Who Can Residents Trust to Tell the Truth About Over Development

The Township Committee in Hillsborough under Mayor Tomson authorized various for-profit private developers to build thousands of market priced apartments in two and three story complexes throughout town. The Committee has stated this choice was necessary in order to persuade developers to also build, within many of the apartment complexes, the few hundred affordable housing units required by our Supreme Court. The Committee has stated private builders cannot make enough profit constructing solely affordable housing units, and need to be permitted to build three market priced units for every one affordable unit.
So when we see residential complexes with several hundred apartments being built, only 25% are affordable units. The other 75% under this formula are market priced units. It is the far greater number of market priced units, not the few affordable units that will cause overdevelopment and resulting overcrowding expected to burden the town.
Town residents have questioned whether a different formula not having to be reliant on providing profits for developers would be a better choice for township residents. For example, in other communities the towns choose non-profit developers to build many of the court ordered affordable units. These developers can afford to build solely affordable housing units without accompanying market priced units. They can do so because their goal is to provide the needed affordable housing, not maximizing their profit. They rely on sources of financing other than personal profit, and seek to provide a valuable public service to the community.
The Township Committee’s choice to build three times as many market priced units as affordable ones was a subject at a Committee meeting on 7/14/2020. It arose in connection with the costly $20 million purchase by our town in 2017 of 300 acres of vacant land as a settlement of the Hillsborough Properties’ lawsuit. Mayor Tomson proudly stated the purchase and its price were necessary to prevent residential development of more than 1000 residences planned for those 300 acres. Committeeman DelCore agreed.
At the meeting town residents questioned why some of the 300 acres purchased to prevent residential development, wasn't being used for that same purpose by building solely affordable units without the additional market priced units. If the town would have donated some of the 300 acres to non-profit developers it would have helped them to avoid the cost of purchasing the land and enabled them to construct solely the required affordable units without needing to build market priced units. By doing so the Committee could have further justified the $20 million dollar purchase, reduced residential development by eliminating market priced units, and performed a public service for all the people of Hillsborough.
Mayor Tomson asked the Committee’s lawyer Eric Bernstein to respond. Bernstein provided a surprising answer. He stated that no residential homes, including affordable ones, could be built on the 300 acres and that he had advised the court the land was not suitable for residential development. However, this contradicted Mayor Tomson’s claim several minutes earlier for purchasing these same acres to stop residential development.
Before the citizens of Hillsborough can trust Mayor Tomson, and the Committee to plan any further residential development, we need to know whether our mayor and Township Committee are truly basing their decisions on the profits and private interests of developers rather than the best interests of our community.
By Roger Koch