5 town Union County Mayors’ Consortium-Please Stop Building

05/07/2022

Bruce Paterson

325 Willow Ave

Garwood, NJ 07027

Dayph: 908-956-5651

email: araceengineering@aol.com

Letter to the Editor

Ref: 5 town Mayors’ Consortium-Stop Building

Dear Editor

There is a half-page press release in the media. It is announcing a formation of a “Rt 28/South Avenue Mayors Consortium” consisting of the mayors of Cranford, Garwood, Westfield, Scotch Plains and Fanwood. They plan to do a mobility and circulation study of the North Avenue/South Avenue corridors thru their 5 towns in regards to traffic, bike and pedestrian safety. I believe in their mission and have offered some minor guidance recently. In addition, i understand there is also a separate group of town planners from Plainfield, Fanwood and Scotch Plains convening to study the area’s build-up. These 2 groups may merge.

The first question that comes to mind is where the hell were they 5 years ago when high-density development was starting to go exponential along the South Avenue corridor. Back then, the Cranford mayor was the only one who stated in the media a concern about a neighboring town’s high-density project affecting their town. In 2017 we started a Facebook page, “NJ-Stop the Madness”, inviting residents to chronicle the excessive overdevelopments in their towns, and the posts showed a horrendous increase of high-density building being proposed throughout the state.

In 2018 we did a study of high-density projects proposed, built or being built during a 10 year span along a 7 mile stretch of South Avenue from Netherwood Train station near the border of Plainfield/Fanwood east to the Cranford/Roselle border. We found about 40 high density projects along that stretch that were consisting of about 2000 residential units. Note per traffic testimony in 2016 traffic testimony had stated already South Avenue was at 100% capacity and intersections were rated D and F (like in grade school). I had noted these facts to various government entities and social pages.

This massive increase they easily all claim is due to affordable housing (AH) mandates. But when they allow 4x, 5x, 6x up to 9x multiples of luxury rate rentals to every one unit of affordable housing, makes you wonder if there is any control happening.

The biggest scam we find is that nearly 50% of the projects along South Avenue are being built simultaneously. Independent traffic impact studies needed for each project (Westfield appears to waive that requirement at times) are only performed on one project each since the traffic experts claim that all those other projects not built yet cannot factor into their study. So we get only one building projected to have say 40 cars peak hour with minimal traffic impact, instead of finding when 20 projects are finished concurrently we end up with 40 cars times 20= 800 more cars suddenly on South Avenue. Our governing bodies totally ignore this concurrent impending doom but now are concerned with pedestrian safety. The government creates the problem and now are to be our saviors? And the building continues, now North Avenue is the target.

Some notions: Developers demand their usual 10-15% profit margins on any project. But when 1 AH, imposed by the government, generates 5x free luxury rate units, a huge greed factor becomes evident. Now you know why this overdevelopment is going exponential everywhere. Since the govt is driving only the AH mandates, which is a severe issue in NJ, and which collaterally is driving the freely given huge luxury unit amounts that piggyback, a much lower profit margin by unit demand must be imposed. That’s why every square inch of property is taken up by bloated look-alike high density. As to traffic studies, it has to be made more regional to understand the impacts of all nearby high-density. 40 projects in 7 miles stretch (extending to 1 block in) equals one per every 1000 feet. Astounding. Plus, our governing bodies must force the League of Municipalities to beseech the legislature to address this destructive issue. Final conclusion: STOP BUILDING!