By James Taylor, of Pennington
The proposed urban center at Scotch Road will bring two things to the current residents of Hopewell Township for sure — higher taxes and lower property values.
In an important and often-cited peer reviewed article — “Population Growth, Density and the Costs of Providing Public Services,” Urban Studies, 1992, pp. 273-295 — Helen F. Ladd demonstrated that once the population density of an area reaches 250 persons per square mile, any increase in the density of the population will lead to escalating increases in the per capita costs for essential services paid for by the municipality.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population density of Hopewell Township was 298.2 persons per square mile.
Just one part of the proposed urban center — that being pushed by CF Hopewell — consists of 1,388 new housing units, some of which could be stacked five stories high over retail.
Given that there were (according to the 2010 U.S. Census) 6,551 housing units in Hopewell Township, this part of the proposed urban center will alone lead to an increase in Hopewell’s population of just over 21 percent with a corresponding increase in population density.
Building the urban center will, thus, lead to a significant increase in property taxes being levied on the current residents.
But things get worse.
As well as increasing the tax burden on current residents, the urban center will significantly undermine their property values. Multiple peer-reviewed studies of the effects of traffic on property values show that increases in daily traffic of just a few hundred vehicles a day decreases property values between 5 and 25 percent (e.g., William Hughes and C.F. Sirmans, “Traffic Externalities and Single-Family House Prices,” Journal of Regional Science, 1992, pp. 487-500, and Ian Bateman, et al., “The Effect of Road Traffic on Residential Property Values, Scottish Executive Development Department,” 2001).
According to the letter to the Planning Board from Paul Pogorzelski of Dec. 18, 2014, if the proposed urban center includes commercial development, it could easily generate in excess of 4,000 additional a.m. and p.m. peak hour trips a day. Much of this traffic would be generated by the commercial elements of the urban center — the strip malls, the convenience stores and chain restaurants.
According to the Institute of Transportation Engineers, even the smallest of strip malls will generate 22 times the amount of traffic as housing units. Chain restaurants are even worse, generating over 75 times the amount of traffic as single family homes for every 1,000 square feet of space they occupy.
The message is clear: To avoid escalating property taxes and rapidly-diminishing property values, the residents of Hopewell Township must oppose the urban center.
And if any housing must be built to comply with the legally-imposed obligation to provide affordable housing, the out-of-state developer should, under no circumstances, be allowed to force commercial development into our valley alongside its sprawl housing.
Commercial developments have nothing to do with affordable housing requirements. All they will bring to our beloved rural valley will be increased traffic, lower quality of life, urban blight, and rapidly-decreasing property values.
James Stacey Taylor
Pennington
