Should property owners eager to move forward with major projects at the underdeveloped edges of Hoboken have to wait for the City Council to weigh in on the future of their neighborhoods, and if so, for how long?
This past December, the City Council approved its first new redevelopment plan since 1997, for the NJ Transit rail yards. However, plans for several other areas have been pending for almost a decade.
One of these areas is the so-called Western Edge, five blocks zoned for industrial use from Ninth to 14th streets along the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail tracks in the northwest end of town. Two developers brought proposals to the city’s court of last resort for land use – the Zoning Board of Adjustment – last year, seeking variances from the existing zoning to build residential projects.
Both were rejected. The board members expressed discomfort with rezoning areas by variance while the city ponders rezoning them by ordinance, the conventional route.
The Western Edge has been designated for redevelopment since 2007. Nearly every public official in Hoboken agrees that its industrial zoning is woefully outdated.
A planner was appointed for the site last May, and as of this past week, he has delivered a draft redevelopment plan to the City Council. On Wednesday, Councilman Peter Cunningham said he hoped a preliminary vote on the plan, which would update the zoning rules for the Western Edge, could take place in February.
“It’s bizarre to think that you could open an ammunition plant easier than you could open a bowling alley.” – Hany Ahmed
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Mixed-use towers, 515 units proposed
The most recent Western Edge proposal was rejected by the Zoning Board on Nov. 18, 2014. The project was prepared by the Mandelbaums, a family of New Jersey real estate moguls. David Mandelbaum, the family patriarch, is a General Partner at Interstate Properties and a minority owner of the Minnesota Vikings.
The project calls for two mixed-use towers of nine and ten stories on Monroe Street between Ninth and Twelfth streets.
The complex would contain 515 residential units, 516 parking spaces, 24,500 square feet of office space, and 39,000 square feet of retail space, including a gymnasium.
In addition, the Mandelbaums would develop 1.7 acres of its 4-acre site as public open space – a larger area than the Southwest Park currently being designed by the city.
In two hearings before the Zoning Board, professionals representing the 914-930 Monroe project presented a number of benefits they said the project would bring to Hoboken. Besides the park, the development would include space for medium-sized retailers like Best Buy, co-working space for tech entrepreneurs, a golf simulator, live-work units, and 52 units of affordable housing in keeping with city ordinances.
In addition, a 55-foot wide courtyard would be left between the two buildings, allowing the view corridor of Tenth Street to extend all the way back to the Palisade cliff.
In response to concerns raised by Zoning Board members in the first meeting, the developers added to the site plan electric car charging stations, trash chutes feeding ground level trash rooms, bicycle rooms with space for 230 bicycles, and a rooftop dog run.
Waiting for the council
For the Zoning Board, however, these benefits did not outweigh what they considered negative elements of the project. The board voted 6 to 1 to deny 914-930 Monroe a use variance, with Commissioner Antonio Grana as the only dissenter. Board members said the buildings were too tall, too dense, the apartments were too small, and the complex would generate too much traffic in the area.
A deal breaker for several board members was the placement of the complex’s northerly building so close to the HBLR tracks that a path could not be built between them. A bike trail borders the light rail for much of southwest Hoboken, and many development activists hope to see it extended northward as the Western Edge is built out.
Hoboken’s Rebuild By Design-winning flood mitigation proposal also called for a water-absorbing green belt all along the HBLR tracks.
Even if the Mandelbaum project had been designed perfectly, it still would have been vulnerable to the board’s fear of treading on the City Council’s prerogative to define the area’s zoning.
Zoning Board attorney Dennis Galvin warned that granting a use variance for such a large area – in relative Hoboken terms – could be considered ‘spot zoning,’ an activity in which zoning boards are not supposed to engage.
“Any time you are going to do a major project, or approve something, you could be invading the province of the governing body,” said Galvin.
Last June, the Zoning Board rejected 1300 Jefferson, another proposed mixed-use development in the Western Edge, based on the same concerns. The 13-story development would have brought a bowling alley, a rock climbing gym, and 296 new residential units to Hoboken. That decision provoked some debate in the community over whether the city was, in its longtime effort to avoid overdevelopment, going too far and rejecting potentially advantageous projects.
Had both 1300 Jefferson and the Monroe Street project been approved, the vast majority of the Western Edge would have been effectively redeveloped by the Zoning Board, making the City Council’s ongoing planning process essentially obsolete.
“I hope that the City Council will promptly address this area,” said Zoning Board Chairman James Aibel, “but [1300 Jefferson] was in the Western Edge, and we as a board at that point concluded that that was not something that we ought to be taking from the City Council, and here I feel strongly that the same logic applies.”
Aibel said granting the Mandelbaum project a use variance would be “usurping…the legislative rights of the City Council.”
Lawsuit possible
Through their lawyer Robert Matule, the Mandelbaums declined to give an official comment for this article. The developers behind the rejected 1300 Jefferson project, on the other hand, have publicly criticized the Zoning Board for deferring to a hypothetical Western Edge redevelopment plan that is not yet approved and may not come to pass for years, if at all.
“If there is no redevelopment plan on the books, it is their job to consider such a [variance application] and not defer to a different body,” said Hany Ahmed of Pegasus Real Estate Solutions, the Hoboken-based developer behind 1300 Jefferson.
“We have an archaic zoning book that’s over five decades old, and it’s no longer relevant in a lot of cases,” added Ahmed. “It’s bizarre to think that you could open an ammunition plant easier than you could open a bowling alley” under current Western Edge zoning.
On Sept. 15, 2014, Ahmed and his business partner filed a lawsuit in Hudson County Superior Court challenging the Zoning Board’s rejection of its variance application. The complaint alleges, among other things, that the City Council “has a policy of demanding that the Zoning Board severely limit granting variances for residential high-rise buildings.”
Matule would not say whether the Mandelbaums will also challenge their rejection, and so far nothing has been filed in Hudson County court.
If the Mandelbaums do decide to sue the Zoning Board, they would be a formidable foe. The clan has deeper pockets than Pegasus, not to mention their own in-house law firm, West Orange-based Mandelbaum & Mandelbaum, where David Mandelbaum is a partner.
“We’re not playing in the same sand lot,” said Mark Villamar, Ahmed’s partner.
Plan coming this year?
On Jan. 15, Mayor Dawn Zimmer confirmed that her office has received a draft document from the city-appointed planner for the Western Edge, Maser Consulting, containing concepts for what a final plan will include.
After reviewing them with her staff, Zimmer said she will present the concepts at a public meeting and seek further feedback from stakeholders. After taking this feedback into account, Zimmer’s administration will present a plan to the council.
Zimmer speculated that a City Council vote on a Western Edge plan would take place sometime in 2015.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.