Morality, money, protecting water among forum topics
By John Tredrea, Staff Writer
Morality, money, protecting our water and how strong a grip the state Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) has on reality were among the dominant issues discussed at the Jan. 29 Hopewell Valley League of Voters’ forum on COAH.
The event was held in the auditorium of Hopewell Valley Central High School. About 50 area residents and officials attended.
The league had four speakers on hand for the event: the Rev. Charles Stephens of the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing Road in Hopewell Township; planner Phil Caton of the Ewing-based planning firm of Clarke, Caton and Hintz; Hopewell Township Committeeman David Sandahl; and Jim Waldman, executive director of the Stony Brook- Millstone Watershed Association.
The Rev. Stephens has been working for several years to make the state more proactive on providing affordable housing. He noted that, while New Jersey has the highest median income and the highest per-pupil public school expenditure rate in the nation, “there are concentrations of poverty in our state.
”Unquestionably, affordable housing is unevenly distributed in our New Jersey communities,” he said.
He noted that median house price in Hopewell Township is $350,000, while “more than three-quarters of the jobs coming to Mercer County will pay an estimated $72,000 per year or less . . . Where are our starter houses? Where do we want our children to live when they’ve grown? In our basements?”
The minister said regional planning and the collection of property taxes on a regional, rather than a municipal basis could produce affordable housing at a faster rate, and in ways that would minimize opposition to that housing.
Mr. Caton noted affordable housing laws thus far have produced 58,000 new affordable units and 22,000 rehabilitated affordable units in New Jersey.
”That’s a significant achievement,” he said. “The challenge is to find more fiscally and economically sound ways to produce that housing.”
Mr. Sandahl has long maintained that current COAH regulations put demands on municipalities that are very unrealistic, particularly from a fiscal standpoint.
”I don’t believe we’ll see the kind of growth called for” by the COAH regulations, he said. “But we have planned for what’s required” by COAH.
All three Valley municipalities sent to COAH, before the Dec. 31 deadline, affordable housing plans for 2008-2018. The township’s plan calls for over 400 units. The plans from Pennington and Hopewell Borough, which unlike the township have almost no developable land, are on a much smaller scale.
Mr. Caton said towns cannot simply ignore COAH requirements, no matter how unrealistic those requirements may seem. “There’s a constitutional mandate” for communities to provide their “fair share” of affordable housing, he said. This stems from the landmark 1975 Mount Laurel court case, upheld by the state Supreme Court eight years later. Two years after that, the state Legislature passed the Fair Housing Act and established COAH.
The genesis of this sequence of judicial and legislative events was a 1971 lawsuit filed against Mount Laurel Township, in Burlington County, by the Southern Burlington County NAACP. That lawsuit termed Mount Laurel’s zoning “exclusionary.”
Mr. Sandahl said the worldwide economic crisis, in general, and the mortgage crisis in New Jersey (along with the rest of the country), in particular, are factors that must be considered when pondering whether the amount of development COAH wants is feasible.
Mr. Sandahl, an economist with a master’s degree from Yale University, said, “Between 1997 and 2007, housing prices more than doubled in the U.S. They rose far faster than wages. New Jersey and Florida have two of the highest percentages of delinquent subprime mortgages” in the country.
Mr. Waldman said “very few, if any, more important issues than affordable housing are facing New Jersey.” He said the Watershed is a “a strong supporter of affordable housing. The question is how we provide the amount of it, and the distribution of it, that will not harm our environment excessively. Too many of my staff have trouble finding affordable housing in our area, so I know firsthand the problem we face.”
He said there is “a disconnect” between COAH rules and state planning guidelines, particularly those that deal with water quality.