The Blandification of Asbury Park

There’s a peculiar absence you notice when you step back and take in much of the recent development in Asbury Park. It’s not that these buildings are ugly. Many are competently designed, and some are even pleasant when viewed in isolation. The problem is that, taken together, they feel oddly anonymous.

Block by block, approval by approval, a city long defined by variety, eccentricity, and layered history has drifted toward something safer, flatter, and more generic. This isn’t about nostalgia or stylistic purism. It’s about how a place known for character is increasingly shaped by repetition and sameness.

When a building can exist anywhere, it might as well be nowhere at all.

We’ve Gone From Places to Products

For more than a century, Asbury Park grew through variation within a shared framework. Certain building types repeated – apartments over retail downtown, mixed-use blocks along key corridors, dense residential neighborhoods organized by consistent setbacks and a largely geometric street grid. Within that structure, however, there was tremendous variety. Differences in style, proportion, material, and detail created texture and interest even when the underlying form was similar.

Much of today’s development operates differently. Increasingly, buildings arrive as product rather than place – standardized designs optimized for efficiency, financing, and replication. Context is reduced to surface treatment. Local character becomes a muted palette of beige, gray, and tan, punctuated by formulaic gestures toward street life.

You can feel the cumulative effect in parts of downtown where development is largely complete. Stand at the intersection of Cookman Avenue and Heck Street – once a strange, memorable five-point intersection that felt layered and distinctly urban. Now, in nearly every direction, long runs of almost identical units stretch outward, repeating the same rhythms and façades. Looked at in isolation these developments are not necessarily offensive (but, yes, I have opinions). Together, they are disorienting and the variation that once made our city legible has been replaced by uniformity.

Repetition is easy. Texture and variation take effort.

Townhomes and Auto Courts – A Case Study in Nowhere Design

The growing presence of townhomes and auto-oriented residential courts makes the shift from place to product difficult to ignore. These projects are often framed as contextual or even nostalgic, but in reality they represent a relatively new typology for Asbury Park – not an extension of its historic development patterns.

What defines them most clearly is their sameness. Entire blocks are lined with nearly identical units, offering little engagement with the varied grain and layered character that historically defined the city. In many cases, the exact same floor plans have been designed, developed, and constructed in multiple towns across the region and beyond. Exterior materials may change, but the underlying organization, scale, and urban role remain essentially the same.

By the city’s own standards, these projects are not especially contextual. They are often noticeably larger or smaller than their immediate neighbors, take few cues from the prevailing mix of uses and densities, and rely on repetition rather than response to their surroundings. Their architectural language is designed to be deployed, not interpreted based on historical patterns and context.

Developers and the City frequently point to porches, balconies, and stoops as evidence of street engagement. In theory that is true, but in practice, these elements are often undersized and impractical – they are simply visual simulations of urban life rather than spaces that meaningfully support it. Without the daily comings and goings of year-round residents, and most owners arriving through the internal facing garage entrances, these gestures are little more than ornament.

Context Is Not a Constraint – It’s the Point

The common thread running through all of these examples is not aesthetics, nostalgia, or resistance to contemporary design – even if all of those things have their purpose. It is a quiet but persistent disregard for context – and a misunderstanding of what context is meant to accomplish.

Context is often mischaracterized as something that limits creativity or growth. In reality, it is the framework that allows cities to grow in ways that assimilate new and old in meaningful ways. Asbury Park’s original plan understood this. Consistent building setbacks, coherent street walls, and predictable relationships between buildings and public space created streets that felt intentional and neighborhoods that could absorb change over time. Those rules did not suppress variety – they enabled it.

What is striking in much of the recent development is how often new buildings simply do not align with their neighbors. During my decade of service to the Planning and Zoning boards, I constantly fought to maintain the historical view corridors that are a feature of the historical city development pattern. In some cases the developers adjusted their plans to comply with the most basic principles of urban design, but in most they have not – and the City Council (who approves these projects) still has not learned this lesson. Walk almost any block with a mix of old and new construction and the evidence is immediate – façades jump forward or fall back arbitrarily, street walls fracture, and the shared rhythm of the block dissolves. These are not subtle deviations. They are visible, everyday reminders that alignment is no longer being treated as a baseline expectation.

When new development ignores prevailing setbacks, the result is not modernity but fragmentation. Streets lose their spatial clarity. Buildings feel imposed rather than integrated.

The same misreading of context shows up in density decisions. Many recent projects in redevelopment zones are built well below what zoning allows, particularly in high-demand areas. This is often framed as sensitivity to context, but the outcome is predictable – fewer homes, higher prices, and a city that struggles to sustain a year-round population. Underbuilding does not preserve character. It manufactures scarcity that must then be addressed through incentives, tax cuts, and subsidies that are paid for by existing residents.

To that point, affordability is not just a function of subsidies or programs. It is shaped by everyday planning decisions about where dense housing is allowed, how much is built, and how growth is distributed. When density is treated as something to minimize rather than manage, the cost of that choice is borne over time by renters needing affordable housing, small businesses needing customers, and existing residents struggling to remain rooted in the city with spiraling costs.

Context, density, affordability, and design are not separate conversations. They are different expressions of the same responsibility – ensuring that growth reinforces the city rather than erasing the qualities that made it viable in the first place.

How These Outcomes Became Permanent

What makes these outcomes especially durable is not just design preference, but governance. While many projects appear before the Planning Board, a significant share of the most consequential decisions – setbacks, massing (or ‘size’), architectural style, and density – are established earlier through City Council-approved redevelopment plans. By the time a project reaches any sort of public or planning board level review, the framework is largely set. At that point, the Planning Board is largely certifying compliance with decisions already made by the City Council, not weighing whether those decisions meaningfully advance context, affordability, or even the basics of the City’s master plan.

This concentration of authority matters. When elected officials can write the rules that shape form, scale, and intensity, they also control the outcomes – intentionally or not. Repeatedly choosing flexibility over clarity, exception over coherence, and underbuilding over managed growth produces results that may look cautious in the moment but are deeply consequential in aggregate.

Those consequences are now visible. New rental buildings come online with rents far beyond what local wages can support. New for-sale units carry eye-popping prices clearly marketed to someone else – not the people who live and work here year-round. On winter evenings, the evidence is even starker – high-rises, apartments, and townhomes stand proudly finished, but with remarkably few lights on.

These are generational decisions – choices about form, density, and context that get made once and then locked in for decades. If we are serious about sustaining a year-round community, a functioning local economy, and a city that remains both distinctive and livable, then we need to start treating context not as a constraint to work around, but as the central responsibility of planning itself.