Name Calling Has No Place in Debate Over Proposed Apartment Complex on Stockton Street
To the Editor:
I’m disheartened that the debate over the proposed high-rise luxury apartment complex on Stockton Street has reduced some community members to name-calling, specifically accusing the residents who opposed this development of being NIMBYs. This is a facile and generic epithet, and in this case it is also patently false. Far from opposing affordable housing in our backyard, we want more of it. It’s the proposed project that will worsen the imbalance.
Our immediate community of neighbors worked with architects to draft a vision for the plot that would entail less density and 100 percent affordable housing units, as opposed to the minimal 20 percent required by law in the proposed luxury project. The neighborhood plan, while including more total affordable units, intended those units as a path to home ownership. The plan included state-of-the art environmental and green technology to address 21st century climate change.
Municipal authorities summarily dismissed this plan. Instead, we’re left with the densest development in any residential neighborhood in Princeton — a development that, with its 200- plus car garage and its felling of 200-year-old trees across the site, will badly exacerbate flooding.
If the municipal Council in a town like Princeton, with its endless intellectual, technological, political, and financial resources, can’t take the time to envision what innovative, sustainable long-term housing options might look like, what municipality in this country can? As a town, surely we could explore the private/public partnership that would make this type of housing a reality. To dismiss this out of hand lacks the curiosity and creativity we desperately need at the present time.
Yes, Princeton has become unaffordable. There are myriad reasons for this: a university that subsidizes faculty mortgages, a theological seminary that owns a significant number of homes in and around the Mercer Hill district; and not least, a lack of creative foresight.
I encourage community members to see this proposed development and the rhetoric about addressing the affordability crisis for what it is: a bait-and-switch proposition. We get 238 units with rents of $6,000/month and a paltry 48 set aside as affordable. It neither affords working families the opportunity for home ownership, nor aids those in need of less expensive options.
As a native Princetonian, a former volunteer for Princeton Community Housing, and having had the great good fortune to have been a resident of PCH for three years, no one cares more about making Princeton affordable than I do.
Finally, as we see daily in our national politics, I’d remind those who disagree that name-calling is always a substitute for reasoned arguments.