Board hears plan to convert age-restricted development

Board hears plan to convert age-restricted development
BOE officials: Conversion would burden schools
BY KENNY WALTER Staff Writer

TINTON FALLS — The Planning Board continued hearing an application on March 3 for the conversion of an approved, age-restricted housing development.

If approved, the new housing development, to be located between Shafto Road and West Park Avenue and Tormee Drive, would consist of more than 300 market-rate units.

Developer Caruso Building received approval for the age-restricted Rose Glen at Tinton Falls in 2007 but did not go forward with plans.

Senate bill S2577, signed into law last spring, permits the conversion of age-restricted housing to non-age-restricted housing under certain circumstances, and the developer is asking the Planning Board to approve such a conversion.

The board began hearing the testimony at the March 3 meeting at which Kenneth Pape, attorney for Caruso, called the first witness to testify about real estate trends in the state and country.

“The purpose of our presentation was to give the board a broad background of the trends in the state,” said Pape, of Heilbrunn, Pape & Goldstein, who testified for the developer.

Pape explained the requirements to seek the conversion before bringing up his first witness.

“You have to have an approval before 2009 for an age-restricted community,” he said. “You can’t have units that have been sold, rented or marketed.”

Pape then brought up Jeffrey Otteau, president of the Otteau Valuation Group. Otteau spoke of real estate trends, claiming that a growing number of New Jersey homes are becoming childless.

“We have now reached the point in New Jersey where two out of every three households have no children living at home,” he said. “This is a very big trend that has been developing for a decade.”

Otteau cited a Virginia Tech report that the number may increase in the next five to 10 years, adding that younger families are putting off having children due to financial hardship.

“There are severe financial constraints on younger-aged households,” he said. “Increasingly we are seeing declining school enrollments in the face of large numbers of new homes being built at the beginning of this decade.”

Otteau cited school enrollment in Tinton Falls, which he said declined 17 percent from 2000 to 2008, but two members of the Tinton Falls Board of Education refuted the claim.

“Did you take into account that we’ve lost nearly 300 children from the privatization of [Naval Weapons Station] Earle?” Board of Education President Peter Karavites asked. “In reality we’ve had a decrease, but it’s being backfilled every year.”

“Nearly 300 children left that weren’t even residents of the town,” said board member Wayne Wiebalk. “We are pretty much flat over the eight-year period, not a reduction.”

According to Otteau, the project as originally planned is no longer financially feasible and the Senate bill provides an option.

“It would not have the demand to go forward, and in the end it lacked financial feasibility,” he said. “When the bill was designed, it had a project like this in mind.”

Otteau said he expects to see families with fewer children buying homes in the future.

“Baby-boomer households are becoming empty nests and young families are not having children,” he said. “There will be fewer children per household going forward … ”

Karavites argued that the stats on the schools are faulty.

“A new development with younger families would be putting kids in the schools,” he said. “Your testimony is making it seem like they wouldn’t be, and in reality they’d be backfilling our schools.”

Otteau said the future of real estate in the state would be different than in the past.

“Jersey still remains a very potent consumer market,” he said. “New Jersey no longer has the highest income in the country, but we have the fifth highest.

“There is a future here in New Jersey, but that future will look different than we thought it would awhile back. That means we need to adjust our … developments and ideas as to what is feasible going forward.”

Otteau said that active-adult housing is a trend that might not have been studied fully.

“Active-adult housing is a relatively new concept intended to fill a gap between family housing and retirement housing,” he said. “It was developed as a concept when the projections were that New Jersey would have a lot of affluent 55-plus households.

“We really didn’t understand this. It seemed like a convenient way to build developments without the tie-in to the schools. Our expectations have been overstated.”

Otteau also said that the market for agerestricted housing is not what it once was.

“The 55-plus population is relatively small,” he said. “New Jersey is no longer retaining its older residents. People are leaving our state at an increasing velocity.”

According to the borough engineer’s report, the proposed project consists of 243 market-rate units and 61 affordable units. The market-rate units are four-bedroom dwellings, while the affordable units range from one- to three-bedroom units.

Under the conversion plan, the number of bedrooms would decrease from 1,148 to 1,110.

The next Planning Board meeting was scheduled for March 24.

Contact Kenny Walter at

kwalter@gmnews.com.