By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The first apartments are due to be ready by August at the AvalonBay development on Witherspoon Street where rental housing is expected to start at under $2,000 a month, a company executive told area business leaders on Friday.
Senior Vice President Ronald Ladell, at a Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce breakfast, gave an overview of the 280-unit-project and traced some of the history of the battle his company had fought to build at the former Princeton Hospital.
“We want to be in Princeton. This is a unique opportunity for us,” he said at the Springdale Country Club. “And I feel very, very proud that we’re going to have an Avalon Princeton community for decades to come.”
With some of the residents who fought AvalonBay sitting in the audience watching, Mr. Ladell said the company had submitted a project that conformed completely with local zoning regulations. Yet the Princeton Planning Board voted down the first proposal in 2012, leading AvalonBay to sue.
“We settled it, we revised the community, we went back in and got a project approved,” he said. He called it unfortunate that a lot of Princeton tax dollars were spent “to challenge me and fight us.”
In 2013, a revised project was approved by the Planning Board. Out of the 280 units, 12 will be town homes and 56 will be set aside for affordable housing.
“It fills a market need that doesn’t exist today,” he said.
The company has a pending lawsuit against the town, but he did not elaborate.
Mr. Ladell touched on the response his company took after an accidental fire in January 2015 at an AvalonBay complex in Edgewater, Bergen County. One of the buildings was destroyed, but no one was injured.
The company subsequently announced that, at all its future developments in New Jersey, including Princeton, it would increase fire protections by adding more sprinklers and masonry firewalls.
“We’re the only developer in the state of New Jersey that’s voluntarily doing those fire-suppression systems,” he said.
Mr. Ladell’s appearance drew a full house for the breakfast event, including Alexi Assmus and Kate Warren, two of the residents who fought AvalonBay. Neither woman had any comment afterward, although Ms. Assmus asked Mr. Ladell during the event if he felt projects should comply with the site plan ordinance.
“If the people that challenged us feel good about themselves, great. If they think they got something out of it, wonderful,” he said.
AvalonBay owns about 5,000 “apartments homes” in roughly 285 communities, on the East and West coasts, where getting projects approved is difficult, Mr. Ladell said.
“We operate in states we operate in because we don’t want competition. We want to limit that competition,” he said.
Mr. Ladell is in charge of overseeing AvalonBay’s New Jersey development, focused mostly in the north and central parts of the state. The company is in the midst of building three projects, including in Princeton, and looking to do more.
