Tag: affordable housing

New Jersey’s low-income residents looking for housing can stop looking for affordable housing. It is not going to be built anytime soon.

The state Senate today passed S1, legislation sponsored by Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-union, an awful piece of legislation that panders to the longstanding antipathy suburban communities have had toward the state’s affordable housing requirements since their inception in the 1980s.

The bill, which passed today by a 28-3 vote, claims to meet the requirements of two state Supreme Court rulings — Mount Laurel I and II — and the state laws adopted in their wake, while essentially gutting the state’s affordable housing program.

The bill prohibits towns from imposing development fees on non-residential development, effectively severing the connection between jobs created and housing need and making it impossible for towns to even acknowledge that they should make housing available for the people who work in the warehouses they all seem to want. (Warehouses are considered clean ratables that cost little, but generate lots of local taxes.)

The bill also does away with the Council on Affordable Housing, transferring authority to the Department of Community Affairs, which would be directed to help towns create housing opportunities. DCA, however, will not have the ability to impose numbers on towns; instead, the bill offers a series of set-aside targets, but leaves it to towns to manage — which makes local mayors happy and leaves it unlikely that suburban communities will actually build housing for low-income people.

The governor, of course, is happy with the vote.

“The legislation passed by the Senate today eliminates COAH and goes a long way toward fundamentally reforming the affordable housing system which New Jerseyans have long demanded and that I have promised to deliver,” the governor said in a statement.

But this is not reform; it is abolition. Rather than replace COAH with a new system designed to get housing built in an expeditious manner while ensuring that towns do not use zoning as a way to further exacerbate the racial, ethnic and class segregation that plagues this state, Bill S1 is just a sop to the suburban voters who swung the last election to Christie.

Peter Kasabach, executive director of New Jersey Future, a group that advocated intelligent planning and development in the state and has been an advocate for affordable housing, offered a blunt assessment in a written statement that I received via e-mail earlier this afternoon:

We have little doubt that the good folks looking to re-shape the state’s affordable-housing policy are doing so with their own reasonable intentions. Unfortunately, the product of these intentions, embodied in the just-passed S-1 legislation, creates an affordable-housing system that can only be described as a non-affordable housing system. The current proposal will: 1) produce fewer opportunities for low- and moderate-income households, and has the strong possibility of creating absolutely no opportunities at all; 2) generate less funding to subsidize housing; and 3) remove any accountability from the state or towns to even attempt to create affordable housing, let alone actually produce any.

He said that the bill “relies on local good will to generate housing that isn’t being produced by the market” and that “the Senate has thrown out the baby, the bathwater and the tub.”

This may be viewed by some people as a necessary and radical re-thinking of affordable housing, but that would be the case only if the new system had some chance of producing affordable housing, especially near jobs and transportation choices. We have repeatedly asked those involved to explain how the new system will result in more affordable-housing opportunities (or any opportunities, for that matter), and we have yet to receive a cogent answer.

This is not a surprise, given that the backers of this bill have no answer to this question.

Just as troubling is that the bill will create a web of conflicts and counterintuitive results, according to Kevin Walsh, of the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group in Cherry Hill. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer before the vote that the bill “is going to lead to strange results, like wealthy municipalities getting off the hook and older towns that already have their fair share of affordable housing being expected to do more.”

Rural towns, according to environmental advocates, are hit hardest by the new rules, or as hard as they can be given the toothlessness of the bill.

“All these places with more trees than people aren’t exempt,” despite the fact that they are not near jobs, noted Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

The bill now goes to the Assembly, but I have little hope that anyone in that august body will do anything to stop it. Then it is off to the governor to be signed into law — unless the state Supreme Court steps in, as it should, and stops the entire effort in its tracks.

In the end, the legislation is nothing but a disgusting bit of pandering that will leave low-income people in the lurch, where politicians always leave them.

(Under the Fair Housing analysis, a number of Central Jersey towns would be exempt from the rather weak housing requirements proposed under S1, many of which already were exempt: Bordentown City, Bordentown Township, North Hanover and New Hanover in Burlington County; Stockton Borough in Hunterdon County; East Windsor, Hightstown, Lawrence and the Princetons in Mercer County; Jamesburg in Middlesex County; and Manville in Somerset County. This list only includes towns covered by our papers.)

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The perfect storm apparently has hit the state Council on Affordable Housing. With suburban communities in revolt, with an influential state senator playing politics and a new governor elected with suburban votes all taking aim at COAH, it appears we could be headed back to court to defend the underlying right endorsed by the state Supreme Court in its Mount Laurel decisions: that towns have a responsibility to allow lower-priced housing to be built for low- and moderate-income homebuyers and renters.

The web of laws and lawsuits and the bureaucratic maze created in their aftermath have not accomplished the court’s goal. On the contrary, the backlash we are witnessing — culminating in the governor’s announcement today that he was creating a task force to “review” the future of COAH and affordable housing in New Jersey — has narrowed the space for discussion of the issue.

Reform, as we wrote in an editorial last week on the legislation being proposed by state Sen. Ray Lesniak, is obviously necessary. But reform has to respect the basic goals of the original Mount Laurel suits:

After more than 20 years, it has made only the smallest of dents in the need for housing or the income and racial segregation that plagues the state, while also contributing to sprawl. The question is whether the Lesniak bill, which essentially shifts responsibility for providing housing back to local communities, will accomplish what needs to be accomplished.

There are three issues at play.

The first is the need to build more housing for low- and moderate-income New Jerseyans. The state Supreme Court in 2008, in tossing out the latest COAH rules, estimated that 115,000 affordable units would be needed by the end of 2014. That figure, however, may significantly underestimate real need. According to NJ Future, a nonpartisan planning and research organization, housing advocates place the number at 900,000, a figure that takes into account the large number of families in the state who live either in substandard housing or housing that busts their household budgets.

The second is the need for regional planning that acknowledges the impact that both industrial and residential development has on housing need, traffic and the environment.

And the third, which goes to the heart of the COAH debate and we believe was the central point made by the state Supreme Court when it forced the Legislature to address the housing issue, is the idea of fair share. The court did not just rule that housing was necessary, but that every town had to supply its fair share of housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income households. Its point — which remains valid — is that racial and economic segregation is not good for the state, and that all of us had a responsibility to close that gap. COAH, unfortunately, has failed to do so — the state is home to three of the nation’s wealthiest counties (Hunterdon, Morris and Somerset) and three of its poorest cities (Camden, Newark and Paterson).

We obviously can do better, but it remains to be seen whether the legislation on the table will fix the problem or further exacerbate it. Before the Lesniak bill — which is being reviewed by the Economic Growth Committee — moves forward, its sponsor needs to demonstrate just how his reforms will result will lead to more housing and a less segregated state.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Affordable housing is inherently beneficial.

That’s the upshot of today’s state appellate court ruling in Burlington County, which ruled in favor of a nonprofit group that was seeking to build a multi-unit development in an area of
Eastampton Township zoned for single-family housing.

The township Planning Board had denied a use-variance application from Homes of Hope to build two buildings containing eight affordable units on a less-then-an-acre parcel that already contained a four-unit brick building. The board had determined that, because the township had met its state-mandated affordable housing obligation — it had built 100, when 79 were required — affordable housing did not qualify as an “inherently beneficial use” under state law.

That meant that Homes of Hope was required to meet a more stringent standard to win approval from the board.

The Superior Court in Burlington County ruled last year in favor of Homes of Hope, saying that the the original Mount Laurel decision and the state’s Fair Housing Law, which created the state Council on Affordable Housing and the state-mandate, did not intend for “for each municipality to meet only the needs of the homeless within strict boundaries of each town.” The affordable housing program, the court said, was a statewide mandate and the individual obligations were just the mechanism used to meet the overall need.

The appellate panel endorsed the lower court’s finding, saying that meeting COAH’s requirements “does not impact affordable housing’s inherently beneficial use status.”

Affordable housing continues to foster the general welfare and constitutes a special reason to support a use variance.”

There are those who would disagree, especially in suburban communities around the state, where the ongoing need for lower-cost housing is viewed as an imposition bringing school children and the higher taxes necessary to support them.

William Dressel, executive director of the state League of Municipalities, told The Star-Ledger today that the ruling “brings to question what is the real meaning and purpose of the Fair Housing Act.”

He’s correct, but not because it penalizes towns that have played by the rules.

The court, in calling affordable housing a state obligation, alluded to the central issue facing the state: the arbitrary geographical divisions that govern taxing decisions, land-use planning and nearly every other issue that comes up.

Land-use planning, in particular, suffers from our inability to step beyind these boundaries as decisions get made based on immediate tax implications and not on regional need. Cranbury, for instance, builds warehousing near N.J. Turnpike Exit 8A and along Route 130 because it has open land and a desire to bring in what generally are called “clean ratables,” or taxable properties that do not generate school children and require few municipal services. At the same time, it has sought over the years to minimize the number of residential units built in town.

This, under current rules, is good planning; it keeps local taxes manageable.

The problem, however, is that it does little to address the state’s need for affordable housing, its segregated housing patterns or school-spending disparities.

That’s why the courts ruled that affordable housing should be considered an inherently beneficial use for planning purposes. It doesn’t mean that all affordable housing applications must be approved, the court said; it only means that towns must prove “substantial detriment to the public good.”

Weighing the criteria in this way makes “it more difficult for municipalities to exclude inherently beneficial uses,” but allows for exclusion where the detriment outweighs the benefit to the public good.

Given the current state of the law, unfortunately, it is virtually guaranteed that we will see these law suits occur over and over and over again.

State Sen. Christopher Bateman, R-Somerset, told The Star-Ledger that he planned to seek changes in the law that would protect towns from lawsuits over zoning applications involving affordable housing if they’ve met their state obligation.

“The Corzine administration promised that if towns didn’t pursue commercial development and met the quotas set down by the Council on Affordable Housing, they would be protected,” he said.

But that does little more than treat the symptom. The issue, as it always seems to be in New Jersey, is the number of competing jurisdictions, each with its own goals and needs and problems and each allowed to operate without regard for its neighbors.

A new paradigm is needed — fewer towns and better regional planning that focuses on need and not taxes — but the chances of that happening appear slim.