Scaled-back center would be better
By:Hillsborough Beacon
There’s a certain “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” reality to planning issues. No matter how a town’s officials try to deal with development, it’s a safe bet the developers are going to be further ahead in the end than the town.
Such appears to be the case with the Hillsborough Promenade, an application now before the Planning Board. A project of Krame Development, Hillsborough Promenade is the name of a shopping center that would be built on the corner of Route 206 and Falcon Road. The promenade resulted from a settlement the township reached with Krame Development over a lawsuit to meet the township’s affordable-housing requirement. Krame had been suing to build a massive residential development with about 950 living units at the same site, which ordinarily would be designated for office and commercial use.
Did the township really come out ahead on that arrangement? It’s a tough call, but probably. While the site would make a better park than a shopping center, the site is better-suited for a commercial development than a residential one. Putting 950 new homes there would have meant more development. That of course would mean more cars, more children and all that entails for township recreation, schools and infrastructure.
On the other hand, the Krame lawsuit is settled, and the township still has to meet its affordable-housing obligation, with all that that entails. It just won’t happen at that particular site.
Plans for Hillsborough Promenade call for building a massive shopping center that will cover 410,000 square feet — about 9½ acres — of the property at Falcon Road and Route 206. The center would feature a strip mall with two anchor stores and a few other freestanding buildings fronting on Route 206.
You don’t have to be an eco-freak or think that Really Big Corporation Inc. secretly is run by the Antichrist to find that image disturbing.
If the Planning Board approves the application and Krame Development proceeds to pave over the site, the property is going to resemble the Raritan section of Route 206, or the stretch of Route 22 from Somerville down to Watchung. That certainly clashes with existing development in the vicinity, and it’s not the image we want to hold in our memories of Hillsborough.
If at all possible, we’d like to see the Hillsborough Promenade application scaled back — way back. We are not disputing Krame Development’s right to develop the property, but we’d like to see something that better complements the surrounding area instead of replicating the sprawl found in neighboring towns like Bridgewater. A smaller shopping center, such as Krame originally proposed about five years ago, would be better.
And then we’d like to see the township put forward a more aggressive Master Plan to limit and control building elsewhere in the township by every defensible legal means available. Development along the Route 206 corridor may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it has to be covered with asphalt from one end to the other.
The Planning Board’s ultimate decision isn’t made yet. But it looks as if the final judgment on the Hillsborough Promenade could be the township’s having traded a barrel of rotten apples for a barrel of rotten oranges.