South Orange

I've always known that the number "11" was my lucky number. In my early years I believed in horoscopes and read everything I could to discover what was in store for me according to the stars. I learned that as a Piscean I was given to mood swings - from the depths of the ocean to the bright light of the noon sun, as the fish swims just beneath the ocean's surface.

After my tumultuous early career years, when my body was in the U.S. but my soul was in the Philippines, I hit my stride only after I had moved to 11 Warren Court, South Orange, New Jersey and started working at 11 Kulick Road for a Japanese company in Fairfield, New Jersey.

My love affair with number 11 started in my 13th year as a student athlete in De La Salle College, a kindergarten to Masters private school in the Philippines run by the Christian Brothers. Having been told by syndicated astrologers that my lucky numbers were 1 and - less so - 2, there was no question that I would adopt number 11 as the number on my basketball uniform at La Salle. On opening day of the Archdiocesan Athletic League Midgets 1954 season, I exploded with 14 points out of my team's total 42 points. It was the highlight of my brief career as a basketball player.

I had dreamed of a career as a basketball star in the Philippines. I played basketball, breathed basketball, sunned my heavily pigmented skin shooting baskets all day in the hot equatorial sun. Basketball was my life.

My parents had other ideas. They took me to three different cardiologists because they wanted to hear from a doctor what they needed to hear: that I needed to stop playing basketball for health reasons. Long story.

I did not know it as deliverance at the time, but my tumultuous marriage fell into ruins while I lived at 11 Warren Court. It was bad for the kids - all divorces are bad for the kids - but for both my first wife and me it was an opportunity for a new beginning. Would I have gone through it all if I had known how it would affect the kids? Of course not. But, what's done was done and we all had an opportunity to move on. Compliments of 11 Warren Court.

The house was 40 years old and in bad shape inside when we bought it. It looked like a sparkling all-brick English tudor on the outside, but it was crumbling inside. I would spend tens of thousands renovating the interior over the years, when $1000 was still a lot of money. The moldy bathroom. The termite infestation. The worn and dirty carpets. The unfinished third-floor room. The unfinished half of the basement.

It felt like home. I had never felt more at home than after I had moved to 11 Warren Court. I remarked to my first wife that I suspected that I might have been reincarnated and that in an earlier life I had lived in that house at 11 Warren Court.

My former next-door neighbor, a guy named Bob Krueger, who had raised his kids at 9 Warren Court, wept when he saw his house a few years after he had sold it. It was the only house he had owned and in his sickly old age he was overcome with deep nostalgia as the memories rushed while he sat in his car watching the old house - the one and only house he had ever owned.

I was afraid something akin to that rush of emotion would await me upon seeing that old house in South Orange once again. It was my son's spring break from April 16 through April 24, and I took him back to South Orange, where he could reconnect with the friends with whom he first saw the world. I had a lot of loose official business to take care of and spring break 2011 was as good a time as any. It was after all my lucky year - the 11th year of the 21st century - so what could possibly go wrong?

Sure enough, the trip went smoothly as son Paul and I renewed our friendships with old friends and former neighbors. Paul and I stayed at the house of long-time neighbors Mike and Carolyn Banks, who had just remodeled their kitchen and bathrooms at a cost of $100,000-plus. I immediately called my wife to tell her how elegant and expensive the kitchen and bathrooms looked.

It didn't start auspiciously though since we went from the brightness and warmth of the Las Vegas sun and 90 degree weather to winter in New York and New Jersey. When our plane touched down in New York's JFK airport at 6:00 a.m. on the 16th of April, it was winter. What about spring? Wasn't it supposed to be spring? It was obvious from the start that the New York area was the land that Spring forgot. It was cold, dreary, foggy, damp, wet and soporific. And I had lived in this neck of the woods for thirty years?

From across the street, on the lawn of 8 Warren Court, our house in South Orange looked small and boxy. The couple who had bought the house cut down the front-lawn tree that had framed the house and made it look like a tudor on the English countryside. Now it sat there on a tiny lot squat and unpretentious, looking like a decorated box. This was not the house I remembered. I had romanticized this house over the past four years. This was the house that I had thought would bring me to tears when I cast my eyes on it one more time - perhaps for the last time before I moved on with finality?

No, this can't be that same house. This house was small, much smaller than I had
remembered. Now I fully understand why some friends who had seen our house years ago remarked that our house looked like a cute gingerbread house, where Hansel and Gretel might have lived.

Son Paul had the greatest week of his young life. He spent three days with Marshall, his Warren Court friend who is a few months older and with whom he had discovered the hypnotic spell of video and computer games. The two best friends forever never really lost touch because they kept communicating in cyberspace through XBox Live and web cams. Marshall is still a head taller than Paul, but since the two of them move like Thing One and Thing Two, nobody notices the height disparity.

The poignant scenes were reserved for the meeting between Paul and his best friend in school, Sean Taylor. Paul knocked on the front door of the Taylor residence even though the house looked like there was nobody home. I had remarked to Paul that the Taylors were probably not home because it was spring break. "Let's just knock," Paul said.

When Mrs. Taylor opened the door, she was smiling from ear to ear. I sat in the car and observed the scene at a comfortable distance, but it was obvious that she was so happy to see Paul. She called Sean Taylor down and Sean and brother Brian came rushing down the staircase. When Sean reached the fourth or fifth step, he stopped and clutched the bannister and eyed Paul. I had already entered the house and was standing in the anteroom. Paul stood at the bottom of the stairs while Sean had the look of a kid who did not know what was happening all around him. Paul had the same expression on his face he always has. He had the confident airs of someone who knew exactly what was happening because he had made it happen.

Kathleen (Mrs. Taylor) related to me that Sean had often wondered if he would ever see Paul again after we had moved to Las Vegas. Sometimes, Sean would ask his mother to drive through Warren Court just so Sean could see the house where Paul used to live. Paul and Sean were best friends at Marshall School from kindergarten to 2nd grade - both mildly ADHD and both having each other's back as they learned to form alliances on Marshall School's rough and tumble playground.

Paul wanted to see as many former classmates on this trip as we could find. Unfortunately, I had forgotten where his other friends lived. Except Zach Britton, who made a brief appearance at the Taylor residence after hearing that Paul was at the Taylors'.

South Orange in grown-up talk is a disaster. A lot of houses are on the market but are not selling. Everybody we saw on this trip told us how lucky we were that we had sold our house in August, 2007, just before the housing market crashed. Now, every third homeowner in town is trying to sell his house because of the insane property tax system. Property taxes have skyrocketed as the New Jersey state's finances have taken a turn towards possible bankruptcy. The state is no longer there to help the small towns and cities, so South Orange must raise funds by taxing its residents.

The brother of one of my friends in the old neighborhood now pays $33,000 a year in property taxes because his house has been appraised by the town at $1.5 million. Furious, he put his house on the market so he could, like me, become a property tax refugee. Nobody is buying. He is selling his house for $799,000 and still nobody is buying.

He went to the town assessor and argued his case for lower property taxes. He could not even sell his house for $799,000, so how could it possibly have an assessed value of $1.5 million? To no avail.

Some good things - enough to tickle - are happening in South Orange. The old supermarket building in town has been renovated, and new tenants - an upscale supermarket and a swanky restaurant on the second floor called "Above" are the new occupants. The dumpy parking lot of the old supermarket now has a three-story mixed use building, with two floors of ritzy apartments and stores and offices on the ground floor.

On the main street, South Orange Avenue, store owners are fleeing the high cost of commercial rentals, which have been made necessary by the dreaded first-in-the-nation property taxes.

What will become of South Orange as residents flee for low-property-tax areas like Florida, Nevada, Texas and California? For years there have been talk of South Orange and Maplewood merging and becoming one town once again. South Orange did in fact start out as a part of Maplewood, broke off because of concerns about its needs not being met. Now it may be necessary for the two towns to become one once again if those two towns are to have a decent chance to be viable in today's fiscal environment.

The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, is gutting the state government to force a balanced budget. He obviously wants to set an example for the local governments like South Orange and Maplewood. If Christie's state government is the wave of the future, local governments all over the state will be forced to scale back and pool resources. Public education will suffer, roads and bridges, public safety will deteriorate.

More will be demanded of county governments, as small towns and cities become less independent and more dependent on the counties' meager budgets.

The limits of taxing properties in South Orange have been reached. Unless property taxes are rolled back, few residents would want to stay in that town. We, the Lumbas, fled South Orange in 2007 primarily because of our high property taxes. Others before us and still others after us have done the same.

Paradoxically, a monumental collapse of the housing market may be the only hope for the town's residents because that would force the local government to substantially roll back taxes. This, of course, would be the worst thing for seniors who until the housing collapse had been counting on selling their houses and using the proceeds to partially fund their retirement.

Is South Orange the metaphor for the entire United States experiment?