More housing in Wayne? AvalonBay quietly plans a 490-unit project on Valley Road
WAYNE — The same real estate giant that is building a 473-unit housing complex on the site of the former headquarters of Valley National Bank is planning an even larger development less than a mile away.
AvalonBay Communities Inc. wants to construct 490 more residential units, including some for low-income households, at 1655 Valley Road, according to a letter from its attorney, Derek Orth, to a judge in state Superior Court in Paterson.
Virginia-based AvalonBay is under contract to buy the 11-acre property — six-tenths of a mile from where the bank headquarters stood until its recent demolition.
The site is occupied by an office building of 156,941 square feet. The Wayne Solar Center may have been regarded as ultramodern when it opened 35 years ago, but it is now uninhabited.
Its last tenant, Second Home Day Habilitation Center, a facility for adults with disabilities, moved out last month.
Coming soon: Anatolia Market, a halal grocery store, set to open in Wayne
The Valley Road property became a target for high-density housing in November 2020, when its owner sued the township.
Ironically, that legal action was taken in direct response to a court order stripping officials of immunity from builder’s remedy lawsuits — a consequence of their “concerted procrastination” in negotiating redevelopment of the bank headquarters.
Judge Thomas Brogan, who retired last year, restored the township’s protection two months later.
In his letter, Orth asked Brogan’s successor, Judge Darren Del Sardo, to schedule a plenary hearing, which is like a trial, with cross-examination and expert witnesses, to decide how the Valley Road site will be rezoned.
Such a formal proceeding is usually a last resort in this type of case — and it has not been needed in any other housing case involving Wayne.
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But Orth wrote that he and attorneys for the township could not come to an amicable resolution after several months of negotiations with a special master.
AvalonBay invited officials to tour its project in Princeton to serve as a model for what could be built in the township, Orth wrote.
“We strongly believed it would assist settlement discussions,” Orth wrote.
Officials did not visit the Mercer County development, Orth wrote, and “these predictably futile efforts to settle with this intransigent municipality have also failed.”
The AvalonBay project in Princeton consists of 221 units, plus 80 for senior citizens on a separate portion of the property that the developer conveyed to the borough.
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Rachel Lokken, an attorney for Fair Share Housing Center, a Cherry Hill-based nonprofit, supported the AvalonBay request for a hearing in a subsequent letter to the court.
She noted that the township must rezone the Valley Road site to meet its housing obligation.
Brian Chewcaskie, an attorney for the township, responded to the AvalonBay request by writing to the court that officials do not object to a hearing.
However, he wrote that officials took umbrage with how AvalonBay has made inconsistent proposals for redevelopment of the site. Its offers, he wrote, were “drastically different” from that of the property owner, which tried to make its own deal with the township before the developer stepped in.
“What Avalon misconstrues,” Chewcaskie wrote, “is that once it entered into this matter, it didn’t change the posture of the case.”
Philip DeVencentis is a local reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: devencentis@northjersey.com
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: AvalonBay planning another development on Valley Road in Wayne NJ
