Apartment buys, transfers are key
By: Marisa Maldonado
EAST WINDSOR Converting existing apartment buildings into low-cost housing is one way the township plans to provide slightly more than 200 affordable housing units over the next nine years.
A second key component of the township’s newly approved affordable housing plan is transferring an obligation of 67 units to one or more other municipalities at a cost of more than $2.3 million.
The Township Council and Planning Board approved the plan Monday night, one day before the deadline to submit it to the Council on Affordable Housing. COAH, in its third-round of requirements, is calling for the township to create 204 affordable units over the next nine years.
The proposal, presented by Township Planner Richard Coppola, relies on buying units from two township apartment complexes, The Orchard and Windsor Castle Apartments on Devonshire Drive. The township hopes to make a total of 58 units available for rent in the complexes and sell 10 units from The Orchard to low-income residents at a minimum cost of $25,000.
"Both of those developments are a number of years old, and The Orchard units are for-sale units," Mayor Janice Mironov said. "Windsor Castle (has) rental units. They provide different opportunities for the town."
The township would have to hire an outside agency to run the buildings, the mayor said.
The township is responsible for creating only 20 rental units they would receive double credit from COAH for the remaining 38 units they plan to create.
The mayor said the township has not discussed its COAH plan with either apartment complex owner.
"We have substantial information," she said. "But we have not begun implementation on any of this. We don’t even have an approval from the state on any of these elements."
The township also plans to transfer 67 units to a neighboring municipality, a plan the mayor said is being negotiated with several communities. Selling the units, and alleviating itself of the obligation, would cost the township at least $2,345,000, according to the plan. That money could come from the township’s housing trust find. At present, there is a little more than $1 million in the account, which is funded by developers’ fees.
The township still is calculating the cost of the other proposed projects, the mayor said. Last round’s obligations cost about $1 million, a sum the township paid for with grants from the state Small Cities program and the township’s housing, she said.
A surplus of 31 units from the construction of Wheaton Pointe, an 85-unit retirement community that opened in 2000, will contribute toward the township’s third-round COAH obligation. The township used the development’s other 54 units for its second-round obligation of 345 units.
Two proposed developments from the second round still have not been built. The Wyncrest development, a 10-unit development on One Mile Road that the Planning Board approved in the late 1980s, has not been constructed, and no plans have been made to develop a five-lot cluster on Daniel Road.
COAH is expected to respond to the township’s report within 90 days, after which East Windsor can revise the plan if needed, the mayor said.
The township’s current COAH plan is certified through the end of 2006 but Mr. Coppola said the township is filing its third-round plan to take advantage of increased developers’ fees allowed by COAH.
Township Council members on Tuesday agreed to introduce an ordinance at their next meeting to increase the fee commercial developers contribute to the housing trust fund from 1 percent to 2 percent, which is the maximum allowed by COAH.
"I don’t see how we cannot do it, frankly," Councilman Perry Shapiro said.
COAH’s third-round requirements are based on a formula that calls for the creation of one affordable housing unit for every eight residential units built and 25 jobs created.