Issues meeting notes

12/21/2006

Roseland Issues with Fred Krueger

With our guest, Fred Krueger, we had a remarkable discussion of one neighborhood association’s extensive work on identifying issues that need addressing and possible solutions for them. Fred Krueger has a distinguished and varied background working on the national scale in the past, and on an international scale currently, including a huge tree planting effort in Central and South America for CO₂ sequestration. He also presented us with several copies of a book called, The Patriot Test written by Fred, Warren Linney and Peter Asmus. Written in 2004, it compares George W. and John Kerrey’s stands and statements on issues.

For this meeting, we concentrated on his local activity as representative of the Hughes Avenue Neighborhood Association (HAVA). Found in the Southwest quadrant just south of Roseland, the neighborhood is a mix of county and city land. HAVA (my abbreviation, not Fred’s) has identified its top issues. They include an overload of traffic, no parks or youth facilities in the Roseland Area, growing homelessness, growing gang and graffiti problems, no general grocery store, a concentration of convicted pedophiles, subsidence from overdraft of the underlying aquifer (and paving over aquifer recharge areas), too few trees, too many street vendors ringing bells and playing music, increasing prostitution (perhaps pushed over from Santa Rosa Avenue) and a sense that they are not represented by anyone on the City Council.

Their suggestions for solutions include district elections for City Council, an increase in infrastructure development in proportion with the growth there, a mixture of housing types instead of a concentration of low income housing, bringing in a grocery store, improved street light maintenance , video monitoring of graffiti sites, monitoring unscrupulous lenders to low income buyers (resulting in multiple families in small living spaces), building of at least two parks in Roseland, and many others. Fred addressed the steps needed to include and involve the very large immigrant population, including a cultural orientation process for Hispanic immigrants, as well as a greater emphasis on learning English.