High-End Golf Course, Controversial Data Center Continue Development Wave In Vineland

Developable land is scarce in the nation’s most densely populated state, and when New Jersey builders do come across those opportunities, they often face a winding entitlement process and little cooperation from municipal officials.

Deep in South Jersey, Vineland is bucking that trend. The city government has an aggressively open-for-business stance, which has led to an ongoing wave of development that helped pull the community out of a post-industrial malaise.

“Vineland has made a pretty big turnaround. It’s been refreshing to see,” Northeast Precast CEO John Ruga, who is also a major player in local development, said of the last 15 years.

“There’s certainly a business-friendly administration that understands what we’re trying to do,” he added. “It’s the one area [in South Jersey] where there is land to develop.” 

Ruga is involved with a high-end golf course that opened in Vineland last week, Trout National, backed by MLB star Mike Trout and designed by Tiger Woods.

The city has also fielded a wave of cold storage facilities, retail outlets, and a modest crop of townhomes and apartments. A Microsoft data center under construction, another Ruga project, has drawn major pushback from some Vineland residents.

The city’s 2024 population of 62,070 was up 2.1% from 2020, a faster rate of growth than it experienced over the prior decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It sits in Cumberland County, where the median home sale price of $250K last month was the second lowest in the state.

For decades, glass manufacturer Wheaton Industries was an anchor for the region at its headquarters in neighboring Millville. 

While it still exists as a sub-brand of DWK Life Sciences, the shutdown of its historic Millville factory and loss of 650 jobs there in 2006 marked a low point for the area’s economy. The company employed thousands of people at one point, Ruga said.

“Vineland experienced the same late 20th century cycles of growth and decline seen in many U.S. cities, though calling it ‘distressed’ may be overstating it,” Mayor Anthony Fanucci said in a statement to Bisnow.

Laying The Groundwork

Since the 1980s, sections of Vineland have been part of the statewide Urban Enterprise Zone program, which incentivized retail projects in the city and created a funding source the municipal government used to pave the way for further development.

The program covering distressed sections of dozens of New Jersey municipalities halves retail sales taxes, which made Vineland’s Delsea Drive an appealing spot for national brands.

“That’s why you see a Home Depot and a Lowe’s here,” Eastern Pacific Development President Hans Lampart, a longtime Vineland resident, said of the two competing retailers located directly across the street from each other. “Stores were able to draw customers because of the lower taxes on purchases.”

The early version of the UEZ gave towns and cities significant control over the program’s funds. Most used the money for municipal building upgrades and new equipment for their workers, but Lampart said Vineland spent the money on infrastructure and two city-owned industrial parks instead.

“That enabled them to be competitive with land and infrastructure that was needed in order to encourage people to move here,” Lampart said.

Vineland is also the only municipality in the state with its own dedicated utility, which provides energy at a rate about 20% lower than Atlantic City Electric, he said.

The city has long been a hub for South Jersey agriculture and related food manufacturers, Ruga said. The cheap power and other groundwork the city laid with UEZ funds also made it a destination for cold storage operators catering to those businesses.

Vineland also has a revolving loan fund for UEZ-certified businesses, which was a major draw for Genesis Capital CEO Gowtham Reddy, who owns three car washes in the city.

The program allows the municipality to come in as a second position to fund up to 30% of a development project, he said.

“With that type of incentive, it would be dumb not to come here and do it,” Reddy said.

Down the road from King’s Crossing, Lampart and Eastern Pacific are building a 58-unit, low-income housing tax credit-backed townhouse community called Oak Hill Farms.

Lampart is also working on two similarly funded senior housing projects in Vineland. That includes 74 units at Landis Square Senior Apartments and 65 at the site of the former Newcomb Hospital, where Eastern Pacific has already built 130.

While LIHTC is at the core of Lampart’s business, he said it is hard to make residential projects in Vineland pencil without incentives. The Newcomb builds were initially supposed to be market rate, but he had to pivot after the anticipated rents weren’t high enough.

Some single-family homes have been built in recent years, but those developers face similarly tight margins, Lampart said.

“It could use a lot more,” Reddy said of the housing situation in Vineland.

Adding A Golf Course And Data Center

The new Trout National golf course could someday bring a wealthier demographic to Vineland alongside new housing to match, Ruga said. He worked on the project with Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout, a Millville native and three-time American League MVP.

Many of the members are metro New York and Philadelphia residents who own shore homes or who fly into the Millville Executive Airport, which Ruga expects to benefit from the project. Lampart estimates there are just a dozen Vineland residents who can afford one of the invite-only memberships, which Reddy said go for $250K.

But Ruga said a destination course like this doesn’t need to be in a locale that otherwise caters to wealthy golfers.

“When you look at some of the great golf courses in the world, many of them have been in places that when they were first put there, nobody would have believed,” he said. 

The ample land that made Vineland an option for Trout National also caught the attention of Microsoft, which contracted DataOne and Nebius Group to build a 300-megawatt data center across 2.6M SF.

While the project made it through the entitlement process and is now under construction, it has continued to draw pushback from residents who are concerned about everything from ambient noise to pollution from the on-site gas-generation plant. 

Intense community opposition to data centers has become a trend nationwide as they have been proposed and come online at a rapid pace in recent years.

“It’s hard to grasp the size of this thing. It is staggering,” political candidate Bayly Winder, a former U.S. Agency for International Development adviser who is running against U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, said of the Vineland project. 

“If it sounds like the Turnpike next to your window because of a data center, that’s a problem,” he added.

This could have a negative impact on residential property values, Winder said, which is part of the reason he has rallied against the project.

He has also accused local elected officials of rolling out the red carpet for Ruga and the other developers, who received a $6M UEZ loan for the project.

“Bayly is trying to get votes, and I respect that,” said Ruga, who declined to comment on the specifics of the political process.

He believes that once the data center comes online, residents will realize it won’t be as intrusive as some expect.

“Until people see it, it’s tough to convince them otherwise, and I get it,” Ruga said.

He said he was contacted by several people looking to build distribution centers on the parcel but rejected those proposals. Ruga said they would have had a larger negative impact on the community due to the traffic those projects bring.

While Fanucci, the mayor, acknowledged residents' concerns about noise and vibration from the data center, he said the project will have to comply with state and county environmental and safety regulations.

“No regulatory violations have been found,” he said.

“Public concern often comes from uncertainty about newer types of development like data centers,” Fanucci added. “These facilities are still relatively new to many communities, and the technology to power and cool them is evolving, so questions about their impact are natural.”