On a chilly gray December afternoon, at the heart of Witherspoon Street in Princeton, NJ, fifty people crowded around a table in the Hiller LCC architecture studio. Bright LED lights diffused from large vertical windows into a thickening evening fog. Inside, cream-colored cubicles, architectural awards, and miniature house prototypes lined the spotless office. The walls are covered with designs: a 3D model of the historic Witherspoon Street, a map of the same street’s side profile, and a rendering of remodeled houses.
All the designs spanning the wall come from one project coming to fruition after ten years of planning: Hillier’s Witherspoon Street Redevelopment. And it has drawn the crowd here. The project, formally known as Affordable Housing Overlay-7 (AHO-7), will demolish and redevelop 34 housing units that the firm owns along the west side of Witherspoon. The project is marketed as a promise to increase housing capacity and improve living conditions. Yet, as rent prices are expected to soar after redevelopment, current tenants are uneasy about housing insecurity.
Most attendees at the meeting were families of working-class Latino immigrants living on Witherspoon, in one of the housing units that Hillier hopes to demolish. “They said that the redevelopment is happening anyway,” said Juan Regalado, a Honduran immigrant who lives in the area. “Se hace lo que se hace.” They do what they need to do. Sporting dark curls beneath a backward-turned baseball cap, Regalado arrived in Princeton from Honduras 11 years ago to join his sister and has lived here ever since. Now, he works for Resistencia en Acción, a local grassroots organization fighting for immigrants’ and workers’ rights.
Confronting Hillier in his studio, the crowd refused to accept displacement as the answer. “All the families you are evicting from their homes,” Regalado asked Hillier, “Where will you move them?”
According to Regalado, Hillier only replied, “I can’t answer that right now.”
Historically populated with Irish and African Americans, the Witherspoon-Jackson area is one of the last few remaining low-income neighborhoods at the heart of a very expensive Princeton. Over the past two decades, it has attracted a growing Latino population of essential workers. Now, facing a redevelopment plan and subsequent rent increase, the neighborhood’s demographics could change again. And both sides are bracing for what happens next.
As the clock struck 12 PM in Chapin, a Mexican and Guatemalan restaurant on Witherspoon, more young men crowded in, chatting in hushed Spanish. The rich blend of corn and flour sits in the air. Chapin is like a nook, with white ceramic tile tables, limited seating, and shelves filled with packaged nachos, TorTrix, and Zambos snacks. The cashier, a middle-aged woman with a sweet smile and hair tightly bundled in a hairnet, called out orders and handed cartons of take-out food in plastic bags swiftly. “Quesadilla! Chuleta y caldo de pollo!” A wooden carving of a Resplendent Quetzal, Guatemala’s national bird, sits near the window. If you step outside and down the street, you will find Conexión Latina (Latino connection) Multiservices and La Mexicana food store.
Today, 30% of Witherspoon-Jackson is Latino. But historically, Witherspoon-Jackson was populated by Black families. By the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s, descendants of enslaved people and black Southerners found employment in the expanding University (then the College of New Jersey). Witherspoon-Jackson was a segregated and vibrant Black neighborhood, nicknamed the “North’s Southmost Town.” Buildings like the Witherspoon School for Colored Children, Mt. Pisgah AME Church, and Witherspoon Presbyterian Church, all come from a time of organized Black representation in response to discrimination. However, modern gentrification of Princeton has continued to drive up property taxes since the 20th century. Combined with continuous neighborhood segregation through redlining, the black community is quickly disappearing.
Sixteen years ago, Hillier, coming from a successful career at what was the third-largest architectural firm in the world, returned to his alma mater Princeton to establish Studio Hillier, a gray brick building standing in contrast to the rest of the historic street. Hillier, now a sprightly man in his eighties with silver hair, wears thin-rimmed glasses and a colorful bowtie. At the time he arrived, the neighborhood was already experiencing an influx of Latin American residents. Hillier saw great potential in these houses for their history, location, and a 20% tax deduction. Between a Black homeowner who couldn’t afford to pay his loan, a contractor complaining about overcrowding, and a property owner selling a building loaded with asbestos, Hillier bought the properties in shambles. He is adamant about preserving the area’s historic legacy: along Witherspoon and Jackson Streets, he helped to establish Heritage Tour memorial plaques. The stainless metal plaques introduce the buildings’ history for self-guided tours, preserving the last traces of what used to be a Black neighborhood.
Now, Hillier’s Witherspoon housing properties are experimental projects in his backyard—and he is ambitious. With redevelopment, he hopes to not only repair buildings that are “dangerous and falling apart,” but also set a model for balancing historic preservation and expanding capacity.
In particular, Hillier wants to tackle Princeton’s “missing middle” crisis. While Missing Middle Housing is typically “house-scale buildings with multiple units in walkable neighborhoods,” when Hillier talks about it, he refers to the town’s lack of middle-income housing. Princeton residents who earn between $50,000 and $70,000 struggle to find accommodations, as even one studio costs $3,000 per month, according to Justin Lesko, the Director of Princeton’s Planning Board.
To address this, most of the new units will be transformed from single-family to two-story duplexes, preserving the historic facade while building an extended, modern-looking structure at the rear of each house. Housing units would be divided into studios, which would more than double the capacity, from around 34 to 76 housing units. Cheap studios would cost $1,250 per month.
“Believe it or not, we have been working on this project for 10 years and finally are hoping for approval,” Hillier said.
Members of Princeton’s municipal government support his plan. “It’s a really good example of trying to balance the requirements of historic preservation, keeping what’s special about Princeton, while at the same time trying to help solve our little local housing crisis,” David Cohen, board member of the Municipality’s Affordable Housing Committee, said. With approvals from the Princeton Environmental Commission and the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), the project is heading to a public hearing with the Planning Board, which is currently postponed.
“I’m excited,” Hillier said. “I think we have a good project.”
In June 2022, letters signed by Hillier Property LLC started to appear at residents’ doorsteps. According to Ana Paola Pazmiño, director of Resistencia en Acción, each contained a central message: under Hillier’s new redevelopment project, this house would be demolished and reconstructed, regardless of their lease. The tenants would need to prepare for relocation in the next few years. Laminated paper slips landed on porches and front doors, repeating the message in Spanish and English: the structures “are intended to be demolished in part and rehabilitated sometime in the next 36 months following approvals.” People were left worried and in disbelief. Many residents had lived in their homes for years, if not decades.
“They didn’t believe that this was happening to them – people who had lived in a house like that for years,” Regalado, Resistencia’s delegate, said.
The residents’ concern is grounded in an established link between neighborhood redevelopment and gentrification. Previous redevelopment cases show a similar pattern: after neighborhoods get upgraded with better infrastructure and economic revitalization, they become more expensive, as both costs and demands for housing from higher income classes increase. This feedback loop forces the working-class residents out. Hillier’s development project is shaping up to have the same effect, especially since the current residents of his properties are renters, people of color, families with children, and low-income households: some of the most vulnerable populations for displacement.
Regalado estimates that a two-bedroom apartment, which now costs about $2,600 to $3,000, will rise to $4,800 after redevelopment. (Others offer different numbers, ranging from $1,250 per room from Hillier to $1,500 from a resident.)
María “Charo” Juega, the former director of the Latin America Legal Defence Fund (LALDEF), has argued that the current units have always been what are called Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH), unsubsidized rental accessible to low-income population due to low market values. However, redevelopment means higher property valuation and rent increase. Even if overall housing capacity increases, the number of affordable units would decrease by 19: a huge blow to a community of working-class immigrants. The other 55 houses, she predicts, would only be accessible to high-income tenants.
Veronica Olivares-Weber, a Mexican artist and local activist at Princeton, described the project in a letter to the local online publication Planet Princeton as “unchecked gentrification.”
Indeed, even if residents could afford the higher rent, Regalado countered that large immigrant families would be unable to move into the new, smaller housing units. Many current tenants are families of up to 8 people, while the redeveloped units will mostly be single-occupancy studios. The largest unit would allow up to four people. “I have a family of six. Where am I going to put two more people?” Regalado asked.
“These are big families with children [and] elderly. It’s not that they [Studio Hillier] are just going to come and say, hey, give me the house and leave, right?” Regalado said. He added that most tenants don’t speak enough English, and “it is difficult to understand what’s going on.”
Hillier recognizes the tenants’ discontent and has tried to ease the blow. He said his team talked with each tenant, giving them three solutions: accept the higher rent of a new apartment, move out with a total subsidy of $2,000, or fill out the affordable housing application with assistance from social workers hired by Studio Hillier.
“That’s 72,000 dollars that we are paying to existing tenants just to get them happily on their way,” Hillier said. Matt Mleczko, the director of a social housing non-profit called Princeton GROWS, said that Hillier is “doing more than is what is legally required” to provide financial assistance. He views Hillier’s public commitment to financial assistance as an integral part of modeling equitable housing redevelopment.
“Bob’s not going to throw you out on the street,” Hillier said. “He’s got a plan for everybody.”
The tenants, though, see Hillier’s payment differently. For many, it feels like a dismissal. For them, $2,000 is insufficient to subsidize resettlement for a low-income family into the usually expensive apartments close to Princeton. The residents propose a counter-offer: if Hillier asks them to leave, then he needs to provide a concrete relocation address. “We are not fighting so that [Studio Hillier] would leave. We are fighting for them to find a place where [the tenants] can go and have a roof over their heads,” Regalado said.
Tension rose at the public hearing of the Historic Preservation Commission meeting on January 8th. Juega walked up to confront Hillier. Gesturing to three Latino tenants at the back of the room, she asked: “They are right here, and they will tell you that they don’t know what’s gonna happen. They haven’t been told, nothing’s being explained. Would you care to hear them? Can they speak?”
Hillier crouched in a black office chair by an office table with his colleagues as Juega spoke in front of him. He looked stern and insisted that Studio Hillier’s representative had spoken to all tenants. He felt equally misunderstood.
“It’s wrong for her to be badmouthing us, you know, when she doesn’t really understand what we’re doing,” Hillier said.
Hillier knows the economic and architectural technicalities of housing supply, zoning, and property tax. But this project involves dynamics that run deeper in history – and may be out of Hillier’s control.
For the residents, much dissatisfaction and anger is drawn from a long history of gentrification and escalating racially-charged anxieties in Princeton.
Over the last few years, the tenants have sparred with Hillier on another issue: his enforcement of overcrowding in his housing units. Because of the shortage of affordable homes in Princeton, undocumented immigrant workers often find housing by illegally subletting bed spaces in Hillier residencies. When Hillier finds out about these dealings, he evicts the offending renters. Ten years ago, 46 people poured out onto the street from one housing unit after it caught on fire. “It was terrible,” Hillier said. To the community, however, it feels as though Hillier frequently cites this single incident to stereotype his Latino tenants as a public threat, as Juega argues in an article in Planet Princeton.
This is just one of many crises faced by Princeton’s working-class Latino neighborhood. According to Pazmiño’s estimation, about half of the Latino residents in the municipality are undocumented. Without legal status, they are often denied employment certification or formal housing contracts and have no means to fight back. Trump’s threats to stop federal funding for sanctuary cities and to start mass deportation for more than one million undocumented immigrants, including whole families, causes more unease.
To individuals in the Latino community, Trump’s immigration crackdown nationwide is inseparable from the crisis in their community. The two parallel problems paint a troubling future. “We have a problem with la migración (the Immigration Office),” Regalado said. “And we have another problem: they want to get us out of here and they want to increase the rent.”
For Regalado and other residents, the redevelopment plan is but one piece in a racially charged agenda, motivated both by a history of discrimination and a contemporary escalation of immigration issues, to drive Latino immigrants out of the community. Where Hillier sees a historically preserved, affordable, and middle-class neighborhood, the tenants fear displacement, anti-immigration policies, and a new housing crisis.
“We see it as racism,” Regalado said. “The white people, they always say that we are a nuisance here.” He adds: “It felt very personal towards the Latino community.”
Another Clay Street resident, Fernandez, agreed with him. “They don’t want us to live here,” he said after a Resistencia en Acción rally in Spanish, “Even the children.”
They compare their situation to the Black neighborhood’s gentrification. “The white people themselves took care of getting [the Black community] out of here.” Regalado said, “Five years on, [the neighborhood] has become very crowded with Latinos. So [the white people] see that.”
“The only way to get [the Latinos] out of here,” he added, “is to raise their rent and do what they’re doing.”
The conflict exceeds one developer and his tenants and calls for greater systemic reforms. Matt Mleczko, the director of Princeton GROWS, agrees. “In housing-constrained and supply-constrained places like Princeton,” he said, “affordability is a problem for most of the income spectrum.”
Mleczko suggests creating a developers and community benefits agreement to ensure the housing security of vulnerable tenants after redevelopment and calls for further systemic changes.
“Princeton can’t solve the housing crisis on its own,” he said. “It’s going to require a lot of support from the state and federal governments.” And it will need an ambitious and creative plan. In the short term: zoning and land-use reform to create affordable market-rate housing, and rental assistance and eviction diversion programs to ensure housing stability. In the long term: community land trusts, inclusionary development plans, and social housing funds.
Eventually, he hopes to change the narrative around housing in the government’s decision-making process. Instead of reactively objecting to development plans in public hearings, tenants would be allowed to participate in making that decision. With housing support programs for all populations, we no longer need to decide between prioritizing the “missing middle” or current tenants.
These reforms are far on the horizon, but there is hope. For Mlezcko, regarding Hillier’s project, “nothing’s been finalized. And so that suggests to me that there’s still time to get this right.”
With the upcoming Planning Board public hearing, Hillier told me that conflicts might escalate. Regalado confirms. “If they do not reach an agreement,” he said, “We will march so that they will listen to us.”
On Witherspoon Street, alongside Resietencia’s “ICE Out of Princeton” signs, Studio Hillier’s notification about upcoming demolition plans are taped on many doors. On the porch of a private household hangs a wooden Ginger Man decor, a bright yellow toy truck, and a green children’s beach chair.
On the corner of John and Leigh Street, Marlon Davila, a Guatemalan artist, curated a two-person-tall mural where monarch butterflies fly out of a tree towards the North Stars. Named Journey, it celebrates the migration of Hispanic residents and the vibrant cultures they carry.
Unless Studio Hillier and community leaders reconcile to establish agreements before the next public hearing, displacement feels like an impending reality. Soon, like the Heritage Tour memorial plaques, Davila’s mural might just become another memorial left by a community that used to exist in this historic place.