Page 25 - RE-NJ Nov.2021 #59
P. 25
Still, housing production remains
a challenge across the state. Adam Gordon,
executive
director of
the Fair Share
Housing Center,
noted that
New Jersey
is still vastly
undersupplied
after the so-
called gap period starting in 1999, in which the state Council on Affordable Housing failed to produce guidelines for local governments. That changed in 2015, when the state Supreme Court took over the process and ordered municipal officials, housing advocates and developers to work together on crafting and implementing affordable housing plans.
The good news, Gordon said, is that New Jersey in 2019 issued twice as many multifamily building permits as it did in 2015. That number is on pace to grow further in 2021, thanks in large part to the plans that resulted from the Supreme Court’s intervention.
“It’s not perfect, but it’s a functional system around Mount Laurel again and that is driving a lot more development in towns that historically resisted it,” Gordon said, referring to the landmark fair housing case in 1975, that involved the Burlington County township.
He noted that affordable housing policy in New Jersey was ensnared
in litigation during the gap years, but is now “digging out of a huge hole” with the support of Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration and local leaders in many communities.
South Orange Village President Sheena Collum noted that her community, where the average annual household income is around $150,000, remained
a top 10 housing market even through the pandemic. But she said that reflects a lack of supply and the fact that, “as
a first-ring suburb, we are not owning our fair share of additional market and affordable housing.”
Collum sought to address the issue after being elected to her first term, in 2015, by establishing a rehabilitation designation across the entire municipality. That allowed the village to capture the tools available under state redevelopment law, such as tax abatements that could help subsidize affordable and inclusionary housing projects, allowing it to “focus on a scalpel approach to our outcomes.”
“It has been nothing but wildly successful,” said Collum, who is
also the executive director of the American Planning Association’s New Jersey chapter. “So terms like ‘blight’ scare communities like mine from doing the designations to get to the tools necessary to start building and constructing affordable housing.”
She said the village has also increased allowable building heights and
dwelling units per acre, while working proactively with the Fair Share Housing Center to expand capacity for lower- income units.
“Elected officials who want to construct affordable housing, they can do it,” Collum said. “Anything else is nothing but excuses.”
NJBA President Josh Mann, who moderated the panel discussion, noted that Collum won re-election in 2019 with 76 percent of the vote.
“If you’re wondering that this message doesn’t fly in New Jersey, it does,” said Mann, co-founder and co-managing partner of Iron Ore Properties.
“And I think what you’re also seeing is ... there’s finally
worst thing is calling it a ‘payment in lieu of taxes’ because we get raked over the coals at the local level, with people telling us that we’re giving developers giveaways.”
Builders and local leaders have also grappled with a proposed major change to the state’s long-term tax exemption law, under a bill that would impose a so-called prevailing wage requirement on projects that receive PILOTs. The legislation, which cleared an Assembly committee early this year, would raise wages to put them on par with the rates paid to contractors in public-sector projects.
Doing so could more than double the hourly rates for
construction
workers,
NJBA event, to consider the impact it would have on housing production “without figuring out where that gap financing is going to be.”
Singleton cautioned that “there are thousands of bills that get introduced and a very finite number of them become law — and this one is several steps away, if ever, from becoming law.” He also said lawmakers continue to have conversations with local officials, builders and other stakeholders about how to fill that gap if such a bill were to be enacted.
“There is no final decision on any piece or proposal we’re doing,” said Singleton, a Burlington County Democrat.
Baraka said it was critical to address that uncertainty before it’s too late.
“We agree that people should be making prevailing wage, but we have to build more affordable units at the same time,” he said. “So we have to figure out a way to make that not be a collision course, because right now it’s a collision course that’s going to prevent us from doing a lot of work.” RE
Troy Singleton
REALESTATENJTM 23
Adam Gordon
Collum argued,
making it all but
impossible to
do projects that
seek to provide
affordable
housing and
achieve other policy goals. She then asked state Sen. Troy Singleton, a key sponsor of the bill and a panelist at the
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an understanding (that) we don’t want to be California,” he said, referring
to the Golden State’s dire housing shortage. “We’ve seen the
problems that California has. From a human perspective, it’s depressing to see what happens. We have the ability to avoid that, and the consensus and the understanding that we have to build all types of housing across the economic spectrum is important.”
Local resistance is not the only challenge to building affordable housing, panelists said at the Oct. 13 event. They also pointed to the added costs of complying with or trying to achieve other public policy goals, such as environmental remediation, climate resilience and infrastructure upgrades.
Collum said that makes tools such as payments in lieu of taxes agreements, or PILOTs, all the more “essential
to project viability” — despite the backlash from some residents.
“We can dream, we can plan, we can have these aspirational ideas, but if the money does not work, the money does not work,” she said. “And perhaps the
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