EDITORIAL
By:
A year ago, when the Princeton Borough Council started toying with the idea of banning assisted-living facilities from residential neighborhoods, we warned of the dangers of allowing LULUs to give rise to NIMBYs and, ultimately, ripen into BANANAs.
LULUs, in case you’ve forgotten, are Locally Unpopular Land Uses — prisons, dumps, halfway houses, waste incinerators and other stuff people don’t want in their back yards. This often turns them into NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) — which, if allowed to spread unchecked throughout too many back yards, results in a de facto policy of BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody).
Well, the Borough Council has taken the first step down that slippery BANANA slope by approving an ordinance last week that narrows the definition of assisted living — and, in so doing, severely restricts the kinds of residential facilities that can be established in the borough. Specifically, the ordinance defines an assisted-living facility as one that houses “the frail elderly and other persons with physical or cognitive impairments.”
What prompted the Borough Council to take this action was a recent decision by the State of New Jersey to broaden its own definition of an assisted-living facility. Now included in the state’s definition are facilities that provide residents with medical and psychiatric treatment. It was this frightening prospect that led Mayor Marvin Reed, a supporter of the Borough Council action, to declare: “We don’t want medical or psychiatric facilities being built in a residential neighborhood under the guise of assisted-living residences.”
This sort of parochial posturing could be dismissed as mere symbolic rhetoric were it not for the fact that the Princeton Nursing Home is about to relocate from its present home on Quarry Street in Princeton Borough to a new facility on Bunn Drive in Princeton Township. This will leave the Quarry Street facility, an old school building smack in the middle of the residential John-Witherspoon neighborhood, vacant — and it is the ultimate disposition of this property that sent Mayor Reed, a majority of the Borough Council members and community residents scurrying to amend the zoning ordinance.
So now they have erected an artificial wall around the Quarry Street property, tall enough to separate those whose presence they will tolerate from those whom they plainly deem undesirable. The “frail elderly” fall into the former category. It is OK for them to live on Quarry Street. Folks with “impairments” are also acceptable — so long as their disabilities are merely “physical” or “cognitive.” But if they have an emotional problem — or, worse yet, require psychiatric treatment — forget it. They are not welcome on Quarry Street, or in any other residential neighborhood in Princeton Borough where an assisted-living facility might be contemplated.
We can understand why some homeowners don’t want certain kinds of facilities established in their neighborhoods — whether it’s an assisted-living facility on Quarry Street, a small business office on Mercer Street or a continuing-care retirement community on Drakes Corner Road. But we’re disappointed that the mayor and a majority of members of the Borough Council would let localized opposition to the potential use of one particular property provoke them into placing blanket prohibitions on broad categories of land uses in residential zones. That’s not just restrictive zoning; it’s regulatory overkill.