By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
Profoundly distressing, frustrating, burdensome and outrageous are the words municipal officials from Montgomery, Plainsboro, Rocky Hill and West Windsor have used to describe the state Council on Affordable Housing’s recently revised third round rules.
The officials said they are most concerned about the new ratios of affordable housing units to residential units and affordable housing units to jobs being required, the household growth estimates municipalities are being required to plan for when preparing their affordable housing plans and increases in the costs of regional contribution agreements, which allow municipalities to pay other municipalities to help meet their COAH obligations.
Under the revised COAH regulations which were proposed Dec. 17, municipalities would be required to build one affordable housing unit for every five residential units built, an increase in affordable units from the previous ratio of one to nine. The affordable housing units built to jobs created ratios would also increase, with a ratio of one to 16 being proposed, versus the previous one to 25 ratio.
The regulations also declare a new state affordable housing need of 115,000 units, up from 52,000 units, assigning specific numbers of households to be built and jobs to be created in each municipality between 2004 and 2018.
COAH’s growth projections for all housing units — affordable and market rate — between 2004 and 2018 for Montgomery are 1,931, for Plainsboro 1,493, for West Windsor 1,522, for Rocky Hill 23, for Princeton Township 1,003 and for Princeton Borough a negative 157. While COAH isn’t mandating building the specific numbers of housing units projected, it is requiring municipalities to submit plans based on these increases or decreases in housing units. Only if municipalities participating in COAH are able to prove that they lack the amount of developable land required to meet COAH’s household and employment growth estimates will they be allowed to seek adjustments to COAH’s planning targets.
For some municipalities, the cost of establishing a regional contribution agreement with another municipality will more than double if the new COAH regulations become law. While all of the state’s municipalities currently pay $35,000 per every affordable housing unit they transfer to another municipality, the new regulations would bring the cost up to anywhere between $67,000 and $80,000 per unit, depending on the region a municipality has been assigned.
For Princeton Borough, Princeton Township and West Windsor, the cost per unit would double and for Montgomery, Rocky Hill and Plainsboro the price would increase to $67,000 per unit. As with the existing COAH regulations, a municipality would be allowed to transfer up to 50 percent of its affordable housing obligations to other municipalities within its region.
Lucy Voorhoeve, executive director of COAH, said COAH’s job and housing projections have been derived from the Department of Labor’s records and a vacant land analysis conducted by the National Center for Neighborhood and Brownfields Redevelopment of Rutgers University. While the vacant land analysis, which was conducted in 2002, takes into account preserved land, state Department of Environmental Protection regulations and existing buildings, it does not consider zoning.
Lee Solow, planning director of the Regional Planning Board of Princeton, declined to comment on the regulations, saying that officials from both municipalities were still trying to understand them.
COAH expects approximately 555 new affordable housing units to be completed in Montgomery between 2004 and 2018, bringing the total number of housing units in Montgomery to 9,260. The number of jobs COAH expects to have been created in Montgomery between 2004 and 2018 is 2,712. Montgomery Township Committeewoman Louise Wilson said COAH’s population projections and commercial growth projections are “way too high” for Montgomery, adding that they fail to consider features about the town that impact development, as well as Montgomery, Somerset County and the state’s plans.
”The mandate for new housing in Montgomery is completely inconsistent with our own township’s Master Plan, the county plan and the State Development and Redevelopment Plan,” Ms. Wilson said. “To disregard the planning areas, to disregard a town’s own Master Plan, to disregard road capacity and sewer capacity and availability of public transit and environmental constraints, it’s just nuts. It doesn’t make sense.”
Ms. Wilson said another issue she has with the numbers of housing units and jobs COAH would require Montgomery to plan for is that they are based on the assumption that the township wants to continue to grow in the same way and at the same pace it has grown over the past 15 years.
”If a town has tried to change course like we have, it blows those efforts totally out of the water,” Ms. Wilson said. “We already have a lot of traffic and very limited sewer capacity, and we’ve built as many schools as we can afford to build.
”The prospect of being forced by the state to add thousands of dwelling units and add thousands more people is really profoundly distressing,” she added. “The state has no place forcing development down anyone’s throat and that is effectively what these rules are doing.”
The economic impact of building the number of affordable housing units COAH is expecting municipalities to complete by 2018 is a concern of Montgomery, West Windsor and Plainsboro officials.
West Windsor Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh said the new obligations for building affordable housing will make it more difficult for the township to work with developers and will place additional tax burdens on West Windsor’s residents.
”The system has got to allow the township to be able to work with the developers,” Mayor Hsueh said. “To do this right is particularly important in West Windsor, since building any kind of housing units here is already expensive, because the property values are so high.”
While Plainsboro officials are still trying to interpret all the details of the rules, what they have been able to determine is that the revised third-round regulations will place a burden on residents.
”We’re being required to provide basically more than double the housing with the rules and to figure out a way to pay for it,” said Plainsboro Mayor Peter Cantu. “You can’t develop affordable housing economically. It has to be subsidized in some way.”
Steve Sacks-Wilner, chairman of Montgomery’s Planning Board, described the new COAH regulations as a recipe for economic problems in Montgomery and throughout the state.
”If you build units, you have to build a new school and taxes are going to go up,” Mr. Sacks-Wilner said.
He added that the new regulations would prevent the middle class from being able to buy new homes in New Jersey because they would force developers to choose to build fewer houses for the wealthy rather than more houses for the middle class to avoid having to build as many affordable housing units.
”Builders are going to have to build McMansions in order to satisfy their COAH regulations.” Mr. Sacks-Wilner said.
Montgomery officials are also unhappy about the increased costs of purchasing regional contribution agreements.
”The RCA’s have been priced so high that COAH has practically made them impossible to purchase,” Mr. Sacks-Wilner said.
The new prices are also likely to prevent Rocky Hill from purchasing regional contribution agreements, according to Rocky Hill Mayor Ed Zimmerman.
He added that Rocky Hill has very little space in the town available for development.
”Unless we can meet our affordable housing requirements through doing rehabilitation of affordable units, building more group homes and increasing the number of accessory apartments available for rent, it’s going to be tough to meet our obligation,” Mayor Zimmerman said.
New Jersey residents have until March 22 to submit written comments on the revised third-round regulations to COAH. Five public hearings on the regulations were offered in January and earlier this month. Ms. Voorhoeve will speak during an information forum on the rules that will be offered 7 p.m. Thursday at the Somerset County Administration Building, located at 20 Grove St. in Somerville.
