BY KATHY CHANG
Staff Writer
OLD BRIDGE — In response to fairness in meeting the township’s Fair Share Housing obligation, Township Attorney Mark M. Roselli retorted, “Welcome to New Jersey.”
“This started back in the 1970s,” he said. “The court ruled municipalities have a constitutional obligation to provide affordable housing. It’s not something you can ignore, not something you can put your head in the sand about. … It’s a hard pill to swallow, but again elected officials are sworn to uphold the law of New Jersey.”
In order to meet the township’s Fair Share Housing obligation, Roselli said Old Bridge officials have come to a proposed settlement plan for the township to provide 1,300 affordable housing units.
“This is a very good settlement for the township,” Roselli said, adding that the officials who worked on the settlement plan did a very good job. “It’s whether or not we control the process and do it this way or we lose control of the process and we get 10,000 houses with over 2,000 affordable housing units in the process. At the end of the day it becomes a win-win for everybody.”
The Township Council approved ordinances required for implementing the 1999 to 2025 Housing Element and Fair Share Plan at a meeting on Aug. 22. The Planning Board approved the adoption of the proposed plan at a meeting on Aug. 16.
In March 2015, through a court order on the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) debacle, municipalities were given a certain amount of time within which to come up with a housing plan and a fair share plan to meet housing obligations.
If a municipality fails to do so, Roselli said the municipality would be subject to builder remedy lawsuits.
Roselli said on Sept. 19, officials are set to appear before Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Douglas K. Wolfson and present their settlement plan. Roselli said this will be the third time they will be in court having already presented their draft plan.
The township’s obligation of 1,300 units was planned through different avenues including providing township-sponsored housing for veterans and disabled individuals.
The developers that would primarily build include AvalonBay, Alfieri, the Granite Group and Foxborough Associates.
Roselli said the township has various developers and builders, who are primarily property owners or contract property purchasers, who have intervened and showed interest in developing in Old Bridge.
“We are working with the interveners and came up with a plan to meet our housing obligation,” he said.
If not for the settlement plan, Roselli said Old Bridge’s obligation could be as high as approximately 2,100 to 2,200 affordable housing units.
“These ordinances [of these five zones] are required to be implemented to set forth a framework that developers would be able to build,” he said.
Roselli said the developments would be all inclusionary developments with the certain percentage of affordable housing.
“I can tell you that based upon the plan that we put forward, it’s a plan that will be built [over] a number of years, not all at once,” he said, which would allow the township to digest the development as it comes along.
The zones include Inclusionary Housing Zone 2 District, which contains 6.7 acres along Amboy Avenue consisting of 150 multi-family apartments of which 120 will be market-rate units.
A Mixed-Use-Inclusionary Housing Zone contains approximately 94 acres along Matawan Road.
The inclusionary development will consist of 529 multi-family apartments, of which 423 will be market-rate units, and 106 will be affordable family rentals, or 20 percent, and 15 percent of the affordable units will be very low-income affordable units.
An Inclusionary Housing Zone 1 (IH1) District, which contains approximately 96 acres along Amboy Avenue, will consist of 252 multi-family apartments of which 214 will be market-rate units and 38 will be affordable family rentals, or 15 percent, and 15 percent of the affordable units will be very low-income affordable units.
A Hospital Zone will be adjacent to the IH1 zone, which is required for part of the development of an inclusionary development.
The Mixed Use-Inclusionary Housing Center Zone, consists of approximately 342 acres along Route 9 southbound. The inclusionary development will consist of 2,148 dwelling units of which 1,718 will be market-rate units and 430 will be affordable rental units, or 20 percent. Of the 430 affordable units, 299 will be affordable family rentals and 131 affordable age-restricted rentals. Fifteen percent of the affordable units will be very low-income affordable units.
Roselli said the proposed development would have come anyway; however, this way it comes with benefits and improvements. For example, the Alfieri development will provide improvements along Matawan Road and the Garden State Parkway bridge.
“This is not a situation of [the developers] coming in doing something that they want to do,” he said. “We’ve worked with them [making] sure they work with us [and making] sure the township has been treated as fairly as possible.”
Contact Kathy Chang at [email protected].