Paul Mulshine on "Unaffordable, Unfathomable Housing Plan"

Posted on 04 July 2008

“Each town’s COAH committee has a dozen or so members, so when you multiply that by the 566 towns in New Jersey, you get … lemme get out my calculator. Oh yeah, you get an incalculable waste of time and money.”

No doubt. You really do need to read the whole thing.

And when you’re done, thinking to yourself that it can’t possibly be as bad as all that, go pull your copy of The Soprano State off of your bookshelf and read the section on the Mount Laurel Doctrine, which deals with affordable housing. In just a few pages, it shows how much worse it is than you think. Here, for instance:

The court gave developers the “builders’ remedy,” which says a builder can bring suit if it thinks zoning allows too few units on a parcel of land. If zoning only allows four houses per acre, for instance, the builder can bring suit for, say, twenty units per acre — allegedly so that it can build affordable housing. This usually involves condos and apartments since builders wouldn’t want affordable housing among their high-priced McMansions. Usually the threat of a suit is all it takes for a town to modify its zoning. If the issue never makes it to court, there is no order forcing the builder to provide any affordable housing although he does get the more dense zoning, which can be used solely for market-rate housing.

Follow that? The threat of a lawsuit gives builders the ability to quintuple the number of units on a parcel of land without actually providing the affordable housing that the denser zoning is supposed to enable. And the town residents’ desires be damned.


Category: NJ Business, New Jersey Corruption, local government

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