120 apartments on a former concrete plant
go before Voorhees on September 9.

Voorhees has a 120 apartment application on its Planning Board agenda for September 9. Centennial Housing Associates LLC, owned by The Michaels Organization, is asking for preliminary and final site plan approval of The Oaks at Centennial, which would be built in two phases on the 6.6 acre site at 600 and 602 Centennial Boulevard. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. after a 6:45 caucus at the Voorhees Township Municipal Building.

The site is the L&L Redi Mix concrete company, now vacant. The plant would come down to make room for the buildings. That is the part worth holding on to: this is a $50 million residential project on ground that was already industrial, not a subdivision cut out of open land, and the township is counting it toward the fourth round of its affordable housing commitment.

It is also not the developer's first project here. Michaels opened the 81 unit Victory Commons on Haddonfield-Berlin Road in the spring, a $30 million building that regional vice president Nicholas J. Cangelosi says has hundreds of people on its waiting list, many of them working in retail, healthcare and the schools. A third project, 60 units on Sheppard Road at a cost of $23 million, already has Planning Board approval and is waiting on financing from the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. Together the three come to 261 units in one township.

The rents in the application are set against income rather than the market. For a household earning 60% of Area Median Income, the figures given are $1,323 for a one bedroom, $1,587 for a two bedroom and $1,834 for a three bedroom. The applicant's traffic consultant, Shropshire Associates LLC of Atco, estimates the finished complex would add 43 trips in the morning peak hour and 60 in the afternoon peak hour.

For anyone watching where housing actually lands in Camden County, this is the pattern to know. Towns with a fourth round number to meet and very little open ground left tend to meet it on sites that already had a use, and a closed concrete plant on a boulevard is exactly that kind of site. September 9 is when the board takes it up.

An application is not an approval. Unit counts and rents are as reported and can change at the hearing. Written by Justin Kelly, NJ Real Estate Broker-Salesperson, from the 70and73 article.