Affordable-housing changes pushed in New Jersey

TRENTON - A plan to eliminate the state Council on Affordable Housing and put towns in charge of their own housing obligations is necessary to streamline an unwieldy bureaucracy, supporters said yesterday.

But as a Senate committee began hearing testimony on the proposal, opponents said it would deliver a serious setback to efforts to increase the number of affordable homes in New Jersey.

The housing bill, which drew a large crowd to a hearing yesterday, would move many of the council's powers to the state Planning Commission.

"So much money goes down the drain in terms of all these planning mechanisms that's not going into affordable housing," said Sen. Ray Lesniak (D., Union), who sponsored the bill with Sen. Christopher "Kip" Bateman (R., Somerset).

The Senate Economic Growth Committee took no action yesterday and will hear more testimony Monday.

Calling the proposal a work in progress, Lesniak, the committee's chairman, said the current system is overly bureaucratic and took control from towns while sucking up municipal tax dollars in planning and legal fees to comply with the rules of the council (COAH).

Affordable-housing activists held a news conference before the hearing to say the measure would roll back New Jersey's affordable-housing policies by 35 years and exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.

The council was created under the Fair Housing Act of 1985, after state Supreme Court rulings that each of New Jersey's 566 municipalities has a constitutional obligation to provide a "fair share" of the region's need for low- and moderate-income housing.

A 2008 revision to COAH's Third Round rules established a need for an additional 115,000 affordable housing units to be built in New Jersey by 2018 and increased the ratio of how many such units need to be built for every market-rate unit and new job created.

Towns, which were required to submit plans on how they would comply with the increased obligations, widely contested the state's accuracy in calculating the number of affordable housing units for which they were responsible. Dozens joined the New Jersey League of Municipalities in a still-unresolved legal challenge to the rules.

The bill being discussed states that the commission could not require municipalities to provide a specific number of units as determined by the commission.

Instead, it would say towns may review their master plans and adopt ordinances that determine that they have complied with their obligations under the Fair Housing Act. The bill would be amended to more clearly define those standards.

Communities that do not approve such an ordinance would adopt a zoning measure requiring developers to set aside 20 percent of proposed residential units for low- and moderate-income households, the bill states.

Lesniak said that under the bill, every municipality would know whether it had sufficient affordable housing, and developers could build in those that did not.

"This bill allows the marketplace to work," he said.

The bill also would allow the restoration of certain Regional Contribution Agreements (RCAs), which had allowed wealthier towns to pay poorer communities so they could transfer their affordable-housing obligations.

The bill would allow the Planning Commission to approve by the end of 2011 RCAs that were formed before a 2008 law prohibiting them took effect. Lawmakers said that would allow the building of as many as 5,000 units and the transfer of up to $116 million to urban areas.

Mayors from the League of Municipalities testified in support of the proposal.

Marlboro Mayor Jonathan Hornik offered his town - a suburb of 40,000 people in Monmouth County - as a case study of why COAH "is an absolute disaster."

He said COAH required his town to build 1,673 new affordable units, which would mean an additional 8,000 homes and an increase in population to 70,000.

"Our town is 85 percent built-out. . . . These inaccurate projections convinced me the system needed to be fixed," Hornik said.

At the same time, he pointed out, Marlboro had an RCA to pay for affordable housing developments in Trenton.

Nicole Plett, a member of the New Jersey Regional Coalition, spoke out against such agreements, saying they concentrate poverty in cities such as Trenton, Perth Amboy, and Camden, and continue to make New Jersey one of the most economically and racially segregated states.

Tim Doherty, a member of COAH and executive director of Project Freedom, a nonprofit that develops housing for the disabled, raised concerns at the hearing about how affordable-housing requirements could be enforced without an agency such COAH.

"Does anybody really agree that the towns are going to do that?" said Doherty, who predicted litigation across the board if the measure was passed into law.

Affordable-housing activists who had prepared lengthy speeches were cut short at the end of the 11/2-hour hearing, when Lesniak noted they would have an opportunity to testify again and urged prospective speakers to submit written testimony.

"The bottom line is that we believe . . . [this bill] moves us backward, not forward, and we want to work with you all to move New Jersey in the right direction," said Staci Berger, director of policy and advocacy for the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey.

"We recognize that changes are needed to the COAH process, but what's really broken in this state isn't housing, but the fact that we aren't planning for our future, to link homes, jobs, transportation, and environmental protection in a way that gets us sound, sustainable growth," Berger said in a statement.

Gov. Christie has said he wants to "gut" COAH, and the proposed legislation bears some similarities to recommendations made in a report last month by his transition team.

Under "recommendations for immediate action," the report also calls for a 90-day freeze on new regulations, certifications, and pending mediations by the council.