![]() ![]() "We needed to get those properties cleaned up and changed into a better, more viable use in the community that would promote development, not restrict it," Landgraf said.ĬRDA’s former executive director, Matthew Doherty, who led the agency when the three rooming houses were purchased, agreed. ![]() He defended the rooming house project as critical economic development. “You’re not going to hit every one.” He noted that the agency had spent $4.45 million in recent years to help renovate 153 units of affordable housing, as well as $10.3 million to build student housing at Stockton University’s Atlantic City campus. “You’re trying to hit all of them,” said Lance Landgraf, CRDA’s director of planning and development. Murphy, who ultimately approves or vetoes CRDA’s spending, declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson, and his office referred all questions to the state agency.ĬRDA officials said the agency has limited funds to service a variety of goals, which, under the law, include redevelopment as well as addressing “the pressing social and economic needs” of Atlantic City residents. “They need to do some serious oversight to make sure that CRDA is operating in the best interests of all residents of Atlantic City and not just an investment arm of the casino industry.” “This kind of activity raises some serious red flags as to how CRDA is operating and should be a wake-up call to legislators in Trenton,” said David Sciarra, who as deputy public advocate helped write the bill creating the reinvestment authority. Now, in response to our findings, one of the authors of the original legislation establishing CRDA is pointing to the rooming house outcomes and questioning how the agency is using its power. Side-by-side rooming houses on Albion Place were bought by CRDA and sold to a developer, which has plans to convert the properties into a boutique hotel. In the case of the three properties that included 108 Albion Place, CRDA spent $1.1 million and flipped them to a hotel developer, who expects to command as much as $500 a night during peak tourism season. The effort also included the rooming house deals. Among the shuttered properties: an addiction treatment center and a soup kitchen. Since then, however, it has spent millions of dollars to remove critical housing and social services from the city’s Tourism District, displacing low-income residents, disrupting outreach efforts and leaving additional blight throughout the city’s neighborhoods, the news organizations found. ![]() And, in turn, the agency pledged to change. Phil Murphy in 2018 had attempted to fix that, commissioning a report that directed CRDA to rebuild neighborhoods by investing in housing assistance, among other community needs. The project is the latest in a string of land deals that prioritized Atlantic City’s tourism industry at the expense of local residents. “The way they went about everything was just wrong, period,” added Nikki Knight, a nursing aide and mother of two who rented there for five years. “We all took care of each other,” said Nada Gilbert, who moved into 108 Albion Place in 2015 and managed the building in the months following the death of her husband, Wayne, in April 2021. ![]() Earlier this fall, the patio was littered with empty beer cans and condom wrappers, and a makeshift bed of cardboard and old sofa cushions was tucked in a corner.Īt the same time, some of the former residents are still searching for stable housing and questioning why they were rushed from the premises in the first place. In the case of 108 Albion Place, a developer has another year to start construction under its contract with CRDA, but in the meantime the property has become the kind of eyesore that officials claimed they were trying to transform. Today, far from the purchase having reduced blight, the three rooming houses remain empty, boarded up, with no signs of activity, while a fourth that the agency purchased last year was demolished, leaving behind a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. ![]()
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