Fair Housing Obligation ONLY please!

I emailed the following to Holmdel's Township Committee. Hopefully it helps the public understand and therefore become active regarding this very important Township defining topic.

Dear Holmdel Township Committee (TC) members,

At the August 8^th meeting the public became privy to the township’s estimate of Holdmel’s Fair Housing obligation. TC believes it needs an additional 110 Fair Housing eligible “family rental” units. To accomplish this TC, in discussions with developers, has identified 4 properties on which 420 units will be built with the 5th property’s location and unit size (Lucent redevelopment attributable) yet to be determined. Given the proportionality used on the other four properties it is reasonable to assume that the fifth property will be sized at 170 units. So to obtain 110 Fair Housing units, TC’s plan is to build 420+170=590 family units.

It is reasonable to assume that the tax on each of these units will not exceed $5000 per year. It is also reasonable to assume that each of these “family rental” units will have two school going children. It is also reasonable to assume that the educational cost to the town to educate each of these children is $10,000 per year. So not accounting for the cost of additional services any development brings, each typical “family unit” will be a net cost of $15,000 per year to the town. The total cost of the excess units built in order to obtain the required 110 Fair Housing obligation would be (590 – 110) X $15,000 = $7.2 million per year!!!

Please consider an alternative route, only build the 110 units but subsidize the builder directly. One possible way to do this would be to pay the builder $1000 per month per unit. The cost to do this would be $1000 X 12 X 110 = $1.32 million per year.

To meet the appropriate requirement that Fair Housing units not be concentrated in one location, spread the units in say lots of 15 units around town. So within around 7 locations, evenly spread throughout town, this requirement would be met.

So for a running annual cost of about $1.3 million the town can meet its Fair Housing obligation. We do not need the additional 480 “family units” which would cost the town an additional $7.2 million per year besides the increased density and all the commensurate costs in traffic delays, congestion, noise and aggravations.

TC, this is an extremely important topic, arguably even more important than the Bell redevelopment. The planned path will divide the town into the have and have-nots, with all the associated social discord and at an extremely high cost to those tax payers footing the bill. This is a township defining topic and needs full discussion with the residents at a Town Hall called just for this purpose. I believe my approach meets the obligation at the lowest cost to the town but perhaps other residents have even better approaches to meet the requirement.

I strongly encourage you to call a Town Hall meeting to address this township defining topic.

Kind regards,

Pradeep Jhanjee (Holmdel)

PS: Please consider this an open letter request to you. I will pursue the publication of this letter in the local news outlets.