To the Editor:
Although I’m a week late, I’d like to take a few minutes to respond to Mr. Newlin’s letter of June 11, 2025 about the Defend Historic Princeton lawn signs in front of my house. I see them as a plea to defend Princeton from lack of imagination; the upcoming discussion over what to do with the WCC property makes this especially important. Far from wanting Princeton to become richer and whiter as Mr. Newlin states, I’d like to see it go the other way, and it seems that the town Council could have given more thought to ways to do that. Instead, they adopted a standardized arrangement that uses our tax dollars to fund projects that apparently don’t make financial sense without them.
Here are some ideas that occur to me:
As several letter writers have noted, this project requires 20 percent low-income housing, but only for 30 years. That’s the blink of an eye, and when it ends, we’ll be in a worse situation than we are now. Since the developer doesn’t seem to be able to make the numbers work without the PILOT, why didn’t the Council hold him to 40 years or 50? Or 30 percent or 40 percent low-income housing? Or require him to renovate the town-owned public housing on Franklin Street as part of the project?
The buildings that the developer knocked down were in the Princeton Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Had he renovated the two dormitories for income-producing (i.e. rental) purposes, he would have been eligible for a 20 percent tax credit from the Federal government and an additional 50 prcent tax credit from the State of New Jersey for the cost of renovation. It would have been more difficult to get the credit for turning the gymnasium into apartments, but the Council could have made the renovation of the dormitories a requirement for getting the PILOT for the project.
I share Mr. Newlin’s concern about the plummeting numbers of Black and brown residents, and would also like to mention the equally undesirable decrease in the number of municipal employees who live in town. (About 80 Borough and Township employees lived in town in 1950.) Instead of giving our tax dollars to this developer as PILOT so he can build high-end apartments, the town could use them to follow the University’s lead and co-sign mortgages for municipal employees. That way the cop directing traffic and our kids’ teachers could be our neighbors, instead of having to commute here from some other town.
I applaud the town Council members for all of the long, unpaid hours they put into volunteering on our behalf. I just wish they weren’t so quick to adopt a standardized arrangement that will make developers richer to the town’s detriment. A bit of imagination and tough bargaining would go a long way to making Princeton a community of welcome and inclusion.