New Apartments on Route 22 {Green Brook, NJ}

We were cruising along Route 22 the other day near Green Brook, NJ – and noticed a chunk of the westbound side had many trees knocked down. It appeared to be the very last undeveloped parcel of land on Route 22 in Green Brook.

Then, we proceeded to pull into the Raceway gas station across the street to snap a few photos. Curious, we asked the pump attendant “What’s going in? More retail stores?”

“No,” he told us that “new apartments” are being put in.

Do new apartments on Route 22 matter anymore?

Frankly, we don’t care if they’re senior citizen assisted living units, low-income housing, or luxury condos. We personally wouldn’t find it compelling to live directly on a commercial highway, regardless of how convenient it was. In our viewpoint, we’d either live in a big city “that never sleeps” (and has good public transportation) – or out in the sticks for privacy and self-sufficiency. The middle-zones like this just seem odd.

But we understand why there’s a market for them – and it’s almost always for economic reasons.

And you can’t really blame the municipality of Green Brook either. It’s not like other rural areas that have massive open space. There wasn’t much left to “preserve” (Washington Rock State Park is almost the last of the last.) And the added revenue to the property tax rolls is appealing. What’re a few hundred more residents anyway?

Some residents have “altered” lives now

Most interesting to us is what is happening to the McMansions on Lund Lane just to the north of this new development. Half a dozen or so of these homes once had nice “buffer zones” of trees that separated their properties from the bustling action of Route 22.

Now those natural curtains of privacy are gone. I wonder what that has done to their property values as well. Are the residents there okay with that? Did they know that their habitat could change one day?

Whatever, it is life when you stop and think about the big picture. Nothing really stays the same.

And for the moment – we’re all still free to find better pastures elsewhere. How long that lasts – remains to be seen.