Case Study: Hopewell Township

Hopewell Township in many ways boasts not only the best of central New Jersey, but also the best of the American dream – rolling rural vistas where children can run or ride horses after school, small towns where neighbors shop and turn out for holiday parades, and working farms.

By October 2000, Hopewell Township will also be home to the first phase of a Merrill Lynch office complex the size of 10 Home Depot Stores, drawing 3,500 employees daily. When fully completed, the multi-user two-campus complex with its hotel and other business amenities will be roughly the size of 35 Home Depot stores, and will employ some 10,000 permanent employees: a working population nearly equal to the current residential population of its host community Hopewell Township.

The impact of this development has been felt far beyond the 450 acres now under construction. It is the end result of some 25 years of zoning and planning, much of it regional in scope, involving a patchwork of state, county, corporate and local agencies, each focused on its own expertise and needs. As a result, it offers a textbook case study of the flaws in New Jersey‘s unruly system of land-use governance with its myriad municipal governments, school districts, municipal and regional sewer utilities, and state agencies, so many of which have a role in development decisions.

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Case Study: Hopewell Township (PDF)