Princeton, N.J., April 29, 2001.
“Princeton is as much a small town as Greenwich Village is a village,” Robert Geddes, the noted architect and founder of Princeton Future, declared yesterday at a conference on “Princeton: The Big Picture,” sponsored by the Sandra Starr Foundation. The meeting addressed the changes sweeping the region and the urgent need for new understandings, new policies, and what Congressman Rush Holt at the meeting called “new tools” if Princeton and its neighbors are to continue to be livable communities.
Opening the conference, Paul Starr, the foundation’s president, recalled the wry comment of a long-time Princetonian that Princton was the “Leichtenstein of New Jersey.” But “the world closes in,” Starr added, and the speakers that followed underlined that point.
Clogged transportation arteries were the problem that several speakers highlighted in their discussions of growth and sprawl. Robert Yaro, director of the New York-based Regional Plan Association, argued that New Jersey’s economic development has depended on its relationship to New York City and that the transit connections between the two have reached the limit of their capacity. There has been no expansion of the Hudson River crossings since a second level was added to the George Washington Bridge 40 years ago. Train service from New Jersey into New York has also basically reached its limit. A new rail tunnel—under consideration by the Port Authority—is a $6 billion project that has yet to be financed.
Carlos Rodrigues, manager of special projects at New Jersey’s Office of State Planning, pointed to the enormous gap between the future development implied by local zoning in Mercer County and the area’s limited network of roads and public transportation. The state has adopted a plan that calls for emphasis on compact, mixed-use development around town centers. Nonetheless, the local municalities continue to zone large tracts for single-use development, which implies continued reliance on automobiles for trips to work and shopping. The old model for the suburbs is no longer workable, Rodrigues argued, but local governments have yet to adjust their plans and zoning.
Van Zandt Williams, vice president for development of Princeton University and former chair of the Regional Planning Partnership, emphatically took up the same issue, arguing that we were just “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” without changes in local zoning.
Invited by moderator Ingrid Reed to pose the first question to the speakers, Congressman Holt stood up in the audience and asked what “tools” citizens and communities need to respond to sprawl. He said that he was particularly interested in tools that federal legislation might provide.
Yaro suggested that the government could provide funds for communities to do “build-out” analyses, which “fast-forward” to the likely outcome of local zoning and other land-use regulation. He cited the example of a build-out analysis for a small town in Massachusetts that showed it had zoned for more commercial space than exists in Boston. When a community sees the implications for traffic, needed public services, and consequent tax levels, people often decide to support changes in plans and regulations.
A second questioner, Mayor Phyllis Marchand of Princeton Township, noted, however, that when localities change zoning, they often face costly legal battles with developers. Yaro then identified a second tool that government could provide: legal support for local governments in land-use litigation. He cited the sharp decline in challenges to rezoning on Long Island when the State of New York assumed responsibility for resisting lawsuits.
Others at the conference argued, however, that progress would be difficult without changes in tax policy. Because local governments in New Jersey rely on property taxes, they have strong incentives to chase development and ignore the spillover effects on traffic and public services in neighboring communities. In the Princeton area, for example, West Windsor has zoned land along Route 1 for millions of additional square feet of community space, ignoring the effects on other communities.
Several speakers suggested the need for incentives for collaboration in regional planning. Yaro suggested, for example, that communities could become eligible to receive state funds if they made their zoning consistent with regional plans.
At the beginning of the conference, Paul Starr presented the foundation’s Margen Penick Award, to Jean Mahoney, who has been a leader of the Sensible Transportation Options Partnership, a group active in resisting plans for the Millstone Bypass and demanding a broader regional approach to transportation nees. [See sidebar, Jean Mahoney Wins Margen Penick Award.]
In the discussion about the effects of regional growth on Princeton, at least one speaker offered a more positive perspective. Bill Lockwood, special programming director at McCarter Theater, described how McCarter had evolved from a “community auditorium” into a regional theater. Lockwood, who grew up in Princeton in the 1940s and 1950s, recalled that when he and his family went to McCarter, they saw amateur theatricals and knew most of the other people in the audience. When he first went to work for McCarter in the 1960s, they were hoping to persuade 1,000 people to subscribe to a dramatic series.
Today, Lockwood continued, McCarter has 13,000 subscribers, and there are evenings when he stands in the lobby of the theater and does not recognize a single face. That is because the theater now has a much wider public, drawn from 35,000 households and extending into a broader region beyond Princeton, which now accounts for less than a quarter of the audience.
New Jersey’s state plan, according to Carlos Rodrigues, treats Princeton as a regional center. But not everyone in Princeton accepts that larger role for the town. One of the spakers at the conference, Yina Moore, a member of the Princeton Regional Planning Board, said the other communities in the area should “get a life.” And Professor Geddes, describing the results of the consultations organized by Princeton Future, said most Princeton residents still see the community as a small town. One of the challenges, he suggested, is to bring that nostalgic vision into line with the realities of the larger changes affecting the community.