casman

It's unfortunate and often ugly, but property owners have some 'rights' that allow them to make gross suburbia like that by-right plan (not to say the PUD is much more or less gross)... my guess is that developers bid on property based on the 'by-right' rules, and because housing is stretched so thinly in the area, if it weren't this developer it would be another developer building a plan similar to the parallel plan in that packet. Developers have to build things people can afford to survive. Alpine Township and other townships write by-right rules, and those rules set the price developers can pay for land. A developer can't both (1) outbid other developers and (2) build less units / be less efficient at the same time. Sure it would be great if a dev could come in and overpay for the land AND reduce density, but those developers are the ones who end up pricing themselves out of the market. If someone buys land zoned Low Density Residential, and proposes a large-lot development that could be approved in Agricultural zoned land, they just decided to do a stupid project. Why pay double for the land when you could do large lots somewhere else nearby for a lower per acre cost? Zoning, density restrictions, and NIMBY slow down approvals so the market is almost always behind. That creates a very hostile development environment where (1) only big, greedy, nasty developers with deep pockets can survive and (2) makes every piece of land 100% likely to be built to the absolute maximum. Having said that, I think the parallel plan idea wasn't shady or shifty or hostile or anything like that. I think the developer is showing what HAS TO BE BUILT based on the purchase price of the land. Because the land is already zoned LDR, it looks like it's not a hollow threat. It looks like the dev is saying 'we can be creative and make this a really nice, thoughtful development' if the twp approves the PUD. It's also saying 'we really don't want to build it like this LDR plan, but this is the plan our competition bid the land up to based on underlying rules, so if we can't do something creative we will have to do something like this other plan'. Anyway, I think that it's often lost on [everybody] that the developer that gets the land had to outbid a bunch of other developers, and all those bids are based on the rules laid-out by each municipality. Because of this, projects have to be either 100% boring and repetitive, or pretty much boring and repetitive with a little twist. It would be interesting to see Municipalities and residents agree to some kind of tax/fund to develop public land based on public input and with public dollars. Maybe 200+ people could agree to something if they got 100% of the say in the matter... ....Then again, maybe it's just not possible to make everyone happy.