On Saturday, March 14 two members of the North New Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America were arrested during a protest to try to save one of the last remaining hospitals in Jersey City. Heights University Hospital, historically named and still referred to by many as Christ Hospital, has long been one of the main health resources for community members in The Heights neighborhood of Jersey City. Its closure is the result of the policies of the for-profit healthcare company, Hudson Regional Health (HRH).

One of the arrested DSA members and organizers of the protest, Isaac Jimenez, spoke with Left Voice about the larger context of the struggle, including how North NJ DSA has been organizing against overdevelopment and austerity in Jersey City. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What is the significance of the potential closure of Christ Hospital?

In November, Christ Hospital shut its doors for its main hospital services; so that’s everything except for the ER. Around that time North NJ DSA’s Health Justice Working Group was organizing around the hospital. Our candidate for Jersey City Council in 2025 wrote an article saying that we need Christ Hospital to be put under public ownership to save it.

We’ve been witnessing a decline in services, a decline in patients, and really an intentional decline of the hospital due to HRH’s for-profit motives in shuttering the hospital. This has been an intentional campaign by HRH over the past few years to shut Christ’s doors, and it’s a real detriment to the community, especially those in The Heights who rely on that hospital. It could take someone an extra 20 minutes to get to another hospital in Jersey City during a traffic day, or when school gets out because Jersey City gets congested. Those minutes could mean a matter of life and death for cardiac arrest, for a heart attack, for any number of patients. The ones we’ve talked to told us that they’ve had their lives saved at Christ Hospital. Jersey City is now down to one emergency room for a city of 300,000.

The protest that you organized against the closure of the hospital lasted more than 48 hours and ended in your arrest. Talk more about what that was like.

On Wednesday, March 11, we put out a plan to keep the hospital in public ownership. This hospital was supposed to close Saturday. Comrades within North NJ DSA and the Health Justice Working Group put together a plan to keep the land and the facility under county ownership. The ultimate aim of HRH and the landowner, which are separate entities, is to sell the land Christ Hospital is on to build luxury condos.

So we put together a sit-in. We thought we needed to build community awareness quick, and build a base of support to make these demands. We lasted 50 hours, and at the end of the sit-in, we put together a die-in where we had our DSA elected officials, Jake Ephros and Joel Brooks, and even a councilman from from the district who’s not in the DSA, but they all took part in the die-in. We had good turnout, we had media, and we were telling our story, and we were telling mostly the stories of neighbors in The Heights who had used the hospital at some point or another. They shared their stories about how important it is to have another hospital in Jersey City.

Two of us, including myself, were arrested for attempting to enter the ER. They locked the ER doors. Even though the hospital wasn’t supposed to close until 7:30pm, around 4pm they locked the hospital doors to keep us out. Myself and another DSA comrade were arrested for defiant trespass.

I thought it was interesting you mention speculators wanting to build luxury condos because overdevelopment and gentrification is an issue in working communities across North Jersey. How are you seeing the impact of that in Jersey City?

People call Jersey City the economic engine of the state. What that means is it’s the place where all these speculators and capitalists are looking around for the next buy. There’s definitely an environment of speculation, and that leads to evictions, that leads to long-time residents being priced out.

Our DSA chapter started in 2023 when we launched the Right To Counsel campaign to provide legal representation for tenants facing eviction. We won that, though it’s still in process in terms of opening that office in the city. We elected Jake Ephros and Joel Brooks as city councilors who ran on things like universal rent control, so we have tribunes in office like Jake and Joel, who are going to be fighting for tenants rights. We need working people to be organized and mobilized to make these demands.

We didn’t stop the closure, but it’s not impossible for an ER to return to that site. The hospital license, we’re told, is still in place for a few months. We would then need to find a receiver, which could be a group of doctors, it could be a nonprofit. We’re hoping for something different, so not a for-profit institution, but either a university that wants to turn it into a teaching hospital, or a group of doctors who just want to keep the ER open and want to build something public with the county. Jersey City has a budget deficit, but Hudson County usually runs a surplus every year in the hundreds of millions.

And we can have more effective hospitals which prioritize the specific services most-needed by the community, but instead, what you’ve seen is companies like RWJ Barnabas eat up the competition across urban areas, across New Jersey. RWJ buys up hospitals across New Jersey and lays off staff. Hospitals should be a public good, they shouldn’t be for profit.

We’re gonna keep fighting for this hospital. It’s not over. We’re meeting. We’re organizing in the county and the city.

The post In Jersey City, DSA is Fighting for Hospitals as a Public Good appeared first on Left Voice.

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