NJBiz.com released a piece this week investigating the 14.5 million square feet of vacant office space in New Jersey, which represents the sum of the 94 largest defunct corporate campuses in the state. The piece details the overwhelming need that towns and communities have to address the future of these campuses, as the drain on local tax rolls has taken a huge toll on each community individually.
The article also goes on to detail the efforts of PlanSmart NJ, a planning advocacy organization that is spearheading a major two year research project looking into these “stranded assets”. The project hopes to frame the issue by quantifying the problem through the compilation of data on “vacancy, demographics, property tax appeals and other metrics related to the sites, with the aim of creating a guidebook for local officials and sparking a policy change that could help them find new life as mixed-use assets”.
“We’re looking at it holistically — that this is an economic development project, it’s an environmental protection project, it’s a resource efficiency project,” said Ann Brady, PlanSmart NJ’s executive director. “We think there’s a lot of opportunity with these sites, to better connect them to the greater community, to use the infrastructure that’s already there, so we’re directing growth to areas where there’s already existing infrastructure.”
As the exclusive broker for the largest corporate campus redevelopment project in the state and one of the largest in the country, Bell Works, this article hits close to home at The Garibaldi Group as we work hand and hand with Somerset Development, the developer in charge of said project, to create a mixed-used community center for the town of Holmdel out of the magnificent structure left by Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies a decade ago. for more information on Bell Works please visit their website, and for information on available office space at Bell Works please contact Tara Keating.