Chaptzem Blog!      

Sent in by a Chaptzem reader

It seems that housing in Lakewood has become the hot topic of today. While everyone is murmuring about it, I as a longtime Lakewood resident, feel that I have a unique perspective on the subject.

In the last couple of years I have seen so much new housing come to Lakewood. There are some good things about that and some bad. I will start with the good. More housing means cheaper housing, which means being able to learn longer. More housing means better housing, which means being more comfortable. More housing also means more people, which means a better community.

Now for the bad. More housing means more unwanted elements in town, which means crime goes up and quality of life goes down. More housing means less sacrifice to live there, which means weaker quality of learning.

Those are only some of the problems. There are however other ones that are much less discussed. Here is one. More housing means more business opportunities. People buying houses on the cheap and flipping them for a great profit. The houses are bought up by rich out-of-Lakewooders and sold at higher cost to Lakewood Kollel families. So, instead of these richer people donating to help people sit and learn in Yeshiva, they are rather taking the money away from them by making a huge profit off of them.

The real kicker is that when there is subsidized housing made available to the yungerleit who can't afford housing, these 'investors' come in and buy up a whole bunch of units at the subsidized rates and then once again resell them at a highly inflated rate to the yungerleit. The problem is two-fold. Not only are they grabbing up the houses, but they are also raising the price of housing and rentals at the same time. I can't think of a bigger achzurious that these people could do than to take away these houses from poor learning families just for a few more dollars.