In Brief:
New Jersey cities are building more multifamily and low-income housing than they have in years, thanks largely to renewed enforcement of a court decision that dates back half a century.
But the rule — which requires cities to plan for additional housing, similar to legislative efforts to expand housing options in other states — still faces stiff resistance in some areas. Nine municipalities in the state filed a joint lawsuit last week seeking to overturn a state law codifying parts of the ruling.
Known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine, the ruling requires every municipality to contribute its “fair share” of housing units to meet regional needs. The doctrine has been in place since the 1970s, when the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against exclusionary local zoning rules in a case brought by a local chapter of the NAACP. Under the court’s direction, cities are required to zone for a certain amount of multifamily housing, including subsidized units for low-income families, based on calculations of regional population growth and housing needs.
Some towns have sought to avoid compliance with the rules, and enforcement has been complicated for years. In 2015, the state Supreme Court took over enforcement of the rule, after years of non-enforcement by a state agency called the Council on Affordable Housing. Since that time, more communities have voluntarily complied with the rule, and they have produced more multifamily and low-income housing as a result, according to the Fair Share Housing Center, a New Jersey advocacy group.
“The thing that New Jersey has that other states haven’t been able to develop quite as nicely is a serious requirement for compliance,” says Josh Bauers, a lawyer with the Fair Share Housing Center.
The New Jersey Legislature passed a bill earlier this year that was meant to codify the Supreme Court’s methodology for counting each municipality’s fair share obligation. That methodology has survived previous litigation from local governments, and the Legislature passed the law to streamline the process for calculating obligations in future years. But the nine towns are challenging the law and the underlying housing mandates it imposes, arguing that the law goes beyond the original Mount Laurel Doctrine.
While the details of the law and the legal history of the case are unique to New Jersey, the tension around housing goals between state and local governments is not. Localities typically control their own land use rules, and researchers increasingly blame overly restrictive local zoning for a range of problems, including racial segregation and an overall lack of affordable housing supply.
States are increasingly stepping in with efforts to push cities to loosen their rules. California lawmakers, for example, have been gradually passing bills for years that create incentives and requirements for more housing production. Cities there are required under state law to create housing plans outlining their contribution to regional housing needs, and also to update their zoning codes to permit more housing in accordance with those plans. Massachusetts cities are required to create Housing Production Plans outlining their strategies for increasing affordable housing supply.
But fights over local control of zoning regularly wind up in court, and derail state leaders’ housing ambitions. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul backed a plan last year to build thousands of new housing units in part by mandating local production goals, but it fell apart amid opposition from local leaders.
New Jersey’s practice of requiring local contributions to regional housing needs is uniquely rooted in a court doctrine.
“We have an obligation to do it,” says state Sen. Troy Singleton, who sponsored the law codifying the court methodology this year. “It’s not something that I made up.”
New Jersey cities are building deed-restricted affordable housing at a much higher annual rate since 2015 than in the few decades prior, according to the Fair Share Housing Center. And more than 80 percent of all the multifamily housing units built in the last decade have been built in accordance with Mount Laurel obligations, according to the center.
“We really are at the height of municipal compliance today,” Bauers says.
The demographics of the nine cities that are suing over the recent state law differ from the state in significant ways, according to Tim Evans, director of research at New Jersey Future, a “smart growth” advocacy group. Median household income across the nine towns is more than $160,000, as opposed to a statewide median of about $97,000, Evans says. The plaintiff communities also have substantially higher percentages of white residents and single-family homes than communities around the state, he says.
Michael Ghassali, the mayor of Montvale, N.J., and a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for an interview. State lawmakers and advocates say court fights are inevitable, as some cities will want to avoid any housing requirements imposed on them by courts or the state. But they’re confident they have the legal footing to defend the rules.
“The number of towns that put up this kind of resistance has been decreasing as more and more of them accept that this requirement is not going away and it is going to be enforced,” Evans says.
