By JACQUELINE DURETT
Correspondent
EDISON — “It’s a buyer beware case.”
That was the opinion of resident Emma Joyce Tucker regarding her neighbor Sachin Patel. Patel appeared again before the Zoning Board on March 15 seeking approval to build a house on a vacant lot he purchased in 2013.
At 3,300 square feet, Patel’s lot at 249 Fletcher St. is one-third of the township’s required lot size. He has been seeking approval for three years to build a small single-family home on it. The board denied his original application; Patel appealed. The matter was referred back to the board, and Patel submitted a revised application that required fewer variances for the March 15 meeting.
However, neighbors protested this iteration of the application as well, expressing concerns about how a much smaller home — Patel is proposing one that would be 1,010 square feet — amid larger homes surrounding it would have a negative impact on their property values. They said Patel should have known the lot was too small for building when he purchased it.
“There’s no new homes in that area on a lot that size. It’s obvious that this is an undersized lot,” said another neighbor of the property, Vincent Stallings. “He knew you couldn’t build there.”
Patel’s attorney, John Wiley, said that if the board would not permit Patel to build on the lot, the township would have to compensate him for the hardship. That is, unless neighbors whose properties adjoin the lot want to purchase it. Stallings, who is one of those residents, said it was the township’s responsibility to address the issue, not his.
“I’m not interested in buying the property at all,” he said.
Patel paid $24,000 for the property when he purchased it in 2013.
Stallings was one of a handful of residents who spoke against the application at the meeting; many said they’ve attended prior hearings to protest this project and maintain their dissent. Some said the township has a duty to enforce the lot-size requirement, and overriding it in this case could impact the future of other undersized lots in the township.
Wiley told the board that one of the legal matters at issue is not what Patel knew before he purchased the lot, but how the lot came to be sized in its current form. Wiley said in the 1920s, the lot’s current size was a standard size, and since it was never combined with another lot in subsequent years, the township created the hardship.
As such, the board asked that Patel have a title search done for the property to get some more clarity on how the lot came to be the size it is. The board also expressed disappointment that Patel did not present testimony from a planner as part of his revised application.
The request for additional testimony did not sit well with the residents who attended. Some said they were interpreting those requests as ignoring their concerns and moving toward approval.
“Don’t you see?” Zoning Board Attorney Patrick Bradshaw responded. “The more the delay, the further away he is from building a house there.”
The board will hear the matter again on April 26.
