The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The Rutgers Plaza retail center will get a complete facelift with the approval of a proposed 200-unit apartment building in the former K-Mart space, the Zoning Board of Adjustment was told during a contentious June 20 hearing.
The current 13 retail spaces in the strip center will be increased to 17 spaces, mainly by cutting the size of the larger units, the Board was told.
And 20 percent of the 200 units will be affordable housing units, the Board was told.
The plaza owner, Levin Properties, wants to raze the former K-Mart building and several attached spaces behind it and build the four-story apartment building in its place.
Project architect David Minno also reviewed other design aspects of the proposed four-story building, but not until more than an hour of mostly contentious public questioning of Scott Turner, the project’s engineer, who testified in April.
Residents asked questions covering several topics, including the safety of the parking lot for children walking to McDonald’s or the Stop and Shop supermarket, the safety of children crossing John F. Kennedy Boulevard to get to Marconi Park, and even Turner’s engineering credentials.
Minno was the only original witness to be heard during the hearing, as his testimony did not begin until about a half-hour before the Board’s cutoff time for new testimony.
The proposed building, Minno said, would be “designed as a fully modern residential building,” with “all the things that people are going to be looking for in today’s multi-family apartment building.”
Among the amenities would be a 16,000-square-foot courtyard with a pool, another passive recreation courtyard measuring 12,000 square feet, a 2,950-square-foot indoor club room, and a 1,930-square-foot fitness center, he said.
First-floor apartments will feature private terraces, and a partial basement will include storage areas for tenants, he said.
Minno said 20 percent of the 200 rooms will be affordable housing. That includes eight 1-bederoom units, 24 2-bedroom units, and all eight of the 3-bedroom units, he said.
The retail area will be given “a really fresh look,” he said. “We want to tie into the residential building, in terms of materiality, so we have a consistent-looking project.”
“We want to make this what we call a lifestyle center, so we attract a top-level group of tenants,” Minno said. “Our work architecturally is to really do a facelift on this building.”
Addressing the issue of residential being inserted into what was previously retail, Minno said that is the current trend.
“You may not have in Franklin situations where retail centers now have a residential component, but I can tell you it’s happening all over,” he said. Minno said he is currently working on projects in East Brunswick, at the old Loehmann’s Plaza site, in New Brunswick, at the old Sears site, in Paramus, at the Garden State Plaza, and in Eatontown, at the Monmouth Mall.
“There’s a symbiotic benefit because retail has struggled over the last several years,” he said. “This helps to strengthen retail and make it successful and keep a tenant like Stop and Shop there. It really strengthens the smaller retail stores that are dependent on pedestrian traffic as well as people coming to the center.”
“It strengthens your tax base, it keeps those retail stores from being vacant, and provides a walkable-type community,” he said.
The next hearing is set for 6:30 p.m. August 1 in the Township Council chamber on DeMott Lane.
