Town Faces Affordability Crisis That Cannot Be Solved Without Expanding Housing Supply
To the Editor:
We recently attended a Council meeting about housing development at the seminary. At that meeting, many members of the public voiced enthusiastic support for the project, but many neighbors cited concerns ranging from cutting down trees to changing the neighborhood character to the fact that only 20 percent of the units will be affordable housing.
While these are of course reasonable concerns, the fact is that the Council and Planning Board have been working on this for several years, and they have addressed many of these things already. For example, it would be wonderful to preserve every tree on site, but that’s not realistic, and our regulations require as many as possible to be replaced. Some might prefer if the project were 100 percent affordable housing, but that is not financially feasible, and anyway Princeton needs more housing of all types, not just deed-restricted affordable. Some residents worry about stormwater runoff, but in fact the law requires all stormwater to be retained on the property, meaning the development will likely improve the neighbors’ situation.
We are sympathetic to people who love their neighborhoods and their small, intimate character. We do too. But here’s the deal: Princeton and New Jersey writ large face an affordability crisis that cannot be solved without expanding housing supply. We need housing units, and more specifically, we need affordable housing units: state law obliges our town to meet its fair share of affordable housing, and if we don’t do it, the law says that any builder can sue the town for the opportunity to develop the site as they wish, without any community input. We’ve already lost one opportunity to develop this site in a tasteful manner because of neighborhood opposition. The current plan is not perfect, but we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The project is almost the definition of smart growth: it is walkable to downtown jobs, services, and transit, and has made real efforts to mitigate its environmental impact by including green building components and to accommodate the neighborhood by doing things like putting the garage underground (at considerable expense) to avoid an unsightly parking lot. If we don’t seize this opportunity to build on our local leaders’ hard work to develop the site in a harmonious, environmentally sensitive way, we risk a much less thoughtful replacement being imposed on us by an outside developer.
More importantly, it is the right thing to do. We who live in Princeton are extraordinarily lucky to live in a uniquely wonderful place. There is something both profoundly unfair and deeply unrealistic about Princetonians trying to keep this place to ourselves by cutting off reasonable growth in our town. We are confident that if we instead try to shape that growth according to our shared values, the arrival of new neighbors will only enrich the character of the town we are proud to call home.