Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The Pennsauken Mart never looked prttey but it did at least bring in some tax revenue, provided goods and services that thousands of people each week made good use of, and very well may have been the highest and best use of the site at the time. Without question it was more useful both economically and socially than an empty, vacant lot. With the best of intentions, but no knowledge of economics, the Freeholders really ruined this one.The hubris of our omniscient government technocrati, or in this case the County Freeholders, failed to acknowledge the realities of the market. Similarly, the curent plan fails to address the fact that although we are in a rental boom, that does not mean that this proposed project is a good idea. Demand of high end rental in this area is being filled nearby in many other communities and the market studies do not bear out this as the highest and best use of the land. The demand for high end rental in this town is way less than these projections assume and in the end, rental rates will be much lower than necessary to carry this project meaning that it will be a low and moderate income rental community with much more impact on the community, its schools, and its services than is acknowledged. This project is being completed for political expediency and not for economics. It is high time that the people in this time wake up to the realities of the economics of our situation. Perhaps a better use of this land would be mixed use with some sort of shared office space mixed use light manufacturing, light retail with a smaller residential rental portion and maybe a small corporate training facility with a strong tech or legal/pharma anchor (due to the highways nearby, proximity to Cherry Hill, Mt. Laurel, and center city Philadelphia, a training facility may be ideal). In the end, what is likely to happen is that for political expediency, we will go down the road of this project and end up making yet another poor economic decision.
