MANALAPAN – State lawmakers met with residents and township officials recently to discuss new affordable housing requirements that have been established by the New Jersey Council on Affordable Housing (COAH).
As the rules stand now, Manalapan will be required to permit the construction of more than 470 new units of affordable housing.
Affordable housing as defined by COAH is housing that is sold or rented at below market rates to people whose income meets regional guidelines established by the state.
State Sen. Jennifer Beck, state Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon and state Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande (all R-Monmouth and Mercer), whose district includes Manalapan, held the public meeting on Sept. 23 at the municipal building.
Members of the Manalapan Township Committee, other municipal officials, New Jersey League of Municipalities COAH expert Mike Cerra and a smattering of interested residents were on hand for the presentation.
Since COAH was created in the early 1980s, two rounds of affordable housing obligations have been promulgated by the state agency. Garden State communities have sought to meet that obligation in a variety of ways over the past two decades.
COAH administrators have now issued third round affordable housing obligations to New Jersey’s municipalities.
According to the information presented, Manalapan’s third round COAH obligation is 473 units (from 2004 to 2018). Left uncontested, that means township officials must make provisions in local zoning for the construction of that number of affordable housing units.
O’Scanlon said he wants people to understand that “there is a distinction between affordable housing and subsidized housing. It’s not low income (housing) as a lot of people see it.” He said affordable housing is necessary for people who work at jobs in teaching, nursing and other professions that do not offer a six-figure income.
A recently enacted law eliminates what had been known in COAH’s first two rounds as a regional contribution agreement (RCA). Under that program a town which had an obligation to provide affordable housing was permitted to pay another town to accept some of that obligation and to rehabilitate substandard housing or to build affordable housing within its own borders.
In the past, officials in towns such as Manalapan, Marlboro, Freehold Township, Howell and Colts Neck used RCAs to transfer some of their affordable housing obligation to receiving communities. That option is now off the table.
O’Scanlon said COAH’s third round numbers are onerous to the point of being destructive and counter-productive. If Manalapan has to comply under the current numbers assigned by COAH, according to O’Scanlon, the township’s population will increase by 50 percent.
Manalapan had an estimated 2007 population of 39,370 residents, according to Monmouth County At A Glance, an April 2008 publication of the Monmouth County Planning Board.
O’Scanlon, Casagrande and Beck said the data that was used to compute each town’s COAH obligation was faulty. The legislators said outdated aerial maps were used to compute each town’s obligation. They said land that could not be used for housing — such as cemeteries, highway ramps, swimming pools, empty back yards and preserved open space — was incorrectly factored into calculations of where affordable housing could be built.
“It was decided that 115,000 units were needed (statewide) by 2018 and the calculations were made so they could back into the formula. Aerial maps were used with no discernment as to the land’s use,” Casagrande said.
Resident Anthony Musich, who is an alternate member of the Manalapan Planning Board, called the new COAH mandate “social engineering.” He questioned why — since so many municipalities are opposed to the third round regulations that COAH has promulgated — there has been no legislation developed to countermand it.
“We’re on it. We’re crafting it now. We want something that is not political,” O’Scanlon said.
Casagrande, who worked as Manalapan’s township attorney in 2007, said she knew firsthand that Manalapan was “ahead of many other municipalities in developing a proposal to meet its third round COAH obligation.”
Manalapan’s first and second round COAH obligations (from 1987-99) came in at a total of 706 residential units. Round three has the number at 473 more affordable housing units, for a total of 1,179 units after three rounds. Twenty-five percent of a town’s COAH obligation can be met with age-restricted housing for people 55 and over. Worse than how the numbers were calculated, according to Casagrande, will be the application of newly developed affordable housing fees that will have to be placed into a municipal trust.
The fees are 1.5 percent of the cost to build a residential unit. According to Casagrande, a developer can avoid paying the 1.5 percent fee if he provides for affordable housing in his development at a ratio of one affordable housing unit for every five market rate units.
Commercial development would mean that 2.5 percent of the value of the commercial development would have to be paid to the municipality to help fund affordable housing obligations. According to Casagrande, if a municipality is not COAH certified, the money collected from commercial developers would be paid to the Department of the Treasury to fund COAH obligations statewide.
Failure to obtain COAH certification can make a municipality the target of developers’ lawsuits, the legislators said.
Beck said affordable housing, “in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the COAH regulations are. As COAH now sits, it is unworkable and untenable for the taxpayers of New Jersey.”
She said somewhere along the way the ideals behind COAH got misdirected.
“It was never intended for taxpayers to fund COAH. It was originally intended for the builders to fund,” the senator said.
Beck said the new statewide numbers COAH calculated for each municipality represents an $18.6 billion obligation.
“We are holding these meetings in order to educate you because this is a critical issue,” she told the audience.
Cerra said the League of Municipalities, with the support of 234 municipalities behind it, is making a court challenge to the latest COAH mandate.
“We are not opposing the idea of COAH, but the regulations they set forth. This is a bipartisan, urban and suburban concern statewide,” he said.
Chris Donnelly, a spokesman with the state Department of Community Affairs, of which COAH is one agency, told the News Transcript, “We are certainly willing to acknowledge the data (used to compute the third round obligation numbers) was not perfect. Because of that, we are allowing municipalities to come in with their own more accurate data.”
Donnelly said new information submitted by Manalapan and other towns whose maps conflict with the aerial projections, “could end up in a readjustment of their numbers.”
Mayor Michelle Roth said she was “glad to hear that COAH can admit to making a mistake.”
Roth, as mayor, sits on the Planning Board and said board members have already directed attorney Dan McCarthy and planner Rich Cramer to prepare the strategy the township will need for submission of an affordable housing plan by December.
Roth said she expects Cramer and Mc- Carthy to have a proposal for the Planning Board sometime in October, after which time board members will review the data and then formulate a proposal for the Township Committee in time to meet the December deadline.
Said Roth of the new, third round COAH numbers projected for Manalapan, “We have always done our fair share, but don’t ask us to meet others’ obligations.”
Contact Kathy Baratta at [email protected].