Gloucester Twp. among towns plotting redevelopment for when the market rebounds

The days of developers jumping over one another to turn a farm into a shopping center are long gone.

But Gloucester Township Mayor David Mayer remains optimistic that if he makes the right moves now, the town will see a return to better times.

Mayer, a former assemblyman who works as a lobbyist for Comcast, is doing what many municipal leaders are doing amid this historically dismal real estate market: setting up redevelopment projects for condominiums and golf courses and hoping the market turns around.

"We need to be prepared if and when someone comes in with a plan," he said. "I can't control the market; that's beyond us. But we do have to make our investments as valuable as possible."

A concept that swept U.S. cities in the decades following World War II, redevelopment saw a regional surge again in early 2000s as the government and developers joined forces to build "mixed-use" communities, where young professionals and empty nesters could live, play, and shop.

Fueling the redevelopment wave were many of the same factors driving the larger real estate bubble, said James Hughes, dean of Rutgers' Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in New Brunswick.

"It may well have been an anomaly," he said. "Many projects that may not have been approved in the 1990s were able to proceed in the 2000-to-2007 period because of rich, seemingly risk-free capital."

A redevelopment cottage industry arose in South Jersey, as consultants and lawyers lined up to advise and shepherd the process through everything from affordable-housing regulations to environmental cleanups of old industrial sites.

Now those who racked up billable hours in the boom are looking for other work.

Ballard Spahr, the prominent Philadelphia law firm, has drastically scaled down its redevelopment practice in New Jersey since eight of its lawyers left to form their own firm in Marlton.

Just a few years ago, Lou Bezich's real estate consulting business, Public Solutions, of Haddonfield, was humming with almost $300,000 in government contracts involving projects such as the White Horse Pike redevelopment and a transit village in Collingswood.

Now the firm is down to a single client, said Bezich, an administrator with Camden County College.

"Nothing will go back to the way it was, in my opinion," he said. "For a while there, the sentiment was if we built it, we'll fill it up."

Even with the downturn in the market, some redevelopment projects continue.

Collingswood Mayor Jim Maley, a lawyer with a prominent redevelopment practice, said he recently signed a deal with Sun Bank to refinance Collingswood's downtown condominium project, which has been scaled back but is set to finish construction after a long delay.

"From my work, I got to tell you, the only projects that are going ahead are redevelopment projects," Maley said.

The latest concept circulating among South Jersey planners is the development of educational and medical facilities, with Camden and Cooper University Hospital being used as a prototype.

The project Mayer is championing in Gloucester Township, in which Camden County College and Cooper are partners, would develop more than 100 acres around a new interchange on the Atlantic City Expressway. It would center on a medical complex to be built by Cooper and border the college, which is in the process of an $83 million campus rehabilitation.

But the loosely defined project, which could include condos and a golf course, has no timeline and is unlikely to start construction anytime soon.

And an antidevelopment sentiment has begun, with former Mayor Cindy Rau-Hatton leading a charge against the town's decision to move away from a town-center concept, which incorporated space for business but also included public space.

Mayer conceded that the scope of the project had changed, but he thought it a necessary concession.

"It is more expansive, but we have to be more expansive in these economic times," he said. "Now we can have a developer come in and tell us what they want to put there."

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