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Originally Posted by justin7
The term "office park" scares me. Has the term found a larger use or are we still talking about a group of homogenous 3-4 story buildings with no street interaction surrounded by banal lawns and streets with names like Office Park Drive?
On one hand I'm tempted to say that Camden can use any development it can get, but this location is perfect for those want to just get in and out of Camden so it is unlikely to have much of an economic impact unless we see some mixed used here.
Really hoping this is designed as a walkable urban environment.
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Totally agree. I'm encouraged that it won't be regular boring crap considering that Campbell's has their reputation staked on this in some ways, having invested millions in their HQ and are spearheading this project as a game changer or whatever for the area. And the guy whose job it is to do real estate dealings for Campbell's said:
"Brandywine, which operates six of Philadelphia's 10 largest office buildings and has also been the dominant office developer in University City and Radnor, where it's based, "has consistently demonstrated a clear focus on high-quality, well-designed urban development,” said Richard Landers, Campbell’s Vice President of Tax and Real Estate, in this statement."
Also, an
earlier article about this says:
Part of those plans include getting PATCO to build a stop at the office park — an effort that could take five to 10 years.
So, that's all pretty encouraging. It makes it sound almost like they have TOD in mind. That doesn't sound like "lets build some boxes surrounded by parking lots" to me. I'll be watching out for any renderings like a hawk though.
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Originally Posted by jsbrook
Not particularly good for Philadelphia either if successful. I'm not eager to see companies based in Philadelphia 'lured' to the Camden gateway through incentive dollars, which is Wolf CRE's express objective.
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What I'm hoping is rather that companies based in suburban office parks in places in the state are lured to Camden. This has in fact already happened; Webimax, currently based in Mt Laurel, is moving to the Ferry Terminal Building on the waterfront, and plans to double in size. This could work for other companies outside the area too. The "NJ Grow" tax incentives for were engineered to make South Jersey attractive in ways that other tax breaks were only geared for North Jersey, mainly by lowering the amount of investment/capital/whatever needed to get them, since we don't get the huge investments that North Jersey gets with its proximity to that other city up there.
(As a disclaimer, I really hate the fact that every municipality in the country is at war with every other municipality to see who can offer the best tax incentives to make companies move to their towns. But it's obviously not going away, because it seems to be how a large part of our economy works.)