On affordable housing, Moorestown gives judge a number
Based on a consultant's advice, Moorestown Township has told a Superior Court judge that it believes it is legally obliged to create just 171 affordable-housing units by 2025, a fraction of the 1,313 that a court-appointed master recommended earlier this month.
Based on a consultant's advice, Moorestown Township has told a Superior Court judge that it believes it is legally obliged to create just 171 affordable-housing units by 2025, a fraction of the 1,313 that a court-appointed master recommended earlier this month.
Moorestown is a microcosm of the lively debate statewide over how best to calculate the affordable housing obligations of New Jersey's 565 municipalities.
In the absence of agreed-upon formulas, Superior Court judges are scrutinizing the widely diverging methods that municipalities and advocacy groups are proposing for meeting the state's next round of Mount Laurel obligations, so called after a series of state high court decisions.
Moorestown's 171 figure was calculated by the Philadelphia planning firm Econsult Solutions Inc., which last month published an analysis of statewide affordable-housing obligations for a consortium of 230 municipalities that included Moorestown.
"The township intends to rely upon its expert [Econsult's] report until otherwise directed by the courts," planning consultant Brian M. Slaugh wrote in a letter submitted Tuesday to Superior Court Judge Ronald E. Bookbinder in Mount Holly.
In March, the state Supreme Court instructed the 15 Superior Court vicinages to oversee implementation of the Affordable Housing Act, which obliges all New Jersey municipalities to put in place zoning regulations that allow for creation of low- and middle-income housing.
Most municipalities were told to present their plans to the courts by the end of 2015.
The high court instructed the lower courts to use the methods for calculating housing that had been in place prior to 1999, but planning consultants are far apart on how to apply those today.
The Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group challenging Moorestown's plan in court, has criticized Econsult's calculation as "a series of gimmicks" designed to keep affordable housing to a minimum, and called Moorestown's draft plan "illegal."
Similarly, Mike Cerra, assistant executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities, which advocates a cautious approach to mandated affordable housing, calls Fair Share's housing calculations "pie in the sky" and its methodologies "thoroughly discredited."
The debate over Moorestown's obligation is proving lively, too.
In November, Slaugh, a planner for the Trenton planning and architecture firm Clarke Caton Hintz, submitted Moorestown's affordable-housing plan to Bookbinder.
This month, the master appointed by Bookbinder to review Moorestown's draft plan told the judge there were "flaws" in the way Slaugh calculated the township's obligation last fall.
His estimate - 386 units (later 406) - was more than double the one Econsult subsequently arrived at.
In her Jan. 3 letter to Bookbinder, master Elizabeth McKenzie, a planner based in Flemington, N.J., also challenged Moorestown's claim that it has little land available for affordable housing, saying it ignored or excluded many possible parcels.
"The responsibility of the township in undertaking a vacant land use analysis is to identify how it can, not how it cannot, accommodate its fair share obligation," she wrote.
She recommended to Bookbinder that he instruct Moorestown to submit a revised plan by Feb. 15.
A hearing scheduled for Wednesday to review McKenzie's report and Moorestown's response was postponed, however.
Bookbinder was also expected to decide at the hearing if there was merit to Fair Share's contention that Moorestown was violating the civil rights of low- and middle-income families by failing to provide them housing opportunities. If so, he was expected to set a date for a trial on the matter.
In this week's response to McKenzie, Slaugh challenged several of her data analysis methods. These included her formula for computing the township's housing obligation.
Calling it a "scheme" devised by a developer (who is seeking to build local low-income housing), Slaugh said McKenzie's formula "may have the hallmark of simplicity" but ignores decades of changes in regional population growth, household incomes, quality of housing stock, and other metrics.
"We respectfully request that the court not countenance such an approach to determining Moorestown's affordable housing obligation," Slaugh said in his 11-page letter.
And because Econsult had recently calculated its obligation at just 171 units, he told Bookbinder that "the township is no longer in need of a vacant land adjustment" that would be needed for a larger number.
Slaugh nevertheless acknowledged that those numbers and assertions might change.
The chasm separating Fair Share's and Econsult's numbers "points to the critical need" to determine which "most clearly reflects the dictates of the Fair Housing Act" and the Supreme Court's intentions, he wrote to Bookbinder, "or there is yet another methodology that will pass court challenges and constitutional muster."
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