Lawrence Municipal Manager Kevin Nerwinski recently sat down with the Lawrence Gazette to talk about issues impacting the township.
The first part of the Q&A resulting from that interview ran in the April issue of the Gazette and addressed the township’s plans for the future of fire safety.
In the second part of the interview, which ran in the May issue, Nerwinski discussed the police department and difficulties facing law enforcement in 2023.
This month, Nerwinski talks with Gazette editor Bill Sanservino about the state of commercial and residential development in the township.
A lightly edited Q&A resulting from the interview appears below.
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Lawrence Gazette: Let’s talk about the corporate office market and corporate development in general. Since the pandemic, a lot of companies have downsized and a lot of their workers are now working from home. So the office market is depressed. Has that been your experience? Has there been an increase in vacancies, and has that affected tax revenues?
Kevin Nerwinski: Yes and yes. So what is Class A office versus Class C office? So now, if the Class Cs don’t keep up with the times, they won’t be not competitive.
Now companies can get better facilities for less money. Those older corporate centers are struggling right now. The property owners have to reimagine what they’re going to be doing in those locations, because I don’t think it’s going to come back. I don’t think so. Not in the near future. Maybe there is some type of change that happens where we want everybody to come back to work.
Lawrence Gazette: Have there been any tax appeals filed or any corporate centers looking to pay less in taxes?
Nerwinski: Yeah. I mean, we have no pending tax appeals at this time. So anything that was out there has been resolved. I mean, if you’re a diligent owner of a corporate center that’s 40% occupied, you’re going to file a tax appeal because you’re not producing the income that’s based upon those taxes. So that’s happened. But I don’t think we have anything pending at this point in time. As I sit here today, it’s not a concern to our municipal finances.
Lawrence Gazette: On the other side of the coin is warehousing, which has increased in both demand and price. How concerned are you that that demand is not going to decrease. Do you have any pending warehouse applications? I know there was the big Amazon one that was built on Princess Road. What’s your philosophy on warehouses, and how concerned are you that might be a warehouse glut, because so many towns are looking to put in warehouses? For example, they have approved a 5.5-million-square-foot warehouse complex (Bridge Point 8) right on your border in West Windsor.
Nerwinski: So we have 40 Enterprise Ave., which was an area that we were able to deem in need of redevelopment. It was an awful site.
Lawrence Gazette: Where’s that?
Nerwinski: It’s right on the border of Hamilton and Trenton (between the Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Assunpink Creek).
Nerwinski: It was a first responder nightmare. There was a series of very, very old unkept buildings, and the owner recommitted to the site. We worked with the owner in order to get it designated as a redevelopment zone. They’re in the process of knocking everything down and putting up, I think, what looks like to be a beautiful industrial complex that will be 275,000 square feet of warehousing.
Other than that and the Amazon, there’s nothing else on the horizon. I want to make note at this point in time that the fear and the concern and the litigation that was prompted by the existence of the last mile Amazon facility, I think is now shown to have been misplaced.
It’s running effectively and efficiently. It doesn’t disrupt. In fact, I’ve gotten emails and calls from residents who initiated the lawsuit to try and stop it, and they thanked me because we blocked the cut through right there (The connection on Princess Road between the residential housing and the warehouse). You can go there right now and you don’t hear anything, you don’t see anything.
Lawrence Gazette: Yeah. I want to thank you very much for that, because now it takes me longer to get to my office on Princess Road when I’m coming from Baker’s Basin.
Nerwinski: Right, because you’re on the other side of the barricades.
Lawrence Gazette: I’m just kidding.
Nerwinski: But you know what? Listen, that road was before my time, and I always thought it was odd like that. I mean, to have a road to a commercial zone go right through a residential development.
Lawrence Gazette: I’ve always thought it was really strange to have a connection from a major road going through the development…
Nerwinski: Into an industrial zone. Installing a warehouse there, my goodness. It’s exactly what it’s been zoned for for decades. You can’t be concerned about that. But the residents were concerned about trucks coming through. We’ve had some trucks actually push through those barricades and continue on. But I think that’s stopped.
As for the 5.5-million-square-foot warehouse situation happening in West Windsor, I am yet to be convinced that it will happen, because there are some serious New Jersey DOT concerns, and it requires the county to to have to do things on its roadways. I don’t know if it’s going to happen.
Lawrence Gazette: I’m not sure if the demand is there for it eventually.
Nerwinski: What it’s going to do is allow the surrounding communities to not have to deal with warehousing, because how do you justify putting in a warehouse here if there’s one right down the road?
We have actively participated as a governing body to fight this (Bridge Point 8). It just seems over the top, like way over the top. Our community is going to get affected by it, because Route 1 is going to be impacted.
You know a lot of people said, “Oh, my God, you’re building a Chick-fil-A. That’s it. Route 1’s a parking lot.” In my mind I go, “We’ve been there, done that before. These roads have a remarkable ability to absorb new cars entering onto the roadway.”.
But the trucks that are going to be going there (Bridge Point 8), I just I can’t even picture it. I hope it doesn’t happen. I hope that land is reimagined in another way. I don’t know if you remember, but at one point it was going to be a housing complex.
Lawrence Gazette: Right, with about 2,000 houses plus retail.
Nerwinski: It would be great if there was like a multi-billionaire guy that said, “Let’s preserve this, and let’s make this into some type of sanctuary of some kind.”
Lawrence Gazette: I ran an interview I did with the mayor of West Windsor about that site in our sister paper, the West Windsor and Plainsboro News. I heard from a lot of residents who weren’t happy about the article because the mayor was talking about the township’s justification for the project.
They said the town should have considered preserving it. Do they realize that the site was purchased for $40 million? The town doesn’t have $40 million to pay to preserve a property like that. If you’re talking about a small residential piece that could have had five homes, then that might have worked.
Nerwinski: Or something like the Colonial Lake here in Lawrence.
Lawrence Gazette: Right. This is no Duke Estate (in Hillsborough), you know? There’s no Doris Duke here who wants to set aside the her property as a park for the public. It’s a former commercial site that was zoned for commercial offices that the market couldn’t support. It was never developed with commercial offices, even back when the commercial office was hot. Now it is depressed, and you have a developer who wants to put something there. The township’s hands are tied as to what you’re going to put there.
Nerwinski: Yeah, listen that’s a very Americana fight. Property rights are are highly regarded in our country. And you can’t tell an owner, “No, you can’t do anything with your property that you purchased, even though it’s zoned for exactly what you’re saying it’s for.”
This was a planning board application, so it’s zoned for that. But whether it should happen or not is a whole different story. I meet with potential developers. A part of my job is being the director of community development. Developers like to have this courtesy meeting, and it’s for the sole purpose of saying, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this. What’s your temperature on this?”
Lawrence Gazette: Exploratory.
Nerwinski: Yeah, exploratory. Nine times out of 10, it won’t go any further, because it’s not a great idea, you know?
I don’t even know what that would look like in that area in West Windsor. Their hands are kind of tied, but…
Lawrence Gazette: Well, there’s litigation involved on top of everything else, so it’s a it’s an extremely complicated piece of property.
Nerwinski: And I don’t know if it’s been environmentally investigated yet. I think that’s still part of it, having formerly been American Cyanamid (a chemical company) there.
Lawrence Gazette: Moving on, it seems to me there’s not a heck of a lot of developable land in Lawrence Township. One type of development that can be costly in terms of impact on the town and especially the school district is certain types of housing. Is there much in terms of residential development coming online?
Nerwinski: So this is who we are as a community. We’re built out. We’re not Jackson, New Jersey. We’re not some of these southern towns that have a lot of former farmland. I think 26% of Lawrence is preserved as open space or is open space. What is happening is the redevelopment of locations. On top of that is our continuing obligation to provide affordable housing.
Our obligation is to provide 1,110 units by July 1st of 2025. So when people say, “Stop building in town,” it’s easy to say. But when you have the Supreme Court of New Jersey saying that we must produce this housing at this amount, or run afoul of state assistance or whatever the consequences are, Lawrence Township has always been compliant and in front of our affordable housing obligations, which I think is a good thing.
It goes to our inclusiveness as a community and our diversity as a community. We do have some things coming online, the Brandywine development, which is on Lenox Drive, in the corporate area. That took a lot of reimagining to situate housing there—I think 189 housing units.
Lawrence Gazette: What type of housing is that?
Nerwinski: It’s going to be market rate, and there’s going to be affordable housing—I think it’s 42 affordable rental units, and the other ones are townhouses. It’s been in the works for a while. It was in litigation. It was a part of our affordable housing struggles. It came in to us as a 300 unit development and we got it down to 189. That’s always the battle. Developers come in big and then you have to fight them back.
Spruce Street is another development.
Lawrence Gazette: Where is that one?
Nerwinski: If you go down Spruce Street a little, there’s the Boys and Girls Club of America. Behind that is a lot. It’s an 8- or 9-acre-lot that’s going to be developed into market rate apartments with 20% set aside for affordable housing.
One of the things that I have consistently heard, and I’ve heard in my position here, is that you could be you could be born here and raised here, but when you’re a young adult, there’s no housing for you to be living out on your own. These apartments, I think, address that issue, and I think I don’t think we’re alone in that dynamic, because I’m seeing more apartments coming online.
I think Spruce Street is really a great place to put it in terms of walkability, which is what we’re always trying to promote, with the farmers market there and across the street. The county is going have to do some work to make that a little bit safer on the roadway.
There’s also the development on Texas Avenue—a 100% affordable housing unit development, which is getting past its final financing stages. I think that’s going to be starting to happen soon.
Lawrence Gazette: That’s the project next to the Lawrence Shopping Center, right?
Nerwinski: Yeah, that’s the Lawrence Shopping Center. You know who would have thought, even me back in the day, that that area where everybody practiced driving and parking would be the area that could hold an affordable housing complex of some kind.
The development is going to be about 54 units. I know it was very controversial and there’s always a NIMBY element to every new complex. People don’t like change and they especially don’t like change near them.
You look at that property and you think, “there’s no way can that work.” But the conceptual designs and the 3D presentation of how it can work and how it will work, I think at the end, when it settles in, people are going to go, “Oh okay, I get it now.”
Lawrence Gazette: I’m used to hearing a lot of negative comments about housing in general and especially affordable housing. People think it has a stigma associated with to it. When I wrote a story reporting that approval, I received a number of phone calls from people who were asking for more information about how they could apply or get more information about moving in there. One woman was talking about how it would be a great place for her daughter, who’s just starting out. It showed me something I already knew—that there’s a huge demand for that kind of housing that New Jersey just does not provide.
Nerwinski: There’s a deep misconception about it. I wrote a couple of articles on that on my blog. I mean, you go on Facebook and there are some negative people that were making really awful comments. It comes from ignorance and not understanding what affordable housing is, who it assists and how it’s critical and obviously legally required.
Although, to me, the legal requirement is less the motivation than than providing a really diverse community. I think it’s an obligation to do that, and I think in the end that it’s going to going to be a fabric of our community like everywhere else. It just takes time to accept it.
Lawrence Gazette: It’s not going to go away. There are going to be future rounds where towns are going to be required to provide more affordable housing.
Nerwinski: I mean, I have this conversation with people all the time. We’re in New Jersey. Our population is not decreasing. It’s increasing.
Lawrence Gazette: Courts are going to continue to say, “Okay, we evaluated your town. This is how many more units of affordable housing you’re going to need to build.”
Nerwinski: People are moving around. It’s much more diverse than it ever has been in terms of economic statuses of individuals. This housing element that we’re required to do—and that we are meeting our obligations under—is just important to the vitality of the community.
And the other thing is—and I consistently hear this—”You always put everything in South Lawrence.”.
Number one, developers come to the town. We don’t have an economic development department that goes out and tries to seek developers to develop land that’s owned by other people. It just doesn’t work that way. So the developer has to be ready, willing and able, and want to develop a particular property.
There’s not as much control as people think that we have in terms of that. Through zoning laws we can reduce and try to work with developers, and we do really successfully try to make it consistent with our community, but not have these buildings that stand out and have people go, “What? Where the hell did that come from?”
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