JUST off Mount Pleasant Avenue in Dover, opposite the Rockaway Townsquare Mall, there is a place now being transformed into a point of refuge for business travelers — after more than 30 years spent as a point of refuse.
The site of a new hotel being built over a former landfill.
A 108-room hotel designed for short-term stays, offering an indoor pool, fitness center and outdoor sports court, is rising on a 10-acre parcel of what used to be the sprawling North Sussex Street landfill.
Such a rubbish-to-riches story is becoming increasingly common in a densely populated state with fewer and fewer large open spaces suitable for development. Right now, there are about 20 communities in New Jersey in which developers are either proposing projects involving landfill property or at work on them, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees dump site closings and cleanup.
In Stafford Township, a developer spent four years cleaning up a 55-acre landfill in the Pinelands region before beginning construction there last year on a large mixed-use complex called Stafford Park. The development will ultimately include 565 units of housing for people over 55, 150 units of affordable housing, an office building, recreational facilities and shopping, according to the builder, the Walters Group.
A first group of retail buildings is nearing completion at the site, with Costco, Target, Best Buy, Petsmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods all set to open between Memorial Day and mid-August, said Ed Walters Jr., a principal with the group.
“This is the place where people used to come back in the ’60s to throw their washing machines and old black-and-white TVs into the pit,” he said. “Now, they can come shop for a new flat-screen if they want to.”
Such is already the case, of course, at Jersey Gardens, the megamall in Elizabeth, which opened in 1999 on a 166-acre site that had been the Union County landfill. Dumping ended in 1972, but the site waited decades to undergo decontamination as outlined by the environmental agency for official closure of a landfill.
Cleanup was finally accomplished — and developers attracted — with the aid of almost $150 million in state and federal economic development grant money.
“Landfill cleanup is very difficult; it is cumbersome, and very costly,” said Mr. Walters, whose company removed 70,000 truckloads of material from the Stafford site before capping it with clean dirt and installing hazardous-gas monitoring devices.
“Typically,” he said, “a municipality cannot come up with the money to do the job by itself,” he said. “But a town also cannot reap the benefits of tax revenue on the property until it is cleaned up, and available for redevelopment.”
This is why towns increasingly find themselves motivated to make deals with developers who will clean up a site, but only in return for permission to build projects “denser” than a town would otherwise agree to, he said. (“Denser” translates as generating more demand for town services, more traffic and more pollution.)
Developers are attracted to landfill sites, according to Mr. Walters, not only because they are large but also because they often adjoin “solid infrastructure,” like well-maintained roads and utility hookups.
Landfills can also be among the few parcels where development is even being permitted in a given area, said Mark Manewitz, a Newark real estate lawyer who teaches a class in “hazardous waste law” at Seton Hall University’s law school. “There is a definite regulatory preference in New Jersey for brownfield and urban infill sites,” said Mr. Manewitz, noting that antisprawl, pro-environmental restrictions put in place over the last decade have ruled out any type of construction in some spots, and strongly discouraged it in others.
Landfill redevelopment is generally encouraged by state regulation, Mr. Manewitz said; on the other hand, because “the bar has been set very high” on clean-environment standards, developers still find it challenging to produce the kinds of projects that will win approval.
In Stafford, the Walters Group is looking to become the first commercial development in the state to use renewable energy to generate all its own electric power. Solar panels have been installed on the roofs of the first retail buildings — and plans include a system for recycling rainwater, wind power generators, and a “solar farm” of panels in a field.
“We are committed to making the project as ‘green’ as possible,” Mr. Walters said, “because that’s what the town wanted, and because it is the right thing to do.”
Mr. Manewitz notes that environmental health standards are higher for developments that have residential components, and Mr. Walters says plans for Stafford Park will meet, or exceed, those standards.
In Dover, Woodmont Properties is the designated redeveloper for the entire 75-acre former landfill site, not just the 10-acre hotel property, called Hilton Homewood Suites.
“We were lucky in that the property was only lightly contaminated,” said Steve Santola, explaining that dumping ceased in the 1970s and cleanup began six years ago. “Still, we worked steadfastly with the town and D.E.P. for five years before getting full approvals.”
The first project to open at the former landfill was a FedEx Ground shipping center that began operations in late 2006. A third office-industrial building is being planned, he said.
Similar plans are taking shape in Kearny, with proposals to create a light industry center on a site that encompasses three former landfills.