Slowly, a Mount Holly neighborhood is dismantled

Tony Jimenez remembers when as many as 40 people would gather for weekend cookouts in his backyard in the Mount Holly Gardens neighborhood.

"Everybody looked out for each other, fed each other," he said.

Lately, fewer people have been stopping by 328 S. Martin Ave. for roast pig and chicken. The low-income development off the Mount Holly Bypass is gradually being razed to make way for market-rate housing and businesses.

Most of the neighbors long ago accepted Mount Holly's offers to buy them out.

Attached to one side of Jimenez's home is a boarded-up brick house on which someone has scrawled in paint, "Done X w + s." (Translation: The water and sewer connection have been turned off). An orange sign says, "Owned by Mount Holly, no trespassing."

On the other is a bare field where the homes of his friends once stood. Coverings for electrical wires are jumbled on the ground. Jimenez, who is in the home-improvement business, said the roofing on his house had not been properly sealed when contractors demolished an attached home, so squirrels now romp around on his ceiling.

"Everybody here was like family, and they just destroyed it," said Jimenez, 53, who has lived in the Gardens with his wife for 30 years.

Rosemary Roberts, 76, who lives down the street and long ago paid off her mortgage, offered this assessment from behind her chain-link fence: "It is really hell living here."

The Gardens rowhouses were built in the 1950s for military families. The neighborhood over time became a haven of crime, deterioration, and absentee landlords, and township leaders reasoned they could elevate the local economy and quality of life by redeveloping the area.

Mount Holly for a decade has been buying, boarding up, and demolishing the rowhouses to make way for a development with 228 apartments, 292 townhouses, and 54,000 square feet of commercial space.

The township sent inspectors this summer to 57 houses. Final appraisals will be completed by Sept. 15, when Mount Holly will start negotiating with the residents to acquire their homes, redevelopment attorney Jim Maley said.

Officials are working on a proposal to move residents, and Maley said the township was hopeful that it would not have to use eminent domain.

As part of a continuing legal battle over the demolitions, the township filed court papers Monday seeking permission to knock down more vacant homes that it says "pose an imminent threat to public health, safety, and welfare."

More than half the occupants of houses attached to the 40 vacant properties being targeted have not responded to Mount Holly's request that they consent to certain safeguards during the demolition. So Mount Holly is asking the court to determine whether its safeguards are adequate in protecting the attached units and to allow for demolitions to proceed.

About 200 homes in all - or two-thirds of the original dwellings - have been demolished.

Olga Pomar, an attorney for the residents, said the demolitions had caused her clients distress. Sidewalks were torn up and houses improperly sealed off and "left a real mess," she said.

Maley, however, asserted in court papers that there had been no injuries and minimal damage to fewer than 10 properties adjoining the demolished units.

While the lower courts have upheld the township's actions, a group of residents, represented by Pomar, of South Jersey Legal Services, has challenged the redevelopment in federal court. A judge has not yet decided whether to dismiss the lawsuit.

Maley & Associates collected $575,000 between 2006 and 2009 from Mount Holly, according to municipal records.

Though opponents of the project have questioned the costs to the township - about $16 million so far - Maley said Mount Holly would break even.

"No town says, 'You know, I think it makes a lot of financial sense to strip down a bunch of houses and build something in its place,' " said Maley.

"You do this to improve your town in ways that only get measured in the quality of life for your residents. . . . And you have a better place for people to live, including those people that were in the Gardens," he said.

Carmen Vadiz, 72, hears of her neighbors' distress as she translates English for those who speak only Spanish and runs errands for the residents who do not have cars.

"They cry and they make me cry, too," said the retired nurse's aide.

Roberts acknowledged that the overall quality of people in the neighborhood had improved because the redevelopment pushed out criminal activity.

But she and the other holdouts said the project had also made the Gardens an unbearable place to live.

Roberts and her 67-year-old husband felt they couldn't afford to leave.

"He just kept saying he didn't know how much more he could take," said Roberts, who is raising two grandchildren in the Gardens.

Three weeks ago, he died of a heart attack.

Neighbors Vivian Brooks and Nancy Lopez went to Roberts' house to offer comfort and food, in one of many ways that residents here have become a kind of family.

Roberts and Brooks are among a group of older residents who have paid off their mortgages and fear they cannot qualify for or afford to pay a new home loan at this stage of their lives.

Past appraisals by the township - used to pay residents to move voluntarily - pegged the value of homes between $29,000 and $49,000 and factored the blight caused by Mount Holly into their calculations.

Acquiring homes on North and South Martin Avenue, where Vadiz, Jimenez, and Roberts live, is a priority for the township because the road will be the entranceway into the new development.

Vowed Roberts: "I'm going to fight 'em. I'm going to fight 'em to the very end."

That was the plan for Jimenez, who years ago helped the Robertses knock down the partition between two residences to form one larger house. After living like family among the Gardens residents, Jimenez doesn't want to be in a place where people don't talk to their neighbors.

But he can't stand what's happening here any longer.

Jimenez said he recently had agreed to accept $43,000 from the township, plus additional relocation expenses, and move out.