JustASC

In the Times, Sam Freedman writes how the recent snowstorms knocked down eruvim all over the northeast (an eruv is circuit of wires, strings and natural boundaries that form an unbroken border around a neighborhood — within its symbolic confines an observant Jew is able to carry objects outside the home on Shabbat, and push a baby carriage).

Freedman writes about the recent boom in eruv construction, and the opposition:

With the boom has come some opposition — not, as Jews once feared, from intolerant gentiles, but from fellow Jews. Some ultra-Orthodox leaders maintain that urban eruvim are too large and populous to be legitimate. Less-observant Jews in Tenafly, N.J., and Westhampton Beach, N.Y., have fought against their installation, under the erroneous assumption that an eruv would coerce them in some way.

I think he is being generous to the less-observant. A big part of the opposition to the eruv is fear that its erection will attract Orthodox homebuyers to the neighborhood, and the community will “flip.” As the Baltimore Jewish Times once wrote, in describing an eruv dispute in 2001:

“At the crux of the animosity was resistance by longtime secular residents to a perceived onslaught of Orthodox families about to move in and take over their upscale neighborhood – reconfiguring houses for their large families, destroying quality public schools and introducing a brand of Judaism they had little affinity for.”