Newark Mayor Cory Booker allotted $1.25 million of the city’s budget to tear down deserted buildings — but his own town house erupted into flames last year after he neglected the property, allowing squatters to move in.
“No government should allow its citizenry, people who live next to these homes, to live next to a fire trap, to live next to drug dealing, to live next to prostitution,” Booker said in 2008 when he introduced the Demolition Task Force with plans to bulldoze 49 abandoned buildings.
Booker’s neighbors are still fuming over the fire that erupted in March 2012 at the three-story town house on Court Street, which is now padlocked and boarded up.
“I think Cory Booker needs to be ashamed of himself,” neighbor Betsy Smith told The Post.
“You buy a piece of property in Newark and you do nothing. You hold your head high with your chest stuck out and say, ‘I’m the mayor of Newark!’ What kind of example are you setting?”
“A piss-poor example, in my opinion.”
A spokesperson for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office called the cause of the fire “undetermined,” but law enforcement suspected it was caused by squatters.
The US Senate candidate, 44, recently sold the abandoned property for $1 to the Newark Now nonprofit, which he owns.
His campaign called it “an opportunity to give back to Newark,” according to The (Bergen) Record.
A sign above the front door reads, “No loitering. Violators will be prosecuted.” The back yard is overrun with tall weeds and grass, strewn plastic bottles and broken glass.
Booker — who once rushed into a burning home to save a constituent and hopped onto a roof to save a cat — allowed enough garbage to pile up on the sidewalk to warrant a citation.
“When it snows, his property doesn’t get shoveled,” said Smith, who lives in a three-story two-family row house that is attached to Booker’s former property. “We wrote many many letters to him about squatters in the yard, people using drugs — no response.”
Booker claimed he was planning to renovate the property and put his parents — IBM’s first black execs, who raised him in the upper-middle-class town of Harrington Park, NJ — in the rundown neighborhood located near a housing project and the abandoned, decaying Krueger-Scott Mansion.
Booker bought the property in 2009 for $175,000.
A campaign rep didn’t return calls from The Post.