To the Editor:
There are moments when leadership requires more than polite disagreement. This is one of them.
This is not about old lawsuits being recycled. There are brand new legal challenges underway, one already in appellate court, and another aimed at dismantling the Municipality’s entire Fourth Round Affordable Housing Plan, a plan that had broad community support. That is not routine opposition. That is escalation, an organized effort to strong-arm this Municipality and stall progress.
This is not about preservation, process, or defense. This is about Power and Control.
It is about who gets to live in Princeton, and who gets told, repeatedly “not here.”
And while that fight plays out, the public is forced to pay for it.
Every lawsuit filed racks up legal fees, consumes staff time, and drains public resources. Thousands upon thousands of taxpayer dollars, money that should be going toward services, toward community, toward keeping people here, is instead being burned up defending against the same arguments, repackaged and refiled.
The people bringing these lawsuits can afford to lose. The people paying for them cannot.
That is the part that should outrage all of us.
Why? Because when you have the means to keep suing until you get your way, or until everyone else is too exhausted or too broke to keep fighting, that is not civic engagement.
That is leverage.
And yes, when the consistent outcome of these efforts is to block or delay affordable housing, particularly in parts of town that have long been insulated from it, we have to ask hard questions about intent, impact, and who benefits from keeping things exactly as they are.
If you choose to repeatedly file lawsuits that fail, that drain public resources, and that serve to delay access to housing, then you should not get to walk away without consequence while taxpayers pick up the tab.
That is not accountability. That is a free pass.
This is bigger than one case, bigger than one neighborhood, bigger than one group of residents protecting their slice of Princeton while others are being priced out of it.
This is a test of whether we will allow process to be weaponized. A test of whether we will tolerate public systems being strained by those with the deepest pockets. A test of whether we have the courage to say, plainly, that standing by while others are pushed out is not neutrality.
It is complicity.
So yes, this moment calls for something.
It calls for people across Princeton, especially those who know truth and stand by it, to speak up, to stand up, and to decide whether they will defend a future of economic, ethnic, and cultural diversity, or side with the small-minded forces determined to shut it out.
Because silence, in the face of this, is not harmless.
It is part of the problem.
John Lewis reminded us; there is such a thing as good trouble.
This is it.
And it’s time to make some.
No Kings, no Court.