Responding to Rebuttal of Advertisement Placed by Ad Hoc Committee of Historians
To the Editor:
As Dan Chamby’s rebuttal to “Historians in Defense of Historic Princeton,” rehashes some of the flimsiest arguments favoring the massive luxury project proposed for the former Tennent-Roberts site [“Writing Rebuttal to Message in Advertisement Placed by Ad Hoc Committee of Historians,” Mailbox, May 14”], I’m delighted, as one of the historians he upbraids, to respond.
His letter calls the severe shortage of affordable housing in Princeton a threat to our democratic heritage. Absolutely correct. Yet the project he supports provides the absolute minimum of affordable housing, 20 percent of all units.
An alternative plan presented to the Municipality offers 100 percent affordable housing, with less density but more affordable units than the proposed complex. The affordable units in the complex revert to market price in 30 years; the alternative offers affordable unit residents a pathway to home ownership.
The alternative plan attacks the affordability crisis head on and promises to welcome scores of lower-income families into historic Princeton as they deserve, as neighbors and friends. The proposed project with its close to 200 luxury — yes, luxury — units will worsen the very inequalities the rebuttal purports to deplore.
Yet the Municipality has summarily rejected the alternative proposal while handing the current developer a $40 million PILOT, shifting the extra tax burden onto hard-pressed homeowners.
Let’s face it: the proposed project is an extremely dense high-end complex being disguised as a noble advance for social justice to win public favor. We’re supposed to believe that the surest way to build more affordable housing and combat inequality is to build four times as much luxury housing! And on a massive scale! This double-talk shamelessly exploits the great cause the rebuttal claims to uphold, while it hoodwinks Princetonians of goodwill.
The rebuttal charges us historians with fearmongering about “destructive” effects in historic Princeton. The project, it claims, will be “additive,” an enhancement. But one of those additions is a 261-vehicle underground garage that threatens to cause severe flooding to vulnerable historic homes and sites. I’d call that destructive. Another addition is the project’s vehicle entrance and exit on hazardous, traffic-heavy Route 206, a federal highway, the potential havoc spilling into an 18th-century street. Still another is a complex built atop a hill that will loom like the Bastille over historic homes and sites at the bottom of the hill, including Albert Einstein’s former residence. How is any of this (and much more), in the rebuttal’s word, “palliative?”
The rebuttal spares us the ballyhooed “walkable” features of the project, hyped elsewhere as if hundreds of new residents won’t need to drive to shop for groceries, see a doctor, purchase hardware and household supplies, and more, exacerbating an already nightmarish traffic problem.
Unfortunately, the rebuttal’s conclusion insinuates that we historians, ignoring Princeton’s history of residential segregation, may be racially motivated. It’s the tired old, discredited NIMBY smear jacked up a bit.
Can’t we talk about repudiating and correcting that oppressive racist history in more direct, creative, and even radical ways, using all our Princeton brains and imagination, instead of falling for the cloaked designs of regressive profit-driven luxury development?