“If you build it, they will come.” As I listened to the Howard Hughes executives explain the rationale for their extremely low student estimate for nearly 2,000 proposed homes, that’s the thought that popped into my head.
“If you build housing, the students will come.” While Howard Hughes claims they can cleverly choose housing types that won’t attract families with children, we know better, don’t we? You could set up some yurts in your backyard and there’d be a bunch of kindergartners enrolling at Hawk the next day. People move to West Windsor for the schools!
Howard Hughes would like us to believe that an enormous, mixed-use, high-density housing development is the only possible use for this land, and that any other type of development is obsolete. Nonsense. That’s just because it’s the only thing they want to build.
What they’re really proposing is a city-within-a-city. And Howard Hughes builds them big, in some cases doubling or tripling the population of a town. This site is about 10 times the size of QuakerBridge Mall, or roughly the size of the old Princeton Borough. If you apply the same ratio of police officers in Princeton to this development, we’d need nearly 20 officers just for this one piece of property. Clearly our emergency services needs would increase dramatically.
Howard Hughes is asking that the zoning be changed to allow housing, and for their property to be deemed “an area in need of redevelopment” so they can take advantage of PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) financing. They make it sound like that’s a good thing. What they won’t tell you is that areas in need of redevelopment and PILOT financing were created for run-down areas in cities with bad credit ratings. An appropriate use of this designation might be a city that wants to clean up their abandoned dockyards. So they do urban renewal and turn those dockyards into seaport shops. That’s not West Windsor.
A PILOT allows the developer to make a lump payment to the township—and the schools get nothing. Yet they want to build an enormous number of high-density housing units which would require the expansion and construction of four levels of schools: elementary, upper elementary, middle and high school. This arrangement would provide no money to support the school district at all.
It’s not surprising that most PILOT programs in New Jersey are done in Abbott districts—where the state funds the schools—so PILOT doesn’t affect their school districts. In our town, it would have a devastating impact.
Howard Hughes has allowed their property to deteriorate for years and now they want us to give them special treatment to make it right—all at our expense. Our property taxes will go up to subsidize this development. It will crowd our roads, strain our emergency services, lower our property values and destroy our schools.
It’s time for Howard Hughes to either follow the current zoning or sell this property to someone who will.
— Virginia Manzari, West Windsor
