No House Too Big, No Plot Too Small

It’s an attractive home.

Tucked in at the end of Highland Avenue off of Spring Street, the narrow, new two-story construction – narrow so it can fit on the small plot of land – has an attached garage and nice stonework out front. It’s got a backyard big enough for a lawn chair, maybe two.

Walking by the house it just seems a bit out of place, as if it’s too large for the small plot of land it’s located on, and perhaps it is. But in Red Bank, however, plot size is rarely an issue, even with ordinances defining clear minimums on the books. At a meeting last month, Brad Jacobs, a homeowner who owns property that abuts both Spring Street and Branch Avenue, won approval from the planning board to subdivide his property to allow him to build a second house on a slice of land where the borough originally decided years ago that there should only be one.

Discussion that night had less to do with the actual plan to build two homes and more to do with the efforts to save a tree at the rear the property, which will soon become the front of the property for a second home – for the record, the board thinks it should come down.

Board Vice Chair Daniel Mancuso was the lone voice of objection during the application hearing, wondering if it was really in the best interest of the neighborhood for there to be two homes on one plot of land, especially with Jacobs needing variances for minimum lot frontage, front yard setback, side yard setback, and combined side yard setback. Board approval, however, was unanimous.

According to borough Business Administrator Stanley Sickles, Red Bank’s master plan calls for neighborhoods to be “filled in” with development, which is applicable, apparently, even when borough ordinances say otherwise.

This is hardly an isolated case as Red Bank officials have made it clear that they encourage development in the town. Currently, the Planning Board is entertaining a proposed hotel project that would locate a on a plot of land so small – and polluted by a former gas station – that the developer needs up to 20 variances just to make it fit.

Space is certainly at a premium in Red Bank with it’s a little more than one and a half-square miles, limited open space, and almost shockingly to the Navesink River. But, like Jacobs approved subdivision, if the public doesn’t object, there’s hardly incentive for the borough to either.