On Feb. 28, Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer posted a photograph of her son scrambling up an indoor rock wall on Twitter and Facebook. “Packed house at Brooklyn Boulders,” read the caption. “A place like this would be fantastic in Hoboken! Let’s do it!”
“We almost did!” responded Hoboken Zoning Board of Adjustment member Phil Cohen on Facebook. “Too bad we shot that idea down,” added Hoboken resident Sean Iaquinto.
The men were referring to 1300 Jefferson, a proposed 13-story, 296-unit mixed-use development in northwest Hoboken that would have included a rock climbing gym and a bowling alley. To the consternation of many residents, including some supporters of Zimmer, the project was rejected by the Hoboken Zoning Board last June (Cohen was one of two board members who voted in favor).
Though Zimmer does not appoint Zoning Board members and says she has no influence over their decisions, her administration may have played an indirect role in 1300 Jefferson’s failure before the Zoning Board last year.
That’s because the proposed development falls within the Western Edge Redevelopment Area, a taffy-pulled Tetris block of post-industrial lots along the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail (HBLR) tracks that has been waiting for a redevelopment plan since 2007. Until it gets an official plan, the area remains zoned for industry, forcing residential developers like those behind 1300 Jefferson to seek relief at the Zoning Board. However, the current board has indicated an unwillingness to approve projects because city-led redevelopment is still forthcoming.
“The City Council has set out the zoning,” said Zoning Board chair James Aibel at the second 1300 Jefferson hearing. “It has not changed the zoning. It has had opportunities to. There have been multiple discussions about it…for us to, in effect, take that authority and exercise it tonight basically is a detriment to the public.”
That’s where City Hall comes in. After a 2010 draft Western Edge plan Zimmer had shepherded faltered before the City Council, she waited four years to try again, appointing a new planner just a month before 1300 Jefferson was rejected.
Eleven months later, the Zimmer administration has a draft Western Edge plan in hand from its planner Maser Consulting, but has yet to present it to the public, though Zimmer said she hopes to release a final draft in “late spring.” Planning Board and City Council hearings would follow.
“Six years and not one new start-to-finish public amenity completed yet.”–Tony Soares
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That deference puts the pressure on Zimmer to move as expeditiously as possible on the Western Edge and four other redevelopment areas that have languished for years without a plan.
“Mayor, you need to get this done if you mean what you say, lead the charge, six years and not one new start to finish public amenity completed yet,” wrote Tony Soares, a former City Council member and sometime Zimmer ally, on the rock-climbing Facebook thread.
In a civil suit filed in Hudson County Superior Court last month, the developers of the latter rejected project, known colloquially as 914-930 Monroe, accused the city of intentionally keeping the Western Edge as an industrial zoning district to depress the market value of neighborhood properties and preserve its power to control economic activity through the redevelopment process.
Down to the nitty gritty
Of the four redevelopment or rehabilitation areas for which Hoboken currently has professional planners, the Western Edge has come closest to fruition in the past. In both 2008 and 2010, draft plans were presented to the City Council and subsequently tabled.
Last June, Zimmer predicted that the Western Edge planning process would “move forward on an expedited schedule” because the city had “market reviews and other information from a prior study.”
Zimmer has had a draft from Maser since January, but in March, the Hoboken City Clerk’s office denied an Open Public Records Act request from The Hoboken Reporter for the document, stating that it was advisory, consultative, or deliberative material.
At the April 1 City Council meeting, Councilman Peter Cunningham said the North Community Development Committee he chairs was down to the nitty gritty in its tweaking of the Western Edge plan. “The issues that we just recently discussed had to do with base and bonus densities [of permitted buildings] in the Western Edge,” said Cunningham, “so we’re looking at language…as well as the percentages of residential and commercial [development that will be permitted] in the area.”
Cunningham said a firm subcontracted by Maser still had to complete its economic analysis of the projected rates of return for future developments in the area.
Once Zimmer and the North Community Development Committee are happy with the plan, it will be presented to the public at a community meeting in late spring, according to Zimmer.
After that, the plan will be introduced to the City Council as an ordinance on first reading. If it passes, it will be sent to the Hoboken Planning Board for recommendations. Finally, the City Council will vote on the plan for full adoption.
There is some cause to doubt whether the third attempt at a Western Edge Redevelopment Plan will fare any better that the first two. Two-thirds of the City Council is up for re-election in November, decreasing the likelihood that a controversial ordinance like a redevelopment plan will be able to advance, especially if the crucial final City Council vote falls in the late summer or early fall, when the politically charged campaign season is fully in effect.
While the City Council approved its first redevelopment plan since 1997, for the NJ Transit rail yards, last December, it did so without the pressure of looming municipal elections.
Lawsuits could force city’s hand
If the City Council cannot pass a Western Edge plan this year, forthcoming court rulings may strip or significantly diminish their ability to dictate future development in the area on their own terms. The developers behind both 1300 Jefferson and 914-930 Monroe have filed separate civil suits against the Hoboken Zoning Board in Hudson County Superior Court, alleging that its rejection of their projects was “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable.”
The 914-930 Monroe proposal called for two mixed-use towers of nine and ten stories on Monroe Street just north of the Ninth Street HBLR station.
In the place of a paper distribution warehouse that currently occupies the block, Monroe Properties LLC sought to develop a complex with 515 residential units, ten percent of them affordable, 39,000 square feet of retail space, and 1.7 acres of public open space.
In a civil complaint filed on March 11, Monroe Properties’ attorney John Curley noted that Hoboken’s 2004 Master Plan mandates that “any new development in former industrial areas in the western section of the City will take the form of residential neighborhoods…that boast shopping at the transit stops and mixed-use development.”
Given Hoboken’s failure to update its zoning book to reflect these goals in the past 11 years, the suit seeks an injunction forcing the city to pass new zoning controls directly, rather than changing them through the redevelopment process.
In fact, the complaint argues that the Western Edge Redevelopment Area designation is itself an illegal and unjustified attempt to “depress the marketability and market value of properties located within the Western Edge…in order to provide for acquisition of these properties…at a depressed price.” Unsurprisingly, the lawsuit seeks to have the 2007 Western Edge designation overturned.
Zimmer declined to answer questions this past week about whether the city was ignoring its own Master Plan in the Western Edge.
By contrast, the 1300 Jefferson suit is relatively tame, declining to make the city itself a defendant and seeking only to have the project’s Zoning Board rejection overturned.
The complaint filed by Just Block 112 LLC last September alleged that “the Zoning Board members…seemed more focused on whether the City Council would object to the project than on the evidence presented by Plaintiff and its professionals.”
In a November 2014 letter, Zoning Board counsel Steven Gleeson said his clients had rightly found the 1300 Jefferson proposal to be inconsistent with both local zoning and the city Master Plan.
The trial for the 1300 Jefferson case is scheduled to take place on April 24 at the Hudson County Superior Court in Jersey City.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.