Retirement communities can be a boon to property taxes

Retirement communities can
be a boon to property taxes

Planned retirement communities may bring more housing units to a municipality, but they also can lower property tax rates — or at least help keep those rates stable.

Elected officials often see the construction of such communities as a boon, and rightfully so.

Although the hundreds of homeowners in each adult community pay property taxes to the township, they add no students to the school system. Therefore, the new residents affect neither the school district’s operating costs nor its enrollment. If regular residential housing had been built instead of retirement housing, the families who move in would add children to the school district’s already-bulging enrollment and fuel the need to build costly additions or new schools.

In other words, regular residential housing and retirement communities have an opposite effect on local taxes.

That’s part of the reason why Monroe Township officials did the right thing when they recently approached several builders who were planning on building regular residential housing, convincing them instead to plan adult communities.

The areas now being targeted for adult communities are 350 acres near the Applegarth School and Old Church Road, and 186 acres bordered by Buckelew Avenue and Mounts Mill and Spotswood-Englishtown roads. In both cases, the developers have agreed and township officials will likely consider zone changes to permit retirement housing as opposed to regular residential.

It’s not that township officials are against regular residential housing being built in Monroe — such developments are coming in anyway, the inevitable result of the town’s obligations with the state Council On Affordable Housing (COAH). A mix of different types of houses, some 1,500 or so of them, are being built or expected to be built in two locations as part of the township’s COAH obligation, according to Councilman and Planning Board member John Riggs.

The idea is to provide a balance of different types of housing, and it can only be to the town’s advantage if officials work with developers to steer them toward building the right types of houses in the right spots.

Working with the developers in the early stages of planning also provides the opportunity to negotiate on- and off-site improvements, such as the funding of new traffic signals and road reconfigurations.