By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert finds herself having to push back against some of her core supporters in an ongoing discussion about rezoning the former University Medical Center at Princeton on Witherspoon Street.
Ms. Lempert has made clear that the charge of the hospital rezoning task force, a nine-member group created to make recommendations to the Princeton Council, was not to change the density of the roughly 5.5 acre site namely, how many residential units are allowed there. At the moment, up to 280 units are permitted, although some want that number to go down.
Those tensions have surfaced during recent task force meetings. At one of them last week, task force member Heidi Fichtenbaum, also a board member of the local environmental group Sustainable Princeton, produced a sketch of the site calling for sharply reducing what’s permitted. Then Thursday, the task force released a working draft ordinance capping the units at 220.
Mark A. Solomon, attorney for Princeton HealthCare Systems, said Thursday that his side “strongly” disagrees with any reduction. The hospital has expressed concerns about the value of the property dropping any more than it already has.
Reducing the density also would impinge on the amount of affordable housing on site, a concern that came up Thursday for the first time. Any residential development must set aside at least 20 percent of all units as affordable; that translates into 56 affordable units in a 280-unit project, compared to 44 in a 220-unit one.
”We need places for people to live,” Sheldon Sturges, managing director of Princeton Future, told the task force on Thursday.
A site with fewer units overall has given rise to concerns that the developer would need to build high-end, luxury units for the project to make economic sense. But Council President Bernard P. Miller, the chairman of the task force, has said he thinks rents will be driven by what the market can bear.
Aside from the density question, the task force is looking at other issues. One idea has been to require a development to be split into at “least” three buildings rather than one large one.
Silent throughout all of this has been AvalonBay, the developer whose proposed 280-unit apartment project was rejected in December by the Regional Planning Board. AvalonBay’s lawyer, Anne L.H. Studholme, has attended the past two task force meetings, but has not commented.
The Princeton Council was scheduled to get an update Monday on the work of task force, a chance for its members to give their feedback. Ms. Lempert said Friday that she thinks the task force “needs to get some direction from the council.”
The task force plans to have three more meetings, although no dates had been scheduled as of last week. At some point, the subcommittee is expected to produce a revised zoning ordinance that the council could consider.
Officials want to have changed zoning in place before any future developer files an application.
Another scenario is for AvalonBay to appeal the Planning Board’s decision to Superior Court. Mr. Solomon has said that if AvalonBay declines to appeal, Princeton HealthCare Systems would go back on the marketplace seeking a new buyer.
