Guest Column Annette Mayo Adult community wanted on Otken land

Guest Column
Annette Mayo
Adult community wanted on Otken land

My husband and I live in North Brunswick. Our four children attended schools here and many of our long-standing friendships have been forged and cultivated here. My husband served on the school board and I worked with the superintendent of schools to help establish programs for the mentally impaired. Over the years, 39 in all, our allegiance to the township has remained strong. Now that we are both retired and considering a change in our living arrangements, we find the township’s dearth of age-restricted housing troubling. We would like to continue living in North Brunswick.

We read with great interest that U.S. Homes planned to develop the Otken farm into an adult community of single-family homes (disclosure: my family has no direct or indirect interest in U.S. Homes or the Otken farm). Aside from the excellent reputation of the company, its proposed development of an adult community mirrors the state and nationwide trends in housing development, which were detailed in a feature article in The New York Times a few weeks ago. Briefly, municipalities around the country have been embracing adult communities because they increase the tax base without a concomitant draw on public services, e.g., schools, police and sanitation services. Given the increasing demand on North Brunswick’s school system and its public struggles over water and sanitation delivery, the proposed development of the Otken farm should be heralded, not resisted.

The detractors of the planned development offer proposals that appear to do more harm than good. Leaving the land fallow would burden the township’s pocketbook without materially increasing its citizens’ quality of life. The township will be forced to increase taxes or float a bond if it goes ahead with the purchase through condemnation. Then there would be maintenance and upkeep to the land that would only partially be offset with outside funding.

North Brunswick is a vibrant community with legions of public parks and lakeside vistas. Its numerous ball fields, nature trails and exercise areas are enjoyed by many, and one would be hard-pressed to argue that they are overused or too few in number. To suggest that the Otken farm is suitable for "green acres" type preservation is, therefore, disingenuous. In fact, U.S. Homes has offered to preserve a significant amount of the acreage for public sports fields.

The views expressed by me are held by many. The adult community of North Brunswick does not want to uproot itself and retire to the more pastoral towns of New Jersey or elsewhere. We like it here and we want to stay.

Annette Mayo is a resident of North Brunswick