Dear Editor:
This letter is concerned with the effort to create exceptions to the longstanding city rule that plenary retail consumption license holders may not open within 500 feet of one another. According to the article in the Hoboken Reporter, June 25, 2017, the proposed areas of exception include a very large part of Hoboken; the Southern Redevelopment Area, the Central Business District, the Neumann Leathers Redevelopment Area, the Western Edge Redevelopment Area, the Southwest Redevelopment Area, the 3rd Ward, the 1st Ward, and any area designated as a theater exception.
This would also entail an increase in the number of liquor licenses. Although this proposal is stated to be “in the best interest of the city”, that is certainly not true. Our city is already seriously fouled by the existing bars and this would only get worse if exceptions to the 500-feet rule are relaxed in any way, for any reason whatever. There is already excessive noise from bars on the lower Washington Street strip, a plethora of loud and often violent drunks on the streets late at night, lots of litter, and really ugly traffic congestion due to uncontrollable double parking, as one can readily verify by a visit to lower Washington Street on a weekend night. These conditions persist all night until about 3 am. While the police report that they try to control the traffic and double parking, they also say that after ticketing, more double parked cars spontaneously appear.
The result is chaotic. Because of the double parking, cars in transit are forced to move to the center of the street and even into the opposing lane, creating a dangerous situation. Drunks wander out into the street against the traffic lights, crossing any place along the blocks (very often not at corners) creating dangerous situations for themselves and for drivers. Furthermore, wandering drunks also foul the streets, using our streets as toilets and engaging in sex in alleys. We really do not need more of this. A particularly noxious proposed exception to the 500 foot rule is that of “extraordinary circumstances like claiming an extreme hardship”, which can obviously be severely abused.
For example, a newly opened restaurant subject to the exceptionally high rents in the city (or an equivalently high mortgage/loan) could rapidly find itself in extraordinary financial difficulty and make a plea of extreme hardship to get a liquor license and therewith increase its income for survival. However, such a scenario of bad business planning is a vivid picture of irresponsibility if not deliberate scheming to create another bar. The quality of life in our city should not be subject to such abuse of a “back-door” to yet another liquor license and bar extending the miserable circumstances of the Lower Washington Street strip to other parts of the city.
Sincerely,
Norman Horing
