Brace yourself for New York City prices if you are looking for an apartment at the new AvalonBay complex at Thanet Circle in Princeton.

If you choose a 12-month lease at the new development called Avalon Princeton Circle, you would pay $2,560 per month to rent a 510-square-foot studio apartment at the current rates being advertised by AvalonBay on the company’s website as of May 8. A 727-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment starts at $3,088 per month. Two-bedroom, two-bath apartments range from $4,060 to $5,33o per month. Three-bedroom unit rents range from $5,295 per month to $5,785 per month. AvalonBay offers discounts for longer-term leases. Some of the units at the new complex are available starting May 10. Others are available in June or later, with some units coming online in the fall.

Eleven of the 220 units at the new complex will be affordable units, with five designated units for people with special needs. AvalonBay has donated about 2.5 acres of land at the Thanet site for the town to build an affordable age-restricted housing development that will be called Princeton Senior Living.

The Princeton Council agreed to a 30-year payment in lieu of taxes deal with AvalonBay for the Thanet property in 2021. Under the PILOT agreement, AvalonBay, a publicly traded company, will be exempt from paying taxes for the land and the improvements for 30 years. AvalonBay will instead pay the town an “annual service charge” or payment in lieu of taxes. In New Jersey, PILOT payments go into municipal coffers, with five percent going to the county, and no funding going to the school district.

For the first 10 years of the agreement, AvalonBay will pay the municipality an annual service charge of 11% of annual gross revenue. For the following five years, the annual payment will be equal to 11% of annual gross revenue or 20% percent of the amount of the taxes otherwise due on the value of the property and the Improvements, whichever is greater. For the following five years after that, the annual payment will be equal to 11% of annual gross revenue or 40% percent of the amount of the taxes otherwise due on the value of the property and the Improvements, whichever is greater. From the first day after the twentieth anniversary of the annual service charge, the annual payment will be equal to 11% of annual gross revenue or 60% percent of the amount of the taxes otherwise due on the value of the property and the Improvements, whichever is greater. For the final five years of the 30-year agreement, the annual payment will be equal to 11% of annual gross revenue or 80% percent of the amount of the taxes otherwise due on the value of the property and the Improvements, whichever is greater.

Avalon Princeton Circle is the largest of several new housing developments that are coming online in the next few years in Princeton. New housing projects that will create more than 1,100 units are slated to bring more students to the school district. Some of the units include Fair Share Housing round three affordable units. Anticipated fourth-round projects are not included.

The latest demographic study projects that these new housing developments in Princeton will bring more than 400 new students into the Princeton Public Schools. District officials are looking at various ways to accommodate the growth in student population. Enrollment in the district had stabilized in recent years and had not met previous growth projections. In 2010, 3,857 students were enrolled in the Princeton Public Schools. In 2020, 3,842 students were enrolled in the Princeton Public Schools. District officials have been looking at ways to maximize existing space. A plan to redistrict elementary schools to make their student population numbers more even was put on hold for 2023-24.

3 Comments

There is a lot of pressure to build more housing in Princeton, as well as to enable more affordable housing. This project and a number that are potentially in the pipeline seems to fail on a number of levels. The ‘Housing Here’ advocates and others need to explain, exactly who these rental apartments are for, given that a policeman with 3 years experience would pay 63% of their gross salary to live in a 727 sq ft 1 bed apartment without parking.
It would appear that the developer, that is only providing 5% of the apartments as affordable thanks to a land donation, will also not pay property taxes, depriving the schools of important direct funding and forcing existing taxpayers to make up the shortfall. Developers are the real winners here.

The giving away of all these generous PILOTS to developers means school taxes will go up even more, making Princeton even more unaffordable than it already is. So you will have people who can afford to live in million-dollar homes or pay five grand a month in rent, and people who qualify for affordable housing, but almost no one in between. Planet Princeton should also look at who is moving into these affordable units. When I lived in Merwick Stanworth it seemed that many of them were affiliated with the university. Why should we subsidize the university? They should build more workforce housing, but it is not a priority for them. They have said so themselves. Please look into this. Also none of these developers are building a single unit more than they are required to build. It is all about profit. So the developers acting like they care about affordable housing is quite the theater.

Princeton University, Avalon, Eden are the 3 largest taxpayers in town and they do not pay full taxes. Isn’t this the same argument made for Exxon and other multinationals in the news? Money talks…as the saying goes. Would someone develop the property without the incentives? Someone would. It is profitable without the incentives. It’s useless to even complain about this. From the outside it looks like a weak trade on affordable housing requirements for tax incentives.

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