I know this is not a popular view — especially in Monroe and Cranbury — but the state is taking a positive step forward in eliminating regional contribution agreements from its affordable housing program.
RCAs, as they are known, have done little but give towns a way out of providing housing while keeping the few affordable units that have been built in the state’s cities. It has contributed to a pattern of segregated housing that has left the state’s suburban communities overwhelmingly white and its cities overwhelmingly black and Latino.
Doing away with RCAs should help spread the obligation out to a greater degree. To make up for the lost revenue in urban areas, the bill creates a developer fee that will be used to create a pool of money that can be distributed to cities and towns to pay for units.
While the bill addresses a significant shortcoming of the Fair Housing Act — bringing it in line with the original Mount Laurel decision that created the affordable housing requirement — it ignores another issue that is likely to come more and more to the fore in the coming years: the shrinking availability of land on which to build units.
This is a major issue in Cranbury, for instance, which has done a remarkable job preserving open space and farmland and is near build out because of it, and it is fast becoming an issue in South Brunswick, which also is nearing build out. The bill that has made its way through the Legislature and now awaits the signature of Gov. Jon Corzine requires that the Council on Affordable Housing take this into consideration. The problem is that the bill does not provide a way of doing so.
What happens if COAH and a town disagree over what constitutes available, developable land? What happens if COAH’s requirements clash with specific planning decisions made at the local level? Who makes that decision?
Consider: Cranbury and South Brunswick build warehouses that create a total of 1,000 jobs (this is a hypotehtical). Under the current rules, each town would have to zone and then build housing to accommodate a portion of the workers who take those jobs. Seems fair, but it may not be practical. As state Sen. Bill Baroni pointed out to me last week, this issue could create a constitutional conflict of its own.
“How do we provide affordable housing, keeping the commitment we’ve made, but also recognize that there are economic, health and space issues that towns have already run into?” he asked. “At what point, do you say we can do no more.
“At one point, you will have a clash between affordable housing and open space. If trends that are apparent now don’t change, you will have towns faced with requirements to build but the only space available would be the open space.”
We are not there yet, but we’re not as far off in Central Jersey as one might think. After several decades of what can only be described as warp-speed development that has more than doubled the population of most towns (South Brunswick has gone from about 17,000 residents in the early 1980s to about 42,000 today), there is not a lot of space left on which to build new housing — at least, not without using deed-restricted open space or forcing towns to rezone commercial areas. Neither approach — one because it would violate contracts, the other because it violates the principles of sound planning and penalizes towns under the state’s outmoded tax system — makes sense.
That’s why the developer fee makes sense. It essentially allows some revenue sharing to occur — towns that build the warehouses, create the jobs and earn the tax revenue — woule be helping fund housing in neighboring towns.
Again, consider the example I offered earlier: Cranbury and South Brunswick, via their developers, would pay into the fund while New Brunswick, North Brunswick, East Windsor, Jamesburg and other neighboring towns could get trust fund money, addressing the cost of building the units needed to address the regional housing need without creating too much of a tax burden.
The residual costs — education, police, etc. — would still be picked up by local taxpayers, however, which is why there is a need to change in the tax sytem — away from property taxes — or, at the very least, to share revenues among communities.
But that’s a piece of legislation that is still a ways off.
In the meantime, here’s hoping the governor signs the COAH reforms and pushes the Legislature to continue working to fix its other ills.
Hank Kalet 