Queen Latifah goes to her hometown of Newark, NJ to build affordable housing
Queen Latifah went to her hometown of Newark, New Jersey, to build affordable housing for local residents.
“I’m a little bit emotional that we got walls up, we got windows,” the actress, TV host and rapper said Tuesday at the groundbreaking ceremony, according to NorthJersey.com. The townhouse development is put together by BlueSugar Corporation, where Latifah is co-president; builders Life Assets Development and GonSosa Development are also partners in the venture. The 76-unit structure will be mixed-use project that will include 20 three-family townhomes, their rents set at the market rate of $1,800 a month.
According to reports, Latifah whose real name is Dana Owens began looking to do real estate development in her Brick City hometown in 2006. The project was announced a decade later, but faced a few challenges.
“It took a while, but we stayed with it, and it changed, and it morphed, and we stayed with what we needed to do, and the timing is right right now for this place to rise,” she said, referring to the project’s name, RISE Living. The moniker, an acronym for “Rita is Still Everywhere,” is a tribute to her late mother, Rita Owens, who passed away in 2018 of heart failure. Owens was a schoolteacher in Newark.
“I grew up around here, playing in West Side Park, a block away,” Latifah told the crowd. “My grandfather’s hardware store was blocks from here. I drove past this block. I saw what was needed on this block, houses that weren’t lived in. Some were really dilapidated, and so I thought, ‘Why not here?”
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