TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie today recommended eliminating the Council on Affordable Housing and repealing the Fair Housing Act, the agency and law that largely guided housing development across New Jersey for the past 25 years. Describing the changes as a shift from state to local control, the Republican governor endorsed a system in which towns — rather than...
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Gov. Chris Christie holds a news conference on affordable housing addressing his plans for COAH -- the state agency that decides towns' affordable housing obligations. Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, left, and Lori Grifa, Acting Commissioner, New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA) , right, listen.
TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie today recommended eliminating the Council on Affordable Housing and repealing the Fair Housing Act, the agency and law that largely guided housing development across New Jersey for the past 25 years.
Describing the changes as a shift from state to local control, the Republican governor endorsed a system in which towns — rather than the state — would determine how much low- and moderate-income housing they need. The plan, which needs legislative approval, would require future projects to either include affordable housing or require developers to pay into a fund to build affordable housing elsewhere.
"This is about getting Trenton the hell out of the business of telling people how many units they’re supposed to have — some arbitrary, ridiculous formula that nobody could ever explain," Christie said. "We need to lift that wet blanket off of the municipalities and put the people who were elected back in control of making these decisions. And I believe that they’ll approach that in a fair and responsible way after having been put upon for so long with controls — undue controls — from Trenton."
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Advocates said the move would return the state to practices that occurred before the state Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel decisions, so named for the township that was sued for its zoning policy. The courts said a town’s poor residents needed a "realistic opportunity" to live in an affordable home, and towns needed to also take surrounding towns’ needs into consideration. The decisions sparked a generation of lawsuits.
"The reason the court acted the way that it did was because towns were not giving families the opportunities to have the kind of housing they could afford," said Kevin Walsh, the associate director of Fair Share Housing Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending Mount Laurel. "We’re not sure why the governor thinks that we can go backward."
Christie said he was pleased with the direction being taken by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, who are developing a bill similar to Christie’s policy. That measure (S-1), however, has been criticized as open to a constitutional challenge, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services that was obtained by The Star-Ledger.
"We believe that the percentage set-aside system proposed in the bill, by itself, would fail to provide for specific numeric goals necessary to assure that the regional need for low- and moderate-income housing is adequately being addressed," the memo states.
Asked about the memo, Christie said he would work to address the constitutional questions raised while maintaining the fundamental aspects of his proposal.
"Nothing in life is ever perfect," he said. "But we’re going to get as close as we can to perfect on this. I have complete confidence we’ll be able to overcome those hurdles."
Christie also recommended abolishing a 2.5 percent fee on commercial development that is used to offset the cost of building affordable housing. That fee had been lifted for a year during the recession to try to encourage building, and Christie is using the date it is set to come back into effect — June 30 — as a deadline for new legislation to be passed.
Towns would implement the plans by either modifying existing buildings or requiring future developments to include a certain percentage of affordable units — 10 percent, for example, for housing projects of 10 or more units.