Reimagining the Suburbs
Village Center in Plainsboro. Photo courtesy of Mark Cannuli, Sharbell Development Corp.
New Jersey Future’s 2017 Redevelopment Forum featured among its breakout sessions a two-part series on redefining suburbs to adapt to changing demographic realities. The morning session highlighted demographic and economic trends that are driving new demand for in-town living and “live-work-play” environments. The afternoon session then featured practitioners who have worked on projects of various types that had in common the goal of attracting new residents who are looking for a compact, walkable, mixed-use center.
Forum Photos!
Enjoy this select gallery of photos from Redevelopment Forum 2017, sponsored by Greenbaum Rowe Smith & Davis LLP and Kitchen & Associates, and then take a look at the full album over on our flickr site!
Sponsor slide
Forum crowd
Title Sponsors
Peter Reinhart
Gov. Florio
On Camera!
Networking
Thanks to all our sponsors!
Future of Suburbs
Dean Hughes
Patrick Terborg
Future of Retail
Michael Nutter
Tech Platforms
Affordable Housing
Tim Evans
Anne Babineau
Cool exhibit!
Federal Tools: Threats and Opportunities
Smart Growth America President and CEO Geoff Anderson
How will the new presidential administration’s policies affect redevelopment at the state level?
At New Jersey Future’s annual Redevelopment Forum, Smart Growth America President and Chief Executive Officer Geoff Anderson provided an overview of where he thought the threats were, and where some potential opportunities lie.
Mr. Anderson (presentation) began with some stage-setting. He highlighted several of the new administration’s stated priorities that come with hefty price tags, including tax reform and an anticipated infrastructure spending bill, while at the same time noting a strong reluctance among federal lawmakers to raising any new money. That means, he said, money for the administration’s priorities will have to come from somewhere, be it tax credits or cuts in other areas.
Regionalizing Coastal Resilience
New Jersey has been developing densely and extensively along its 125-mile coast and fragile barrier islands for more than three centuries. Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call that storms are becoming increasingly frequent, severe and destructive as sea levels rise more and more rapidly. As a result, there is a growing awareness of the need to rethink the state’s development patterns. And because these growing threats ignore municipal borders, they seem to call for a regional response. This roundtable discussion explored what that response might look like and how it could be implemented to help us begin to reimagine our coast.
How Downtown Retail is Changing
Downtown Bordentown. Photo courtesy of JGSC Group.
Downtowns across New Jersey are facing a unique set of challenges. While many towns are seeing a rise in the number of people who want to live in a walkable, mixed-use town center, they are also facing the challenges of keeping their downtowns vibrant and full of retail tenants when New Jerseyans increasingly do most of their shopping on laptops and not in stores.
The Changing Downtown Retail Paradigm, a panel discussion led by Debra Tantleff, the founding principal of TANTUM Real Estate, focused on the trends that were bringing more people downtown and the hindrances that developers, mayors, and others were encountering in trying to capitalize on these trends.
Less Parking, Better Management
The Ferren Parking Deck in New Brunswick during its recent demolition. Photo courtesy of Jim Zullo, Timothy Haahs & Associates.
If you were planning to build a parking structure, would you invest in a 30-year bond to finance it?
That’s the question Bob Goldsmith, partner and co-chairman of redevelopment and land use for Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis LLP, posed at the beginning of the Redevelopment Forum session entitled “The Future of Parking, Today.” The session explored whether the decades-long, ever-expanding demand for parking that has influenced the form of urban areas throughout the country will decline as market forces shift and alternative transportation options proliferate.