Build elsewhere. Save Drew Forest. | Opinion

By Addison Del Mastro for NJ.com

I write professionally about places I live and visit, but I’ve never written about my college town of Madison, where I attended Drew University. But recently a college acquaintance posted a Change.org petition on social media, titled Save the Drew Forest Preserve, which as of this writing has over 10,000 signatures. Drew, an institution long-struggling financially, is reportedly considering selling some of the preserve for development.

This brought back a lot of memories. I minored in Drew’s unique environmental studies and sustainability program, and I recall many weeding and cleanup “service hours” in the 53-acre preserve, pulling out invasive plants and learning about native flora and fauna. A very tall deer fence, which protected native plantings, allowed a piece of uninterrupted forest to resemble its old self, as it existed centuries ago.

I often took quiet walks around the preserve. Sometimes I found interesting things: a CRT television; a (mostly-empty) wallet from a graduated student; an ancient sealed can of beer, maybe from one 1990s “Sloppy Saturday”; a pile of old dorm furniture. I once found a nearly-buried but perfectly intact flower vase that I cleaned up and presented to my mother for Mother’s Day!

Many students appreciated the forest as a remote area for activities that might have been of interest to Public Safety officers. Others appreciated it simply for its solitude and wilderness. Some appreciated it for both. The forest helped contextualize and make real what we studied. It’s part of the campus ethos: the whole college is affectionately known as “the forest,” and many students and alumni look back on their years there as a peaceful sojourn.

Is development of some of the forest preserve a bad idea, then? On the one hand, Madison is 40 minutes from Manhattan by rail, so it’s a prime location for new development. And development that connects to existing communities, and especially to transit, is better for the environment than sprawl.

On the other hand, the Drew Forest is a unique space, one which really did, and does, enhance student life and the environment (for example, it’s a recharge area for the surrounding communities’ aquifer). While the land might be valuable to the university as real estate, and while it might be prime land for housing in a transit-connected suburb, it’s also valuable as a natural feature and amenity. And Madison has room to grow up rather than out.

The intersection of “NIMBY”ism (“not in my back yard,” or the tendency for current residents to oppose new development) and environmentalism is familiar in New Jersey. Open space often doubles as anti-housing policy. These debates can often become nasty and emotional.

But the debate over the Drew Forest is a fruitful one because it exemplifies how the “NIMBY” tendency can also be natural and well-intentioned. Developers are popular punching bags, but they do not build what they cannot sell, and so new development is a given. It has to go somewhere. The pertinent question, then, is if it doesn’t go in the forest, where does it go?

The missing half is that it should go where we already have stuff. That means well-chosen, carefully designed, and appropriately scaled infill and redevelopment. It means that not every single informal landmark and recognizable feature of a town like Madison can remain in perpetuity, regardless of the evolution of the economy, the population, and attitudes and preferences on housing, family size, and commutes.

Madison already has an example. A decades-vacant school just outside downtown, a hole in the town’s life and streetscape, was redeveloped in 2018 into 100 residences. The Rose Hall complex features apartment types from studios to three-bedrooms, meaning that it can accommodate everyone from singles to families with one or two children (albeit at Madison’s high market rates).

Rose Hall mostly takes the form of a modest three-story apartment block that fit architecturally, and connects physically, to the existing town. There are other lots, already served by roads and infrastructure, that present, or may present in time, the opportunity to rebuild where we’ve already built — and to preserve where we haven’t.