Business View Magazine | December 2020

379 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2020 READINGTON TOWNSHI P , NEW JERSEY all about balancing going forward, so it’s still that liveable community that we know and love.” With five 18th-century homes, a mill wall, a store, cemetery, inn, two school houses, and several early 19th-century dwellings still intact, there is little wonder historic preservation is high on the list. Work is moving forward on weaving new structures and amenities into the fabric of the township to accommodate the needs and wants of both old and young. The majority of planning currently revolves around implementing affordable housing complexes to the tune of about 881 units (a combination of market rate and affordable units), meaning a potential 14 percent increase in residential units within the municipality if they are all constructed. According to Monaco, “Residentially, the word now is affordable housing so we’re consumed mostly with that. In terms of available space, when I joined the planning board in the 1980s we used to have one or two 100-acre farms come in for development every month and since that time we’ve gone two ways: One, we’ve developed a lot of those 100-acre farms for residential but we have also preserved a lot of them going forward. So at this point you either have a development or you have preserved land. There aren’t a lot of those 100-acre parcels available anymore but in the Whitehouse Station area and the Three Bridges area there are parcels that you can use for higher density and that is what we’re doing to meet the State requirements for affordable housing.” To date, new developments are a quaint blend of historic and modern with walkable trails and close access to commuter trains. Monaco reports, “In terms of trying to knit some of the affordable housing communities into the town, we just completed one 72-unit development which abuts the downtown Whitehouse Station, so it fits really nicely. It connects walkable sidewalks to the main sidewalks on Main Street and we have another complex going in behind