PACKET EDITORIAL, Oct. 18
By: Packet Editorial
You don’t have to go far to find some of the abominations that several decades’ worth of "planning" or the lack thereof have visited upon the New Jersey landscape.
Entire city neighborhoods lie abandoned while sprawling subdivisions spread across once-fertile farmland. Giant shopping malls, tattered strip malls, gleaming auto malls and assorted other malls line continuously congested roadways as far as the eye can see. New homes varying in size from townhouses to McMansions crop up on freshly minted cul-de-sacs far removed from stores and offices, rendering any trip for any reason entirely dependent on the automobile.
New Jersey’s Municipal Land Use Law, enacted in 1976, grants municipal planning and zoning boards extraordinary powers to plan for appropriate types and levels of development in their communities. The State Planning Act of 1985 encourages municipal, county and state agencies to coordinate their efforts in order to promote sound regional planning principles. The State Development and Redevelopment Plan, adopted pursuant to the State Planning Act, gives planners at all levels of government a new set of tools to promote urban redevelopment, resource conservation, open-space preservation and mass-transit use while discouraging suburban sprawl.
And still, the hodgepodge development of the Garden State continues driven, in most cases, not by public-sector planning but by private-sector site plans. It’s pretty much a given in New Jersey that developers decide when, where and how they want to build, and local planning and zoning boards are reduced to saying little more than yes or no.
Here in Central Jersey, however, we are blessed at the moment with not one, not two, but three unique opportunities to exercise some genuine, forward-thinking, public-sector planning. At the present site of the University Medical Center at Princeton, the Princeton Junction train station in West Windsor and the former North Princeton Developmental Center in Montgomery, local officials are mapping out strategies that could have a meaningful, positive impact on what our region looks like a decade or two from now.
At the medical center site, which will need to be redeveloped after the hospital completes its planned move out of town, discussion among Princeton Borough and Princeton Township officials, along with neighbors and other interested parties, is focusing on a mixed-use development, with housing, perhaps age-restricted and/or affordable, joined by a limited mix of office, retail and restaurant uses.
At the Princeton Junction train station, whose attraction is now limited to commuters with parking permits, West Windsor officials envision creation of a transit village a commercial-residential-office complex that could transform today’s unattractive parking lot into tomorrow’s major regional center of activity.
And on the sprawling NPDC site, Montgomery planners are putting together a redevelopment scheme for "Skillman Village" a 21st-century mixed-use development that would include municipal, civic, cultural and educational resources, age-restricted housing, retail uses, a conference center and carefully positioned parcels of open space.
Each of these sites poses its own set of daunting challenges, from zoning to financing to environmental impacts to traffic and aesthetic considerations. But each also offers a wide range of creative opportunities mixing residential, commercial, office and other uses, and breaking the all-too-familiar mold of development, New Jersey-style: housing here, commerce there and a ribbon of asphalt in between.
This is what the smart-growth movement is all about. We’re pleased that Princeton, West Windsor and Montgomery are poised to be in its forefront.