Fixer-upper on affordable housing

Legislation that would change the way the state approaches providing affordable housing — for the bettere — is moving through the state Legislature.

A state Senate panel yesterday cleared a bill that would eliminate regional contribution agreements and create a statewide housing fund in an effort to get about 115,000 units built.

The bill accomplishes several things:

1. It eliminates RCAs, which allow rich towns to buy their way out of providing housing by paying poorer communities to build a portion of their state-mandated obligation. Both Cranbury and Monroe have used RCAs in the past.
2. It offsets the money that urban communities would lose by creating a statewide housing fund — funded by a 2.5 percent fee on the value of new commercial development — that would help pay for affordable units.
3. It sets aside about $20 million for what are being called “work-force units,” essentially expanding the program to higher incomes.
4. It requires that land preservation be taken into account when setting a municipality’s obligation — something that could help limit the size of Cranbury’s future obligations.

Reform is obviously needed and this legislation is a good first step that, hopefully, will lead to new affordable housing being built. But it is only a first step.

It is obvious that the current affordable housing program does not work. It does not provide enough housing, while encouraging sprawl — a combination that does little more than anger suburban voters and officials and diminish support.

The current rules require towns that have new jobs created to build housing — a seemingly logical approach, but one that has shipwrecked on the shoals of questionable calculations. In theory, if a town like Cranbury or South Brunswick create new jobs, the town should provide housing. Assuming that East Windsor or North Brunswick or some other community will provide housing for the workers creates a tax imbalance — South Brunswick would get the revenue but the neighboring community would pay the cost of educating the new students or providing other services.

But that’s not practical. Jobs and housing are regional concerns and should be viewed that way on a policy level, though that will require a change in the way we raise and spend money — altering the tax structure (moving away from property taxes to an income tax) and/or instituting significant revenue sharing so that towns that build warehousing share some of the taxes they generate with towns that provide housing.