Letter To The Editor: Resident Addresses Affordable Housing Issue

Letter to the editor from Roger Koch:

Oct. 20, 2020

Lately you can’t avoid noticing all the construction going on in Hillsborough. The Township Committee under Mayor Tomson authorized various for-profit private developers to build thousands of market priced apartments in two and three story complexes throughout town. The Committee has stated this choice was necessary in order to persuade developers to also build, within the apartment complexes, the few hundred affordable housing units required by our Supreme Court. The Committee has stated private builders cannot make enough profit constructing solely affordable housing units, and need to be permitted to build three market priced units for every one affordable unit.

So every one of the residential complexes with several hundred apartments being built, only contains 25% affordable units. The other 75% are market priced units. It is the far greater number of market priced units in each complex, not the few affordable units, that will cause overdevelopment and resulting overcrowding expected to burden the town.

Town residents have questioned whether a different formula not reliant on providing profits for developers would be a better choice for township residents. For example, in other communities the town chooses non-profit developers to build many of the court ordered affordable units. These developers can afford to build solely affordable housing units without accompanying market priced units. They can do so because their goal is to provide the needed affordable housing, not maximizing their profit. They rely on sources of financing other than personal profit, and seek to provide a valuable public service to the community.

The choice by Mayor Tomson and the Committee to build three times as many market priced units as affordable ones was a subject at a Township Committee meeting on 7/14/2020. It arose in connection with the costly $20 million purchase by our town in 2017 of 300 acres of vacant land, as a settlement of the Hillsborough Properties’ lawsuit. Mayor Tomson proudly stated the purchase and its price were necessary to prevent residential development of more than 1000 residences planned for those 300 acres. Committeeman DelCore agreed.

At the meeting, town residents questioned why some of the 300 acres purchased to prevent residential development, wasn’t being used for that same purpose, to build solely affordable units without the additional market priced units. If the town would have donated some of the 300 acres, to non-profit developers, it would have helped these developers avoid the cost of purchasing the land and enabled them to construct more solely affordable units without the need to build market priced units. By doing so, the Committee could have further justified the $20 million dollar debt incurred by the town, reduced residential development by eliminating market priced units, and performed a public service for all the people of Hillsborough.

Mayor Tomson suggested the Committee’s lawyer Eric Bernstein to respond. Bernstein surprisingly stated no residential homes, including affordable ones, could be built on the 300 acres and that he had advised the court the land was not suitable for residential development. However, this contradicted Mayor Tomson’s claim several minutes earlier for purchasing these same acres to stop residential development.

Before the citizens of Hillsborough can trust what Mayor Tomson, and the Committee tells us about its plans for residential development, we need to know whether our mayor and Township Committee are truly basing their decisions on the profits and private interests of developers rather than the best interests of our community.

By Roger Koch

This press release was produced by Roger Koch. The views expressed here are the author's own.