Just about everyone has a horror story or two to tell about how some government program, enacted with the best of intentions, ended up helping practically no one — and having all sorts of unintended consequences along the way.
This pretty much sums up New Jersey’s efforts over the past three decades to break down the barriers of exclusionary zoning and provide affordable housing for people of limited means.
What began, following the landmark Mount Laurel rulings by the New Jersey Supreme Court, as an initiative to construct low- and moderate-income housing in the state’s growing suburbs has morphed over the years into a mind-numbing bureaucratic numbers game administered by the Council on Affordable Housing.
And it has turned the council’s acronym — COAH — into a reviled four-letter word among municipal officials all across the state.
Actually, it isn’t all COAH’s fault. Much of the blame lies with the Legislature, which allowed a series of deadlines to pass without doing what the Supreme Court said needed to be done to spur the construction of affordable housing in the suburbs. This led the court to institute the so-called “builder’s remedy,” granting developers the right to construct one low- or moderate-income unit for every four market-rate units permitted under local zoning.
While the builder’s remedy pitted developers against the towns in which they were building — an unhealthy situation at best — the introduction some years later of “Regional Contribution Agreements” gave the towns an opportunity to buy their way out of their affordable-housing obligations by paying nearby cities to host this housing instead. So dozens of suburban communities simply paid places like Trenton and Newark, which already house a disproportionate share of low- and moderate-income residents, to build even more of the very type of housing the Mount Laurel rulings said the suburbs were obligated to provide.
COAH has recently complicated matters greatly by proposing to calculate each municipality’s fair share of affordable housing based on the square footage of new construction already permitted, as well as the amount anticipated through 2018. The rationale for this calculation is that new construction creates jobs — and the people who will perform these jobs need a place to live — so the formula applies to non-residential and residential construction alike.
The outcry over this new formula (and an appellate court review that found it was not based on good, verifiable data) sent COAH back to the drawing board, where it is now contemplating revisions. But lost in all this numbers-crunching, just as it has been ignored for most of the past three decades, is the original purpose and intent of the Mount Laurel rulings.
Mount Laurel wasn’t meant to pit builders against towns. Nor was it meant to provide more low- and moderate-income housing in cities. And it certainly wasn’t meant to inspire bureaucrats to devise housing quotas based on square footage of residential and non-residential new construction. It was intended, very simply, to outlaw exclusionary zoning that denied people of limited means an opportunity to move into communities of their own choosing.
The appropriate solution to this problem is, and always has been, for municipalities to adopt zoning ordinances that allow for construction of affordable housing. If the courts, the Legislature and COAH would focus on this remedy, instead of building a bureaucratic superstructure filled with convoluted rules and regulations, maybe New Jersey would actually build housing filled by people who need it.
