Ram new NJ affordable housing plan through lame duck session? Not so fast

A plan to create a new process for New Jersey towns to determine their affordable housing obligations will be tackled during the next legislative session that begins Tuesday, according to the Senate bill sponsor, as opposed to ramming the plan through in the final days of the lame duck period as originally intended.

“It’s not ready,” state Sen. Troy Singleton, D-Burlington and the bill's sponsor, told NorthJersey.com. “You’ll see it the very first meeting that I have” next session.

It’s a shift from the rapid schedule lawmakers forecast when they introduced the bill, A4/S4251, during a press conference in mid-December.

At the time, Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, D-Middlesex, told reporters, “If we can get it done in lame duck, I would get it done in lame duck, because I want to make sure that the municipalities and everyone has a chance to start to work on its process.”

Gov. Phil Murphy was also “hopeful that a final version can be enacted into law before the end of the current legislative session,” his deputy press secretary had said in December.

Days after the bill was introduced, Senate President Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, appeared to consider slowing down the process after hearing from local officials.

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“I think part of it is that they just don’t know what we’re doing, so that might be reason to slow that down to give them a comfort level as to what we’re doing and to give me a comfort level as to what we’re doing,” Scutari said.

New formula to determine affordable units

Under the 70-page bill, towns would follow a formula to determine how many affordable units they would need to zone for, based on a previous court ruling by state Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson in Mercer County.

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Towns would be subject to deadlines throughout 2025 and 2026 that they must hit to create housing plans, change ordinances and hear challenges to the plans in order to be protected from lawsuits brought by developers in the fourth round of housing obligations, which begins July 1, 2025, and lasts 10 years.

The Mount Laurel Doctrine — created by a series of significant state Supreme Court cases beginning in 1975 — said municipalities must zone for and provide a “fair share” of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families, which typically means that a household would spend no more than a third of its monthly paycheck on housing expenses.

In response, the Legislature had created the Council on Affordable Housing. Under that system, if towns submitted affordable housing plans to the council and the council approved them, the towns would be protected for a period of time from builder’s remedy lawsuits, through which a developer can avoid the municipal approval process and build a project with as many market-rate units as it would like as long as at least 20% of the units are affordable.

The council approved plans for two “rounds” of housing obligations through 1999, but it failed for 16 years afterwards to adopt updated affordable housing quotas and rules to cover a third round, stalling construction on affordable units for decades.

In March 2015, the New Jersey Supreme Court said the council was “moribund” and non-functioning, bringing the process into Superior Court, where municipalities negotiate settlements with the nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center.

The new bill would officially abolish the council.

Housing advocates voice support

The Assembly's housing committee heard testimony on the bill during the current lame duck session in December, less than two days after the bill was available to the public. The Assembly Appropriations committee was scheduled to discuss the bill on Thursday, but pulled it from the schedule around 9:30 p.m.

The Senate referred the bill to the Community and Urban Affairs committee, which did not consider it during its last meeting of the session on Thursday.

During the Housing committee hearing, affordable housing advocates and developers largely supported the proposal revamping how towns calculate their constitutionally mandated quota in a state that lacks roughly a quarter of a million affordable homes.

More: Affordable housing quotas may get a sweeping overhaul. How it could impact your town

Citizens, local officials and attorneys representing towns outlined provisions they disliked and asked for more time to examine changes that would have wide-reaching impacts on how towns would grow.

“The families that live in affordable developments in their towns have seen increases in wages, better physical and mental health outcomes and increased college attendance, all while the surrounding residents continue to experience stable taxes, low crime rates, and high property values,” said Frank Argote-Freyre, board chair of the Fair Share Housing Center. “This is a dream we can all live together.”

“It strikes me that as state government, there are times when we you have to make decisions that are for the greater good of the people, despite the challenges that it might pose for municipal local governments,” said Taiisa Kelly, CEO of Monarch Housing Associates, which oversees the statewide annual count of New Jerseyans experiencing homelessness.

“Because at the end of the day, we want to ensure that every citizen in New Jersey has access to the stable housing that they need to thrive.”

Bill has critics

Bill Caruso, legislative counsel for the New Jersey Conference of Mayors, said the bill was unclear about how the $16 million appropriation would be doled out to localities to help support growing infrastructure that is required alongside more housing.

“Transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, water and sewer, these are paramount concerns,” Caruso said. “These don't just fall out of the sky as Christmas miracles, they have to be dealt with. They have real impacts on local governments.”

Jeff Kolakowski, CEO of the New Jersey Builders Association, disliked the “continued reliance on bonus credits,” saying “those individuals that need that assistance, they don’t disappear, the municipal obligation does.”

If towns zone for specific types of housing like age-restricted, homes for severely-low income families, homes for people with developmental disabilities, transitional housing, and homes located near transit, they would receive an extra half credit bonus for each unit.

New Jersey should use bonus credits in an “environmentally responsible way” to “incentivize smart growth, transit-oriented development and redevelopment focused in particular on stranded assets such as underutilized shopping centers, and obsolete office parks,” said Mia Sacks, Princeton’s council president who was responsible for overseeing the implementation of Princeton’s fair share plan.

She said she supported the goals and structure of the bill, and believes the methodology offers "greater clarify and predictability" to localities — she is "acutely familiar" with the formula as the opinion by Judge Jacobson was written to apply to Princeton and West Windsor, and requiring at the time that Princeton needed to zone for 753 new affordable units.

But the bill requires “critical modifications,” Sacks said.

The Legislature should also provide proper financial support to go along with increased school enrollments “so that municipal and school district officials are not pitted against one another,” she said.

Jeffrey Surenian of Surenian, Edwards, Buzak & Nolan LLC, who represents municipalities across the state, said that the goal of the Fair Housing Act of 1985 was to “incentivize voluntary municipal compliance … and the vehicle that they created to create that incentive was the judgment of repose.”

“The Legislature recognized the wisdom of that and created a presumption that you are compliant, that can only be overcome with very heavy proofs,” Surenian said. “All that is lost, substantially diluted with the language in the bill. This bill has an exemption as wide as the Empire State Building. That exception makes the judgment of repose very, really diminished.”

The bill has “hair trigger standards sprinkled throughout when we can lose immunity,” added Michael Edwards, of the same firm.

Jacqueline Hindle, chair of the planning board in Readington, said the bill "does not truly get the township a seat at the table."

"We are a relatively rural, quiet community," Hindle said. "We have more horse farms than any other municipality in the state. We boast a buffalo farm. We pride ourselves on our green space and open space.

"Most of our homes run on private wells and septic systems," Hindle said. "We are not a hub to any major metropolis and have limited access to public transportation. And yet round three affordable housing court mandate far exceeds other similar municipalities.”

Readington was one of more than a dozen municipalities that sued Murphy in September 2022, alleging he violated the Fair Housing Act and demanded the administration bring back the Council on Affordable Housing.

Staff writer Katie Sobko contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: New NJ affordable housing plan must wait for next session