About

The Princeton Policy Review started with a question my family kept running into: who actually gets to live in Princeton?

Four years ago, we tried to move here from Edison. A house, just for the name "Princeton", was priced impossibly high, so we settled in Plainsboro instead. This year, as I’m going into highschool, we tried again. With buying still out of reach, we decided to rent. Now, I get to spend my highschool years in a town thats full of history and ideas!

I thought our story was unusual until I started asking around. It wasn't. The same thing had happened to families across the corridor priced out, pushed to the next town over, then watching from the outside as decisions about housing got made without them. The people most affected by those decisions were almost never the ones in the room when they happened.

So I founded The Princeton Policy Review to help close that gap. We take the dense municipal documents and long council meetings that shape who can afford to live here, and turn them into something a renter, a student, or a working family can read in five minutes. We started with housing because that's the decision that shaped my own family, but the larger question runs underneath everything this town does: who gets to live here, who gets to stay, and who gets a say.

What we do

We translate.

Princeton's housing documents run to hundreds of pages. We read them so you don't have to, and explain what's being decided and what it means for you.

We compare.

Princeton, Plainsboro, and West Windsor face the same state housing law and handle it differently. We put those differences side by side, because no one else does.

We bring people in.

We host community forums and carry residents' questions (especially renters, families, and young people) into the rooms where housing gets decided.

Who we are

The Review is written by a small team of students from across the Princeton corridor, each connected to the place they cover:

Myra Chowdhery

FOUNDER & EDITOR

Moved from Edison to Plainsboro to Princeton, and started the Review to understand the housing decisions her family lived through.

Audrey Zhang

TECH & DATA ANALYST

Has lived in West Windsor her whole life; works with the numbers behind the housing story. Also maintains the website.

Vivaan Vartak

CONTRIBUTING WRITER · WEST WINDSOR

Follows West Windsor's council meetings and reports on what happens there.

Vidula Balasubramanian

CONTRIBUTING WRITER · PLAINSBORO

Her family, like Myra's, moved to Plainsboro after Princeton priced them out.

Contributors are credited by name on the pieces they work on. If you're a student in the corridor who wants to report on your town, we'd like to hear from you.

What we're not

We're not a daily news outlet, Planet Princeton and Town Topics do that and do it well. We don't break news; we explain it. We're not anyone's mouthpiece, and we're not affiliated with Princeton University. We're a small, independent, youth-led publication trying to make local policy something ordinary residents can actually follow.