More traffic predicted for an already congested region.
By: David Campbell
Dianne Brake, president of The Regional Planning Partnership, acknowledges that the partnership’s advocacy of increased residential housing and density ratios for commercial development runs contrary to commonly held ideas about good municipal planning.
But she said traditional wisdom, which holds that increased residential housing burdens the property tax base and decreased floor-area ratios for commercial sites decrease sprawl and traffic congestion, in fact inhibits long-term regional planning.
In fact, current development trends could lead to an alarming disparity between the amount of jobs attracted to the region by new commercial development and housing for those workers only about 70,000 new houses for the 965,000 new jobs that would result from full build-out under current zoning, which, in turn, would bring more traffic to an already congested region, according to a new report issued by the partnership.
"As you can imagine, this is not an easy sell to the municipalities," Ms. Brake said of the partnership’s position. "It may seem counterintuitive. It also has bear-with-us elements to it."
The partnership, a nonprofit, independent, civic-action group based on Mapleton Road in Plainsboro Township, recently released its 2001 Data Book, which provides statistics on population, employment, income and land use in Mercer County and parts of Middlesex and Somerset counties data Ms. Brake called "an eye-opener" for the municipalities.
"We do this as a kind of wake-up call," she said. "This is information that nobody else is giving."
A highlight of the book is the current development survey, which outlines planned development from 1997 to 2000, much of which has received approval but has not yet been built.
In 24 municipalities within the study area, almost 67 million square feet of nonresidential development and only 42,000 residential housing units were either known, applied for or approved, under construction or completed during the three-year period.
Princeton Borough and Princeton Township, which are near full build-out compared to other municipalities, show 339,200 square feet and 661,736 square feet respectively of commercial development, and 40 units of residential housing each from 1997 to 2000.
West Windsor Township saw 4.6 million square feet of new commercial development during the study period, with 1.2 million square feet approved but not built and another 1.2 million square feet currently under construction, the data book shows.
West Windsor, meanwhile, has approved 1,984 units of residential housing, and 711 units currently are under construction, according to the book.
Montgomery Township saw an increase of 165,747 square feet of commercial development, with 91,648 square feet yet to be built. Montgomery approved 3,432 units of residential housing, of which 572 have been constructed.
Plainsboro Township approved 1.1 million square feet of commercial development and 1,176 residential units, according to the book. Of this, 750,000 square feet of development and 912 housing units have yet to be built.
Despite talk at municipal meetings of regional planning, Ms. Brake and Regional Planning Partnership Vice President James Hess said many towns approve development with little attention beyond their own borders.
"Towns don’t often know what their neighbors are doing," Ms. Brake said. "They’re not aware necessarily of the cumulative impact of development in their own town."
According to West Windsor Land Use Director Sam Surtees, West Windsor and other townships regularly attend meetings with Herb Ames, director of Mercer County’s Department of Economic Development, to discuss new projects.
"We kind of exchange ideas, update each other on what projects are coming into our communities," he said.
Mr. Surtees said he sends copies of Township Planning Board meetings to neighboring municipalities, and they observe the same courtesy with West Windsor.
"It’s not like the world ends right at the municipal boundary line," he said.
According to the data book’s zoning-yield analysis for the region, which was conducted using the partnership’s new goal-oriented zoning computer model, current zoning build-out would significantly widen the gap between employment and housing in the region, which would necessitate greater commuting.
Unless action is taken to implement plans for a regional light rail system and enhanced bus routes, this gap could increase traffic volume in the region, which already is problematic, to unmanageable proportions, Ms. Brake said.
According to these findings, full build-out, according to existing zoning, would increase the ratio of jobs to housing to more than 13 to 1.
Ms. Brake said the imbalance is partly due to the ratables chase.
"Different towns are in different states of development, and they have different ratables problems," she said. "It’s very difficult to wean a municipality away from fiscal planning to regional planning. A lot of towns around here are in a fiscal hole."
Ms. Brake said a "more balanced outcome" would result from a 40-percent decrease in employment regionally balanced by a 40-percent increase in residential housing.
And she said that reducing floor-area ratios for commercial development, an increasingly common practice in municipalities attempting to fight sprawl, actually results in increased impervious coverage.
"We’re trying to alert people that the reaction to this is not necessarily downzoning," she said. "Downzoning in the Route 1 corridor is going to have a reverse effect."
For one thing, downzoning only changes the floor-area ratio but leaves the impervious-cover allowance the same, she said. And although it would reduce the number of employees at a site, it could increase automobile dependency because a development would not have the density required to make a light rail or other transit system feasible.
Ms. Brake said the partnership is promoting development according to the State Development and Redevelopment Plan, which provides guidelines to municipalities for centralized development where infrastructure already exists.
The State Plan designates this region as a growth area, which Ms. Brake said might be hard to accept for some municipalities that want to preserve their rural or village-like character.
"Local governments have a hard time changing their very local perspective to a regional perspective," she said. "This is a good location for growth. We don’t want to sour the economy in the region because then nobody benefits."