This is an asinine comment. Helping the current residents of the city doesn’t make Newark a “24sq mile welfare hotel”… whatever that means.

You should read a bit about how investments into communities have guaranteed economic returns. Make cities more walkable? More commerce emerges. Make transportation better and free? More people freely move about to commercial centers without clogging streets with cars and traffic. Provide housing and social services? More people have the capacity for work, paying taxes, buying products and housing, having children, getting educated, and leaving our streets safer and cleaner.

It’s all basically guaranteed based on multiple historical reference points from multiple parts of not just this country, but the world. It’s not even up for debate.

Or we can keep building residential towers like New York City and MAYBE we’ll have some huge companies headquartered here and the employees of those companies might drop a couple of penny’s on our homeless as they step over them on their commute home. Again, historical evidence everywhere.

If you REALLY want the city to succeed, you should want the city government to be the backbone helping the PEOPLE of the city MAKE it succeed.