Affordable housing is complicated in every municipality, especially Princeton, where there both a nonprofit agency and a government agency are trying to do the right thing.. Now there’s controversy swirling around two proposed apartment developments near Princeton Shopping Center. Richard K. Rein makes sense out of this in an article in TAP Into Princeton.
Quoting his lede,
“It was a tale of two PILOT ordinances at Princeton Council’s August 22 meeting. There was a “good” PILOT, a tax arrangement by which Princeton would end up with 65 new units of affordable housing, tucked in with and no different from market rate units in new developments loaded with amenities. And there was an “evil” PILOT, a program that, as one prominent critic argued at the meeting, gives away the store to the developers and also ends up costing municipal taxpayers more than they initially perceive.
The clash of good and evil has the happy consequence of forcing us to enter the weeds of this increasingly popular financing arrangement.”
How to decide? When i’m confused, I vote with Leighton Newlin. Pictured above. He’s been around a l o n g, long time. He knows what’s what.
Princeton Comment 
Thank you. Like a good journalist, please continue to update…maybe quote Leighton Newlin, or Rich if he has more to say.
Valerie — Thank you for your interest, and here is how Newlin was quoted in the article.
Leighton Newlin reminded people that “we are obligated to build this affordable housing. For a lot of years we spent a lot of money litigating against affordable housing requirements. And we used to send money to Trenton for them to build our affordable housing share” and locate it in Trenton under what was then a permissible procedure for transferring the obligation. “I call it a ‘Winn-win’ development,” Newlin said of the Alice project. “Without the PILOT we would not see this magnificent affordable housing.”