Just this last Saturday, I had an article in the online version of New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper. I wrote about the forest preserve at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where I went to college. The university has been in a difficult financial situation for several years, and is considering selling some of the preserve for development. Here’s my piece. Here’s a group of students, professors, and others who have formed to advocate continued preservation of the forest.

My article favors preservation of the entire preserve. But I make an associated point—development, mostly housing, is pretty much a given, and so we have to be smart about where it goes. It should go where we already have stuff. If we don’t densify, we sprawl, and that’s worse for the environment, for commutes, for walkability, etc.

I wrote:

The intersection of “NIMBY”ism (“not in my back yard,” or the tendency for current residents to oppose new development) and environmentalism is familiar in New Jersey. Open space often doubles as anti-housing policy.

The missing half is that it should go where we already have stuff. That means well-chosen, carefully designed, and appropriately scaled infill and redevelopment. It means that not every single informal landmark and recognizable feature of a town like Madison can remain in perpetuity, regardless of the evolution of the economy, the population, and attitudes and preferences on housing, family size, and commutes.

This is a point that most urbanists and housing advocates understand and agree with. It’s probably something so familiar to some of us we don’t always actually spell it out. However, it isn’t necessarily obvious to “ordinary” people. It’s easy to see low-density development as good for the environment, since it looks like there’s more land being preserved. But what would you rather have? A slightly taller and larger town with a beautiful, public forest preserve next door, or a town surrounded by even more subdivisions, strip malls, and signalized intersections?

There are likely a lot of people in Madison, a wealthy small town 40 minutes from Manhattan by rail, who would like to stop new housing growth and preserve the forest. But you just can’t do that. The flip-side of open space preservation has to be densification and building on already-developed land.

I made a similar point last year, after my wife and I visited a sunflower farm about 40 minutes southwest from our home in Northern Virginia. The farm is pretty much at the edge of the D.C. metro area, yet all around it are relatively new, low-density housing developments (and some higher-density ones too—because so much land close to D.C. is zoned single-family only, it’s not unusual to see townhomes and even apartment buildings sprouting up an hour from the urban core.) I wrote:

The wider the band of suburban sprawl that separates the city and inner suburbs from the countryside—and it gets wider every year here in Northern Virginia—the more open space is subdivided and paved over, destroying natural habitat and putting fresh air and activities like sunflower cutting, apple picking, farm tours, and more, further out of reach of urbanites, particular those without cars and/or of lower incomes.

During last month’s week-long New Jersey trip, I didn’t make it to Madison. But I did get this one picture from a previous visit. It’s a tiny diner/lunch counter place, opened in 1928, and basically unchanged since then. It closed in 2017; I’m glad I went there once in 2015, the week of graduation, mostly just to see what it was. The couple who owned the place were the only employees, and they were quite old. The man hunched over an ancient flat top grill and served up massive portions for $4 or $5. The woman rung us up. It was truly a step back in time.

It appears to still be vacant, and it’s not too likely the building will survive in its present form. It may, however, end up in a redevelopment controversy. I very much understand the desire for stuff like this to remain. For some, it’s the same impulse as saving the Drew Forest. But letting things like this go might be what it actually takes, in the real world of choices and constraints, to keep the forest. And I’ll go with that.

Related Reading:

Election Nights and Ice Cream Cones

The Housing Crisis is a Policy Problem

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