RED BANK: MUMFORD LOCKS UP EXTRA SITES
Yellow Brook principal Roger Mumford with a rendering of a building on the site of Atlantic Glass at the northwest corner of White Street and Maple Avenue. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Of the five proposed plans for White Street presented to the Red Bank parking committee Wednesday night, only one had what Roger Mumford’s had: a lock on two adjoining properties.
Mumford also arrived at the meeting with a singular certainty that without those sites, the project isn’t worth doing.
“We don’t have five different concepts,” Mumford told the committee and a standing-room crowd at borough hall, in a veiled reference to one of his competitors. “We’ve got one, because we really like it.”
If familiarity counts for anything, Mumford, owner of Yellow Brook Property Company would appear to have the edge. His office is based in Red Bank. He built the Station Place apartments on Monmouth Street, and is now completing the 12-unit affordable apartment project that adjoins it on Oakland Street. And he’s in the midst of reconstructing the historic T. Thomas Fortune house on Drs. James Parker Boulevard, where he also has approvals to construct 31 apartments.
But the Little Silver resident also may have an ace-in-the hole: options to buy the site occupied by the Atlantic Glass shop, at the corner of White Street and Maple Avenue, as well as the adjoining so-called Stavola property, a parking lot at the corner of Maple and Monmouth Street that was formerly the home of Tubby’s Shell station.
Together, they add three-quarters of an acre of land to the 2.3-acre borough redevelopment site, expanding its development potential. Perhaps more critically in the short term, they provide the space for interim parking and construction staging that will be needed to keep businesses afloat over the course of redevelopment, Mumford told the committee.
Without it, “where are people going to park when this thing is being built?” he asked. The added sites would allow for about 170 spots, he said, “which is 170 more than zero.”
His project also calls for 176 rental units, 12 of them qualifying as affordable, and 60 luxury condos in a 12-story building at the property’s eastern end.
“Red Bank is starving world-class, upscale, for-sale housing,” he said, adding, “Red Bank isn’t just for people 25 years old who want to walk to the train station.” Retirees and divorcees want in, too, he said.
Like two other contenders for the project, Mumford proposes running Drummond Place all the way from Monmouth Street to White Street. Like one other, his project would have parking overhead, in this case, three stories above the ground, connecting to the apartment building.
The Yellow Brook plan also calls for “just 5,000 square feet of retail, so it doesn’t compete significantly” with existing businesses, Mumford said.
The proposal would give the borough its required 500 net increase in public parking spaces, up from the existing 273 on site, Mumford said.
Here’s Yellow Brook’s complete submission made in April in response to the RFP, with sensitive financial information redacted by the borough. It does not include a post-filing revision that increased the number of spaces.
And here’s redbankgreen‘s coverage of each of the other presentations: