Hoboken Reporter, August 13, 2000

Dear Editor:

I recently read, in the Hoboken Reporter, that Valone, Gans, and Gotham Partners Management, bought the Maxwell House property for $18 million. At an 80 percent share, GPM spent $14.4 million. They sit on it for two years and then look to unload it for $75 million, to provide a profit of say $61 million or 423 percent. Valone and Gans spent $3.6 million for their acreage with the decaying piers likely being the worst of it and I'm guessing the most expensive to develop. They are willing to sell a pier for $15 million at perhaps a $14.5 million or 2,900 percent profit. This would gift them the rest of their acreage, and for this privilege, they also want the opposition silenced.

These people are redefining hubris to propose such deals! Furthermore, if Hoboken real estate is this golden, there had better be no such thing as tax abatements to developers of this magnitude!

On top of that, the Coalition for a Better Waterfront won't consider buying a pier, not citing the price, but that it is too "impermanent." Yet Valone and Gans want to put expensive homes on a pier. Will they mention this impermanence to their customers? Also, how impermanent is Joseph Barry's pier housing plan? (Oh, and did you notice, a line is starting to develop for pier housing projects?)

It gets better. For all the development we've had, with their promises for city revenues, Barry says that the city is running a $10 million deficit every year! If the city is that far in the hole now, then how much more development will it take before we go bankrupt? I ask you, no matter how moderate your feeling on development may have started, can you walk the streets and read the paper, without getting pushed into one camp or the other?

F. Haas
Hoboken