Officials from more than 100 New Jersey municipalities say the state overestimated the amount of developable land in their towns by more than 14,000 acres combined — the equivalent of more than 2,800 standard New York City blocks.
The challenges threaten to set back a new push to build 84,000 low priced homes in the state over the next decade.
The state used those land estimates to help calculate how many low-priced homes each of New Jersey’s 564 municipalities is required to build under a state law passed last year. But town planners who spoke with Gothamist said the Department of Community Affairs, which was responsible for the assessments, included flood zones, municipal facilities, land already under development and preserved open space in the acreage it identified for possible affordable housing development. They questioned the accuracy of the data that the state used in its estimates and said lawmakers should have done more to specify how land capacity would be determined when they wrote the legislation.
The disagreement could lead to a significant reduction in the total number of homes built for low- and middle-income New Jerseyans. A Gothamist analysis shows that more than 120 towns are seeking to cut their requirements by a total of 11,256 affordable units, a possible 13% reduction of the state’s goal. The overall amount of land in dispute is larger than Mount Laurel, the town in South Jersey that found itself at the center of a state Supreme Court case 50 years ago that sparked the state’s affordable housing mandate known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine.
In Ocean County’s Brick Township, the state included a parcel of land used for public works and other municipal facilities as places it could build housing, according to the township’s planner, Tara Paxton.
“Our public works facility has our composting yard and actually, it’s also our police shooting range. They included that as developable,” she said.
The Department of Community Affairs declined to answer questions on the specific land capacity issues being raised by town planners. In January, spokesperson Lisa Ryan told Gothamist the agency used aerial imagery combined with data from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to remove open waters, wetlands, steep slopes and open spaces from its total calculations. She said it also used construction permit data provided by municipalities to identify building sites, but that it did not have data on land currently in the development process.
Paxton said that part of the problem was that, in some cases, the land and tax data the state used was “two years old.”
”There’s a mismatch with the best available information from their standpoint, and then ours,” she said. “We have more updated information.”
Planners Joe Burgis and David Novak said they filed 41 land capacity objections on behalf of towns in January. They questioned whether officials with the Department of Community Affairs had enough time to complete their evaluations for all 564 municipalities.
”Quite frankly, it’s almost a miracle that [the Department of Community Affairs officials] were able to get that analysis done in time. We were all placing bets on whether or not they’re going to match that deadline or not,” Novak said.
Novak blamed the state Legislature for not more rigorously evaluating the methodology used for determining land capacity when crafting the law.
“ It’s a real shame that the state did not begin working on this earlier, and think it through better,” he said.
Last week, the state Senate minority leader, Republican Sen. Anthony Bucco, told Gothamist that the land capacity dispute shows that the Garden State’s plans to develop tens of thousands of affordable homes is a “cocktail for disaster.” Democratic Assemblymember Yvonne Lopez, the housing committee chair and lead sponsor of the state’s 2024 affordable housing law, said she’s not worried it will affect the law’s implementation.
Beth McManus, another planner who works with towns around the state on affordable housing plans, said her biggest concern are the flood zones included in the calculations. In the past, she said the state has “typically excluded” those areas.
”Affordable housing sites are not intended to be located in flood hazard areas,’ she said. “I am a bit disappointed to see those lands … counted as developable.”
Paul Ricci, another New Jersey planner who works with towns, shared that disappointment.
“If I’m the town [officials] and we’re going to build affordable housing, if I encourage it to place it in the area that floods and the like, am I doing my job serving the public interest?” he said.
Adam Gordon, director of the affordable housing advocacy nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center, looked positively on the situation. Most of the more than 400 towns that have agreed to participate in the state’s affordable housing process signed off on the number of units the state assigned each municipality in the fall. He added that more towns are participating than at any point in the 50 years since court rulings established the Mount Laurel doctrine.
“We’re certainly taking a close look at all the towns that are claiming these adjustments, which again are not most towns,” he said.
The point of uncertainty that’s now vexing town planners, Novak said, is what will happen to the thousands of affordable homes that town officials are asking the state to cut from their requirements.
He and McManus said those units could be distributed to neighboring towns in the same regions in order to maintain the state’s goal of building 84,000 affordable homes. But Novak said he’s unaware of a mechanism in the legislation to do that.
”Will [the affordable units] just simply be lost? I think that’s a huge question,” McManus said.
