By Lauren Otis, Staff Writer
Princeton may be a vibrant and active place, but it is not regarded by the young, hip “creative class,” as a place to move to, said several participants in a Saturday discussion sponsored by nonprofit organization Princeton Future.
”We are not a cool downtown,” said Jim Constantine, with the architecture and design firm Looney Ricks Kiss. “We really can’t get the creative class here,” Mr. Constantine said.
Allan Kehrt, co-founder of KSS Architects in Princeton, said his firm had difficulty attracting younger, single employees to Princeton, who preferred the firm’s Philadelphia office instead.
”They perceive Princeton as not a great place to be as a single,” Mr. Kehrt said, but rather as a town for families.
A lack of cheaper restaurants and other trendy gathering places in downtown Princeton were cited by participants at the meeting as behind the community’s lack of appeal to the hip set.
J. Michael Littwin, said there was no reasonable event space to rent in downtown Princeton anymore. Mr. Littwin said he had a company that wanted to present evening events in Princeton that would attract a younger crowd. Before its renovation, the Arts Council of Princeton would rent out its event room for $75 a night, but now charged $800 a night for the space, he said, noting that there were no other spaces available for less than several hundred dollars.
Robert Durkee, vice president and secretary of Princeton University, said the proposed university arts and transit neighborhood around the current Dinky station was intended to be a magnet for the hip and creative. “That’s the whole idea, to create a cool area there,” he said.
The Princeton Future meeting on Saturday, held at the Princeton Public Library, followed on a presentation in September outlining municipal structures that might address various problems in Princeton, and sought input in three areas — housing, mobility and transportation, and Princeton’s downtown.
”It was a sort of what if event. What if we did this, what if we did that,” said Robert Geddes, Princeton Future’s co-chairman, of the September presentation by Robert Goldsmith, an attorney with the Woodbridge office of law firm Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis. Mr. Goldsmith outlined the benefits and drawbacks of three types of municipal structures — parking authorities, special improvement districts, and community development corporations — to create better-coordinated solutions to congestion, housing, economic development and other areas perceived to be of importance in Princeton.
Mr. Goldsmith recapped his presentation on Saturday, with attendees to the gathering subsequently splitting into three discussion groups to address how well existing Princeton structures work; how might new structures help; and how might consolidation help in the realms of housing, mobility and the downtown.
”I think the consensus of the downtown group was the existing structures are working, less than ideally,” said Peter Kann, former chairman and CEO of Dow Jones Inc.
It was noted in the discussion of Princeton’s downtown that the area has lost businesses providing basic services to residents, and high rents make it impossible for small, new businesses to open, Mr. Kann said.
In addition, there was a consensus that “local government, if it were a business would be out of business,” Mr. Kann said. Multiple layers of regulatory approval for even small business changes, like putting a sign up downtown, added to the difficulty of operating a business downtown, Mr. Kann said.
The benefits of a special improvement district were discussed by the downtown group, with a SID being affordable and able to assess nonprofit entities too, “which is a long way of saying Princeton University could be asked to contribute to this,” Mr. Kann said.
”A multi-municipality special improvement district can happen with or without consolidation,” Mr. Kann said, with the group agreeing that ultimately municipal consolidation of Princeton Borough and Princeton Township was “a sensible thing to have.”

