To the editor:
The Hopewell Township Planning Board is again considering re-zoning the east side of Scotch Road to allow the development of an urban center, with rental units stacked five stories high above retail, strip malls, and big box stores of up to 15,000 square feet.
This proposal has been strongly opposed by the residents of Hopewell Township since it was first proposed in 2014. And there is even less reason to support it now than there was then.
The first original stated motivation for allowing the development of an urban center at Scotch Road was the decline in the demand for office parks in New Jersey. But at the Oct. 19 special meeting of the Planning Board, the representative from American Real Estate Partners stated that occupancy of their office properties at the Bank of America complex on the east side of Scotch Road has risen from 10 percent to 88 percent over 18 months, and that they expect to sign further new clients. Given this new demand for office space, why should the east side of Scotch Road be re-zoned when there is no market-driven need to do so?
The second original stated reason for allowing the development of an urban center was to provide residential units that could be used towards meeting Hopewell Township’s affordable housing obligation. In 2015 part of the reason for the board’s decision not to vote on re-zoning was that the affordable housing obligation was not known, and so informed decisions concerning Hopewell’s land use plan could not be made. That was clearly a sensible decision. But Hopewell’s affordable housing obligations are still unknown at this time. Why, then, is the board now thinking of reversing its sensible, cautious policy of last year not to recommend re-zoning when it still lacks important information relevant to this decision?
Finally, even if in the future some parts of the east side of Scotch Road might have to be developed to accommodate Hopewell Township’s “affordable housing” obligations this does not require that unbridled commercial development be allowed in this area. The proposed commercial development of Scotch Road — the strip malls, the big box stores, the chain restaurants — will bring both a massive increase in traffic.
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.
These traffic increases will lead to a significant decline in property values throughout the southern tier of Hopewell Township. 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 percent 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).
In 2015, the Planning Board sensibly listened to the residents when they objected to the urban center. Now, in 2016, there is even less reason to build it — and just as much reason to oppose it. The current zoning of the east side of Scotch Road should be preserved until Hopewell Township’s affordable housing obligations are clear. Only then should the board consider rezoning it — and then for residential use only.
James Stacey Taylor
Hopewell Township
