The on-going “Tonight Show”/YouTube feud between Conan O’Brien and Newark Mayor Cory Booker will evidently reach its culmination Friday when Booker appears on the NBC broadcast.
In the interim it has spawned a spate of news stories, an “intervention” by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and, earlier this week, was the focus of Bob Herbert’s New York Times op-ed column.
In paraphrasing Conan, Herbert reports that he “threatened to form an alliance with the mayors of nearby municipalities, thus “creating a geographic toilet seat around the city of Newark,” making it possible to flush the city down the figurative bowl.”
The sad thing is, that’s kind of true. This scenario already exists in that the mayors of many nearby municipalities are allied against Newark in the worst possible way. All except the poorest towns--like East Orange--prohibit affordable housing anywhere in their jurisdictions. Despite the state Supreme Court’s famous Mt. Laurel decision, which declared that each town must have its “fair share” of affordable housing, zoning policies have managed to keep New Jersey highly segregated by race and class.
