Cui bono?
Councilman Newlin accuses dissenters of demeaning the history of Blacks and working-class immigrants while privileging colonial and early national (read rich white) history. He obviously has not read the writings of the historian critics of the project.
Historic Princeton is the entire town, Jackson-Witherspoon as well as the Western section, The Barracks as well as Dorothea’s House. An injury to one is an injury to all, one reason you’re seeing “Defend Historic Princeton” signs far and wide. It’s called community. Councilman Newlin, the overdevelopers’ friend, prefers slander.