Quote:
Originally Posted by June1
Paterson is a large city. There are a couple of nice areas- the Totowa Section of Paterson and also the Garret Heights area on Garret Mountain. There's another area, I don't know the name, with some lovely large, older Victorian homes. However, there are some terrible, dangerous areas of this city as well. Check with friends or the police about what areas are unsafe to drive thru at night.
|
June1 - I agree with a lot of your observations, but with a few caveats. The Totowa section of Paterson still looks nice, but for how long? Many of the new residents are adding illegal rooms to the houses in this area by dividing up a basement into bedrooms and renting them out - most likely to illegal immigrants. This is one of the reasons I moved away. My neighbors across the street did this, with the result that there were 4 or 5 extra cars on the street. They would park an old van in front of my house. When I was a kid there wouldn't be
any cars parked on the street! Cars were neated parked in the driveway and the parking in front of your house would be reserved for friends who would only be there for a few hours. This gave the area a "well-kept and open look" that has since disappeared. If you call the housing authority about all of these illegal housing modifications, not much will be done. Years ago, they'd make people rip out all these basement and attic modifications, but now, nothing is done to remedy this. The housing inspectors must be living well in the suburbs on all the bribe money they are receiving!!!
I used to believe that Paterson might be "gentrified" in some way. Eastside Park, which is probably already in the throes of this to a large extent, will remain a nice place to live for gay couples who buy those huge houses and restore them to their former glory. But for a young middle-class couple, planning a family, given the quality of the schools, it would be a daunting prospect in almost any area of Paterson. Schools are such an important consideration for most people in deciding where to live. Paterson schools just don't make the grade for any middle-class person that might consider moving there. If you have to factor in the costs of private schooling, even with the lower real estate prices, it doesn't make very good economic sense. You'd be better off buying a house in Totowa Boro or West Paterson and paying more for the house to take advantage of the better school systems those towns offer.
Unless energy prices rise to the point, where the economics of city re-vitalization would force suburbanites to move to cities with good public transportation to areas of employment (NYC), Paterson as well as the rest of NJ's cities will just continue to be "holding pens" of New Jersey's poor.