Mount Laurel struggles with affordable housing

For Mount Laurel, the battles over affordable housing in New Jersey have come with a price.

The township where affordable-housing regulations originated has spent $250,000 on planning and legal fees as it simultaneously devises a plan for more than 1,000 low- and moderate-income homes and fights in court over having to build that many.

Municipal leaders find the expense especially troubling because it looks as if everything about affordable housing is about to change - again.

Gov. Christie has said he wants to gut the council that oversees the constitutional obligation of New Jersey's 566 towns to provide affordable housing. State lawmakers are to meet tomorrow to consider a bill that would kill it.

An appellate panel, meanwhile, is expected to decide soon a legal challenge to the state's 2008 revised rules. The New Jersey State League of Municipalities brought the suit on behalf of dozens of towns; Mount Laurel has joined it and filed an independent challenge.

Because of all the uncertainty, Mount Laurel sought to delay by a few months a Feb. 28 deadline to submit a plan for how it would provide 1,421 affordable-housing units by 2018, after failing to win court approval to reduce that figure to 226. The move for postponement was denied.

Projections by the state Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) had raised the number from the 226 units required under the agency's initial Third Round rules for municipalities in 2004.

Mayor Jim Keenan said Mount Laurel had paid to contest the rules, and draft a plan, even as employees were taking furloughs over eight months. He said the township was "wasting money to prepare a plan that we know is going to change."

"Everybody seems to agree that COAH will be and should be changed, but the cost that we as a township have incurred to follow these regulations and court orders is so exorbitant it's sickening," Keenan said.

Lawsuits against Mount Laurel contesting zoning that excluded low-income people led the New Jersey Supreme Court to decide in the 1970s and 1980s that towns have a constitutional obligation to provide affordable housing.

To enforce the decision, a 1985 law created COAH - now targeted for elimination under a bill that would put such decisions back in the hands of municipalities.

The Senate Economic Growth Committee, which heard testimony Monday, scheduled a second hearing in Trenton tomorrow.

Affordable-housing advocates have protested that the measure would further socioeconomic and racial segregation and move low- and moderate-income housing away from jobs and transit - in addition to its being unconstitutional.

Many local officials of both parties, including Keenan, say they support affordable housing but criticize COAH for being bureaucratic, wasteful, and ineffective in producing it.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D., Union), did not refer specifically to Mount Laurel, but said at last week's hearing that the system was eating up planning and legal fees for towns instead of providing affordable housing.

His proposal would allow towns to determine whether they had met their affordable-housing obligations, and would forgive towns that had not met obligations from previous rounds of COAH rulings. Towns that don't have enough such housing would need to have developers set aside 20 percent of their residential units for it.

The measure would also restore "regional contribution agreements" that were in the pipeline before legislation banned them in 2008. The agreements allowed wealthier towns to pay poorer communities to accept a transfer of their affordable-housing obligations.

In 2008, COAH issued revised Third Round rules determining the statewide need for an additional 115,000 affordable-housing units over the next decade. The rules increased the share of housing that towns needed to provide, mandating one affordable-housing unit for every five residential units and 16 jobs.

Towns were required to submit plans for meeting state-calculated projections, to the dismay of many local officials who said COAH's analysis was riddled with errors.

Christie's transition team last month issued a report calling for a 90-day freeze on COAH regulations.

Keenan, a Republican who voted for Christie, said he calls the governor's office once or twice a week to press the issue.

He implored Christie in a November letter to make reviewing COAH his first priority, saying the revised rules were based on flawed data and overburdened taxpayers. He said Mount Laurel was nearly built-out after meeting affordable-housing obligations between 1985 and 2006, which numbered 814 units.

"The urgency of this situation is no better illustrated than in Mount Laurel Township," Keenan wrote.

Citing court precedent, he said that once a property had been included in an affordable-housing plan, the zoning could not be changed without the property owners' written consent, possibly making the plan binding even if regulatory changes occurred later.

At a news conference organized by affordable-housing advocates in Trenton last week, Deitra Chamberlain talked about her experience living in COAH housing in Mount Laurel.

Calling it a safe and comfortable environment, she said, "We are able to live comfortably and experience the superior education that Mount Laurel provides."

She lives in the Ethel Lawrence development, named for the woman who helped bring the 1970s Mount Laurel suit because she wanted her children to be able to afford to live where they had grown up.

More than a generation later, even Keenan's 23-year-old son, Nicholas, can't afford to live on his own in the township where he was raised. He "crashes" with his parents in Mount Laurel.

"I know a lot of people like me," the mayor said. "We're all in the same spot with our children: They live at home or are not living around here because they can't afford to live in Mount Laurel."