By Susan Loyer, MyCentralJersey.com
CRANBURY – The township’s affordable housing plan, including its proposal to acquire by eminent domain a 175-year-old family farm on South River Road for 130 apartments, is running into more legal obstacles.
Four challenges to the township plan have been filed that call the farm site “woefully unsuitable” and a “dystopian location” because it is surrounded by warehouses.
The court papers also describe the proposed development as an isolated “Soviet-style” “Affordable Alcatraz.”
The challenges have been filed with the Affordable Housing Dispute Resolution Program by Henry Realty Company, which owns the farm at 1234 South River Road, the Fair Share Housing Center, which brought the statewide affordable housing litigation, Cranbury Housing Associates and Axira Inc. Onyx Realty.
All the challenges slam the township’s decision to use its power of condemnation to buy the farm, a move that has drawn national attention, including from the Trump administration.
“If Cranbury was looking for the single property in town least likely ever to yield even a single unit of affordable housing, they could hardly have picked a better site for that obstructionist and exclusionary impulse,” Anne Studholme, attorney for Axira and Onyx, wrote in court papers.
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