Slow growth is what we hoped for in New Jesey

PACKET EDITORIAL, April 10

   For reasons we can’t fully divine, a lot of New Jerseyans seem to be upset that our state’s population is growing at a rate that’s much slower than the nation as a whole.
   The release of updated U.S. Census data, showing that only three of New Jersey’s 21 counties — Somerset, Gloucester and Cumberland — exceeded the nation’s 1-percent annual growth rate, sent shock waves through the State House. If the trend continues, politicians fear, New Jersey could lose one of its 13 seats in the House of Representatives after the 2010 Census.
   State officials were upset to learn that more residents are moving out of New Jersey than moving in from other states — especially in the northeastern corridor of Hudson, Essex, Bergen, Union and Passaic counties. Only a healthy birth rate and a steady flow of immigrants from other lands prevented the state as a whole from losing population in the first half of this decade.
   Business leaders, predictably, blamed the state’s failure to keep up with the national growth rate on New Jersey’s inhospitable economic climate — high taxes, high housing costs and too much government regulation.
   "The reasons people are leaving are basically economic," explained James Hughes, dean of Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Public Policy and Planning. "When you look at New Jersey compared to the rest of the country, there are more economic opportunities in places like North Carolina, which has a rapidly growing economy and more affordable housing."
   There is, of course, another side to these statistics. New Jersey has long been, and continues to be, the most densely populated state in the union. For the past half-century, the garden in the Garden State has been disappearing as once-fertile farmland has been gobbled up by rapacious developers. Sprawling single-family houses and apartment complexes now sprout where corn and tomatoes once grew, creating virtual build-out conditions in many parts of the state. As a result, it now takes longer to drive from point A to point B in this traffic-clogged state than it does anywhere else in the country.
   Municipalities and counties across the state have recognized, better late than never, that preserving what little open space remains is now a top priority. Voters have overwhelmingly approved special local taxes that allow towns and counties to buy up open space and preserve it in perpetuity. Local officials who once welcomed development because of the tax ratables it produced are now winning elections by campaigning against rampant growth and all the costly schoolchildren it attracts.
   With public policy having shifted so strongly in recent years away from the ratable chase toward slow growth — or, in the state’s most densely populated regions, no growth — it should surprise no one that New Jersey’s population has failed to keep pace with the nation’s. In fact, it would be most distressing if, despite our collective efforts to do a better job of managing growth in the future than we have in the past, we continued to cram more and more people into this tightly packed state.
   We’ve all heard about the law of unintended consequences — unanticipated and undesirable outcomes that sometimes follow changes in public policy. But when people with agendas start complaining that a deliberate shift in policy has resulted in the intended consequences, the rest of us may wish to view matters from a slightly more balanced perspective.