Rethinking Bergen County's suburban sprawlThursday, January 10, 2013 Last updated: Thursday January 10, 2013, 10:26 AM
BY JAMES M. O'NEILL AND SCOTT FALLON
STAFF WRITERS
The Record
It's one thing to build a convenient, transit-oriented, environmentally friendly community from scratch, in undeveloped open space. But how do you do that in a place like North Jersey – an already mature, built-out, highway-girded, mall-strewn landscape, a place developed in the post-World War II era, when everyone dreamed of escaping the city for their own detached home, patch of yard and personal mode of transit, the car?
STAFF FILE PHOTO
Neighborhoods northwest of Teterboro Airport typify North Jersey's pattern of housing development. Not easily, not in a place that defines suburban sprawl.
Cultivating an alternative style of development in North Jersey – one less dependent on the automobile and single-family houses — may seem like a pipe dream. What's more, New Jersey is a "home rule" state, where local municipalities, and not regional entities like counties, control development.
But changes in the local landscape are slowly taking shape. Construction of high-density housing has outpaced single-family homes in Bergen County for about a decade, according to data from state building permits. And while construction of single-family houses is still greater in Passaic County, multifamily housing has begun to catch up.
This shift is part of an emerging national trend, with regional planners and suburban developers having begun to plan and build in ways that draw on many urban elements from American cities in the 1920s and 1930s. These communities rely less on cars and more on public transportation. They feature buildings that combine housing, retail and office space to encourage walkability, and design roads to accommodate bicycles and pedestrians, as well as cars.
Such development is often called sustainable because it reduces car emissions and uses land, drinking water, fossil fuels and other natural resources more efficiently. It also accommodates a lifestyle that some might consider more appealing: less time stuck in traffic, less isolation, easier access to amenities, a smaller carbon footprint.
These new developments have begun popping up in North Jersey, even though the vast majority of the region has already been built out in the typical car-centric suburban mode.
The two counties do have some characteristics, however, that help foster a more urban pattern of new development: public transit and long-shuttered industrial tracts near attractive amenities like the Manhattan skyline.
Factories and wharfs that once lined the Hudson River south of the George Washington Bridge have been replaced by thousands of new town houses and condominiums, in part because of expanded rail and ferry service. In Wood-Ridge, a huge mixed-use development is rising on the site of an old aircraft factory; it will include a new commuter train station to shuttle residents to Manhattan and other parts of New Jersey.
Another factor could drive this new, less sprawling kind of development here: the region's changing demographics. North Jersey is getting older and younger at the same time, and both groups are looking for the kinds of living arrangements that sustainable development provides.
"Researchers are finding the change in aspirations is already happening and developers are behind the curve," said Juliann Allison, associate director of the Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at the University of California-Riverside. "You find young people and seniors both are demanding denser communities."
Peter Kasabach, executive director of NJ Future, a non-profit group advocating efficient land use, agreed. "You have the millennials and the baby boomers really driving the market for different housing types," Kasabach said. "It's those market forces that are creating more walkable, more transit-oriented communities."
It makes sense. Young people today are less able than prior generations to afford a typical starter home with a yard and a car. And new empty nesters are realizing they no longer need the same space they once did – and as they age they are more interested in being able to walk to get chores done.
"Given the new economies of housing, not all square footage is created equal," said Raphael Zucker, president of Somerset Development, which is building several New Jersey developments in what is often called the "new urbanism" mold. "Some people realize they only may use 2,000 of their 5,000-square-foot home, and they want something that's compact but more livable."
In Bergen County, the number of people aged 20 to 24 grew by 13 percent over the past decade, to 47,472. During the same period, the number of those aged 55 to 64 grew by 31 percent, to 114,526.
"These demographic shifts will continue and intensify the growing interest in this type of development," said David Behrend of the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority.
But can North Jersey significantly address this demand for development that emphasizes walking over driving?
The region has several things going for it.
One is the existing network of mass transit, including two major commuter rail lines. On its face, this doesn't sound like a promising element, since the train lines were built primarily to get people from North Jersey to Manhattan, while today only 18 percent of Bergen residents commute to the city.
Still, the train hubs are a start, and could become even more vital if the region can develop one of the growing trends in transportation – light rail or bus rapid transit. "Bus rapid transit is less expensive than rail and more flexible," said Behrend. "You can more easily change the route if you need to."
A bus rapid transit system often provides a dedicated lane on an existing highway or road shoulder for a bus, and the bus has technology to control stoplights so that it can keep going when car traffic is backed up, said Chris Helms, a supervising planner with Bergen County's planning department.
These alternative lines could provide more of the east-west movement the region lacks but desperately needs, since the bulk of residents now commute within the county to jobs – and 85 percent of people drive to work.
Other transit-related improvements gaining traction in parts of the country that facilitate sustainable living are concepts known as "traffic calming" and "complete streets." The idea is to make downtown roadways more amenable to pedestrians and bikers, not just cars. Widening sidewalks at intersections and switching to angled parking instead of parallel parking on downtown streets can slow traffic. That makes it more pedestrian-friendly, enticing people to bike or walk while running errands rather than driving from store to store. And there's an added benefit – reduced pollution.
"When you have a lot of stop-and-start driving, it's really bad in terms of pollution," Allison said.
By redeveloping around transit hubs, North Jersey could begin to provide the somewhat more urban lifestyle that many younger and older residents are looking for.
"There's no such thing as a silver bullet, but the closest thing is redevelopment around transit hubs in existing downtowns," said Robert Freudenberg, New Jersey director of the Regional Plan Association, which assists and advises planners in the New York metropolitan area.
"The past may be the future for places like Hackensack and Englewood, if you can take the bones and build on them."Randy Solomon, co-director of the Institute for Sustainability Planning & Governance at The College of New Jersey, agreed. "People now live in one suburb, work in another suburb and shop in another suburb," he said. "And they have to drive through five towns just to get to all of them. That is going to change."
Another asset North Jersey has in pursuit of such redevelopment is the many brownfields within older downtowns — former industrial sites that are now vacant and polluted. Once cleaned up, they could offer some of the biggest expanses of land for new housing.
Municipalities will need to reassess their zoning laws in some cases to allow for multi-use development around downtown transit hubs, experts say. Because New Jersey is a home-rule state, town councils and planning boards separated by only a few miles can have wildly different visions for their municipalities. Regional planning is scarce, with the 14-town Meadowlands Commission the only example in North Jersey.
That micro-zoning approach has encouraged the sort of less sustainable development that dominates in North Jersey, some experts and developers say. Because the zoning and permit process "can be so rancorous, developers often end up building little projects that are just small enough to squeeze by," said Zucker of Somerset Development. "So you end up with a hodgepodge of developments. You don't get good master planning. In New Jersey, home rule has been the bane of proper planning."
Another obstacle is more psychological. Beginning after World War II, hundreds of thousands of war veterans and their new families moved from cramped apartments in New York, Newark, Jersey City and Hoboken in search of suburban living in Bergen and Passaic counties. People "fled the urban centers for greener pastures – the house with a yard," said Donna Orbach, a project manager with the Bergen County planning department.
The demand for traditional suburban living will surely remain strong, but more options are likely to be offered in the future. "The single-family house is not dead," Kasabach said. "There's always a segment that wants it. The problem is we've been building only for that segment for the last 50 years."
A prime example of the fledgling trend toward a more dense, less car-centered style of development built on an old vacant brownfield and centered around a transit hub is going up on Passaic Street in Wood-Ridge.
Wesmont Station is a huge 1,000-unit complex of condominiums, apartments and town houses, with plans for some detached single-family homes as well. The project, by Zucker's Somerset Development, will cover more than a third of the 151-acre site of the former Curtiss Wright aircraft factory. The complex is a model of "new urbanism," with sidewalks and plazas, stores on the ground floor of four-story buildings and community ball fields that children can walk or bike to. All 266 rentals units in the development's two finished buildings have been leased.
Anchoring all this will be a new commuter rail station to be built on NJ Transit's Bergen County line; it is scheduled to open by late this year, with 800 daily riders expected by 2015."It's building on this concept of a pedestrian lifestyle, creating the kinds of communities that were more common before the 1950s and 1960s, where streets are narrower, houses have front porches and face pedestrian walkways, and people might have one car just for weekend use," Zucker said.
His company worked with the design firm of Duany Plater-Zyberg and Co., which has designed more than 300 new and existing communities and is known for embracing the concepts of new urbanism.
Zucker said his company started out years ago doing the typical "suburban sprawl"-style developments. "But I noticed we were isolating everybody, and you've got to go everywhere to get anything, and then you sit in traffic on the way," he said.
Zucker thinks the new urbanists are on to something. "There's definitely going to be a lot more mixed-use pockets," he said, "a lot more urbanity in suburban environments."
Email: fallon@northjersey.com and oneillj@northjersey.com
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[Different section of same article in The Record]:
Picture Bergen County with 350,000 additional people, two more highways that cut across its communities and a smattering of tiny airports dotting the Meadowlands.
Those were some of the assumptions and recommendations made by officials in the early 1960s when they last revised the county's Master Plan.
A half-century later, planners are in the home stretch of modifying the document. Drafts are on track to go to the county executive and freeholders for comment within the next few months; the drafts will then be posted online for public review. They will include recommendations for sustainable growth like transit villages, more efficient bus lines and streets designed for bicycles, wheelchairs and public transportation.
Those are rather modest proposals compared with the 1962 Master Plan and its amendments made several years later. It called for a number of changes that came to fruition, such as a better connection between Route 4 and the Garden State Parkway, and having one agency control all commuter railroads.
But a number of proposed "improvements" never materialized. Here are a few:
* The county's population had hit 780,000 by 1960, almost doubling in the three decades after the George Washington Bridge opened. Planners believed the boom would slow, but still projected 1.25 million residents by 1980. That never happened for a number of reasons: More open space was saved rather than developed, and high housing prices pushed population growth elsewhere in New Jersey. Bergen reached its peak in 2010, with 905,000 residents.
* The plan's authors were eager for Bergen County to become an aviation hub. The plan called for more airports in the Meadowlands south of Teterboro Airport, because air travel "may well become a controlling factor in future development of the county." Today, local leaders and residents are fighting to decrease the number of jets flying to and from Teterboro, which morphed from an airstrip to one of the busiest small airports in the nation. Noise pollution from screaming jet engines and the possibility of a crash in a densely developed suburb are the two chief complaints.
* The plan also supported the "North-South Limited Access Highway" – a highway that would start at Newark Airport and head north through the Meadowlands. It would then follow the current CSX train line through Teaneck to Northvale, and over the Rockland County border to link up with the New York State Thruway. The plan assumed that it would help business development in the Meadowlands and provide an alternative to Route 17 and the Parkway.
* It also supported an East-West highway through northern Bergen County, a proposal that was being studied at the time by the State Highway Department, but never materialized.
* The plan set a goal to expand the Bergen County parks system to 9,500 acres; the county is still about 1,000 acres short of that goal.
Email: fallon@northjersey.com and oneillj@northjersey.com