EDITORIAL: Zoning trends in central Jersey over the last 20 years have been like a see-saw. A balanced approach is what’s most needed now.
Watching the development of central New Jersey for the past 20 years or so has been an upsetting experience for a lot of longtime residents, who have witnessed what was once a peaceful and largely rural landscape transformed into sprawling suburbia, complete with unsightly strip malls, mammoth office complexes, traffic jams at every major intersection and a palpable change in that intangible characteristic called the quality of life.
But the folks who live here aren’t the only ones who are disappointed by the way central New Jersey has developed. Equally upset are the folks who work here, but can’t afford to live here. It is, in fact, this phenomenon the fact that the number of jobs all those malls and office buildings have created in the area has far outstripped the number of housing units constructed to accommodate the people who work here that has led to the monumental traffic problems we now confront.
And, according to a new study by the nonprofit Regional Planning Partnership, the situation seems destined to get worse unless we change our ways.
The RPP report surveyed 24 municipalities in Mercer County, and parts of Somerset and Middlesex counties, and found that approvals for almost 67 million square feet of nonresidential development were issued between 1997 and 2000, compared to only 42,000 residential housing units.
If current trends continue, the report concluded, about 965,000 new jobs will be created before the region reaches build-out, but only about 70,000 new houses will be built. The projections by the report show the East Windsor-Hightstown area will gain 38,757 new jobs and only 10,855 jobs. This means many more people will be criss-crossing central New Jersey from home to work in numbers that stagger the imagination and the gridlock we’ll be facing 20 years from now will make today’s traffic problems seem trivial by comparison.
How did we get into this mess? Simple. In the 1970s and 1980s, we opened up the region to a lot of housing development only to realize, years later, that more houses meant more schoolchildren, which meant building and running more schools, which was an extraordinarily expensive proposition. So in the 1990s, we got clever and started going after so-called "clean" ratables the kind of development, like commercial space and office buildings, that generated new property-tax revenues without generating more schoolchildren.
It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. And it was largely successful; while property taxes continued to rise, the shift from residential to commercial development allowed many municipalities to bring down the double-digit annual increases they had been experiencing in their property-tax rates.
The trade-off, we now recognize, was more traffic.
As area municipalities look to the future, they would do well to pay heed to the recommendations offered in the RPP study. Instead of approaching growth as a stark choice between residential development, which generates more schoolchildren, and commercial development, which generates more traffic, the objective should be balanced development a blend of housing and retail and office growth, all permitted in numbers and at densities that municipalities can reasonably handle without overburdening either their taxpayers or their infrastructure.
That may be easier said than done, of course, as long as municipalities and school districts in New Jersey have to rely so heavily on property taxes to support their budgets. But in the absence of meaningful tax reform which would seem, in this gubernatorial election year, to be an unlikely prospect at best applying the principles of smart growth may be our best hope for building a future for our region that doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the past.