[CPEO-MEF] REUSE: "A Long Road to Renewal for Former Military Bases"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

A Long Road to Renewal for Former Military Bases
Closed defense sites are like snowflakes in that no two are alike. The efforts to redevelop two New Jersey forts show the obstacles to revitalization.


By Seth Berkman
New York Times
December 8, 2022

It is rare to come across hundreds of acres of land for sale in New Jersey, the country’s most densely populated state. But in Monmouth County, about 50 miles south of New York City, two expansive sites have sat largely undeveloped for years.

The catch? Both are former military forts and, as such, come with a litany of hurdles that prospective buyers do not usually encounter with redevelopment projects.

After years of setbacks, Fort Monmouth, which is spread across three New Jersey boroughs — Oceanport, Eatontown and Tinton Falls — is inching toward a deal with Netflix to build a production studio on 290 acres. Fifteen miles away at Fort Hancock in Middletown, local officials are struggling to breathe a second life into a deteriorating harbor defense site, despite a commitment from a New York real estate developer to revamp most of the aging officers’ quarters into residences.

“I can imagine the project taking off, but I can also imagine the buildings reaching a point of no return and coming down,” said Tom Jones, 61, a film writer and director who camped at Fort Hancock as a Boy Scout and now leases a building there for personal use.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/business/a-long-road-to-renewal-for-former-military-bases.html

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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