Abandoned Shopping Center Reuse

Who would think to turn an abandoned 115,000 square foot shopping center in New Jersey into an indoor amusement park and event center? Well, someone did and it's called "iPlay America" and it's in Freehold, New Jersey. This new twist on a family fun center includes an indoor boardwalk-style arcade and an indoor town. Other attractions include several themed restaurants, indoor go-karts and bowling.

What I find so encouraging about this project is that the developer used an existing site and building footprint to create a completely new business. Adaptive reuse at its best! We really need to start thinking about what to do with shopping centers and big box stores as they become obsolete or move to different buildings. These buidlings have an immense amount of embodied energy in them meaning it is very inefficient and costly to demolish them, especially if we can use the space adaptively for something new.

Can you think of any other adaptive reuse examples from New Jersey?

iPlay America: http://www.iplayamerica.com/

New Jersey Snowstorm: Planning Implications

by Marley Bice, MCRP '12

The apocalyptic snowstorm that dumped around three inches of slushy snow on the Northeast region over Halloween weekend got me thinking about implications for planning, our cities, our environment. Looking out my window at 10 am on Saturday (besides feeling like I was on the set of "The Day After Tomorrow") I found myself feeling so bad for the poor trees. Deciduous trees are not adapted to withstand wet, clingy, heavy snow on their leaves. The combined excessive weight has caused thousands of downed trees across the region and may be largely to blame for millions of households being out of power more than two days later.

The Guardian reported earlier that New York City is bracing itself for the loss of at least 1000 old-growth, majestic, vital, historically-significant (OK now I'm just getting sappy) trees in Central Park alone. This storm has single-handedlly changed the landscape of one of my favorite places in one of my favorite cities. The shading, stormwater management, and carbon capture benefit of those trees will be lost forever. Will New Jersey and New York City look different from space after this storm? What percentage of the tree cover is gone? These are depressing questions to think about.

Another depressing fact is that many small municipalities (and some big municipalities) do not have the budget to handle the snow removal costs and requirements as our winter season continues to encroach on fall and spring. However, this may be a major consideration in town operating budgets as the reality of global climate change continues to unearth itself. Where will that money come from? How many people will miss work because they can't get to the office because the streets and public transit are shut down because of snow? How much more salt and sand used for ice control will end up in our aquatic ecosystems? It's time to start thinking hard...

The State of Solar Power in New Jersey

by Jedediah Drolet, MCRP '11

In recent years solar development has become increasingly popular in New Jersey.  Probably the most visible manifestation of this is the placement of small solar panels on utility poles throughout the area served by PSE&G, the largest utility in the state, although rooftop solar panels on residential and commercial buildings are also becoming quite noticeable.  This is all due to aggressive policy incentives by the state, starting about ten years ago, to encourage solar.  Initially these consisted of rebates, but recently the state shifted away from providing money directly and now relies on a system of Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs), which are tradable credits that utilities can use to meet their requirements under the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which mandates a certain percentage of electricity generation in the state has to come from renewable sources each year, with a specified level of that specifically from solar.  SRECs are generated by all solar installations registered with the state and traded freely, which provides a major incentive for the development of solar.  At current SREC prices, the income stream from SRECs vastly outweighs the income stream from the electricity generated by solar installations.

As a result of these incentives, solar development has been booming, and New Jersey now has more installed solar capacity than any state except California.  Due to its much smaller land area, however, the amount of installed capacity per square mile is the highest by far of any state.  As of April 29, New Jersey had 9,032 solar projects with a total capacity of 321 megawatts.  For comparison, a typical coal plant is 500 megawatts, and the Hope Creek Nuclear Plant has a capacity of 1,268 megawatts.  Solar is thus still a very small proportion of the overall electricity generation in the state, but it has been growing rapidly.  This is a concern for land-use planning, because solar can be relatively land-intensive compared to other electricity generation options, and New Jersey has relatively little remaining space compared to many other states.  During this past spring semester, I worked on a project as an intern for New Jersey Future to evaluate the state of solar development and its implications for land use (the results are summarized on their website here).  What I found was that despite a lot of recent concern over some high-profile projects in South Jersey which would use a lot of land for utility-scale solar generation, the vast majority of solar development so far has been in the form of small rooftop systems that use no additional land and are quite compatible with Smart Growth principles.  As of March 31, 91% of installed systems with available data were mounted on rooftops, and only 5% were ground-mounted.  Since ground-mounted installations tend to be larger, they account for a larger proportion of total capacity (15%), but rooftopo systems still account for 73% of installed capacity.  The main concern going forward will be to ensure that this pattern continues; there are plenty of rooftops left, and no pressing need at this point to turn to large, ground-mounted systems that use up precious land to meet the state’s goals for solar, ambitious though they are.