During the time of Cooper and Hewitt’s ownership of the mines, their employees lived in housing supplied by the Ringwood Company adjacent to the mines. The ownership of this land eventually passed to Ringwood Realty Corp, a subsidiary of Ford Motors, in 1965. In this same year the Community Action Council of Passaic County (CACPC), an organization that addressed poverty, came to Ringwood and set up several aid programs including Operation Headstart, Neighborhood Youth Corps, and Legal Aid. They surveyed the mine area and, finding poor housing conditions, made plans for a self-help housing project that would be funded by Farmers’ Home Administration mortgages.
HOW-TO, Inc. (Housing Operation With Training Opportunity) was set up in 1966. Training was provided for carpentry, masonry, plumbing, and upholstery skills, and residents provided labor to build the new homes with low interest rates and no down payments required for mortgages. The board of directors included several local residents, including William Van Dunk. The land on which the new homes were eventually built came in the form of a donation from Ford, through Ringwood Realty. They donated 290 acres to the town in order to accommodate a landfill that was facing some opposition. The donation of the land allowed the creation of the Ringwood Solid Waste Management Authority (SWMA), which operated a municipal landfill there from 1972-1976. NJDEP closed the landfill in 1976 after confirming that contaminants were leaching into the nearby surface water. HOW-TO, after long and contentious negotiations, eventually bought 8.2 acres of land from SWMA in 1972 for $1,000 in order to build the homes. According to then Ringwood Councilman Dale Peters:
“Now let’s set the record straight as to how the borough came into ownership of the 290 acres of land in the Mine Area...the land was simply given to the town because of the most difficult set of social problems existing on their piece for so many years. The Ringwood Realty Company...felt that Ringwood could and should assume responsibility for solving housing problems for nearly 400 people – a task they felt was outside of their corporate purposes.”
Paint sludge was later removed from the yards of HOW-TO homes built on donated land; Ford knowingly donated contaminated land.
A Ford internal memo states:
We could probably make a donation to How-To, Inc., sooner with fewer questions and less risk of inquiry and exposure as to the general condition of the property...The State would be intrigued with receiving the property at no cost but also would be more suspicious and make more inquiry as to the general conditions of the property. The State’s Department of Environmental Protection also has some jurisdiction over solid waste disposal, and it would not take much inquiry for the State to determine that the former landfill presents some problems”(Mann v. Ford, 2010).
The people of Upper Ringwood, it turns out, had their shot at the American Dream of homeownership, but it was built on toxic ground. In 2004, after the first EPA cleanup of the Superfund site had been completed, a tour with government officials, residents, and media visited this donated area where paint sludge had been removed from a home’s backyard during the previous clean-up. This time, more sludge was found in the front yard.
“ I was fed up. I turned to the regulator and said ‘you were going to clean this up!’ It was heavy through the grass and around the children’s play area. Their attitude was blasé, they could care less!”
- Jan Barry, Reporter for The Record
Homes built on Contaminated Soil - HOW-TO Inc.
