Millburn, NJ official says 100% affordable housing projects are against town's 'values'

A chief opponent of a 100% affordable housing project in wealthy Milburn, New Jersey's downtown says a development fully composed of apartments for low- and median-income people is “not the right way to do things” in the town.

Millburn Township committee member Frank Saccomandi made the comment during a Thursday night meeting of the town’s Citizen Advisory Committee on Affordable Housing, where town officials and professionals laid out Millburn’s plans to fulfill its affordable housing obligations in New Jersey's upcoming 10-year round of state-mandated development.

Saccomandi, who ran for the township committee in 2023 on a platform to stop the downtown development on Main Street, was responding to a resident who had asked why officials would not pursue all-affordable projects to limit overall development in the town while still generating enough affordable housing to satisfy the state’s requirements.

Saccomandi said that such projects did not “comport with the values of Millburn” and that he favored an inclusionary development strategy. In New Jersey, that means projects with a majority of market-rate units and 15%-20% set aside for affordable housing.

“Mixed use housing has advantages because you have people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, that are living amongst each other, their kids are playing with each other and it helps lift up the entire community,” Saccomandi said.

He added that “segregated” 100% affordable housing would have the opposite effect.

But a 2013 study of an all-affordable development in Mount Laurel, NJ published in the National Library of Medicine found that residents reported “high levels of satisfaction and social integration.”

Millburn officials are mired in a yearslong court fight over a 75-unit, all-affordable building. The state Superior Court has ordered them to allow the development to proceed multiple times, but they have repeatedly delayed construction since the township committee initially greenlit the project in 2021.

After Saccomandi took office in January 2024, he and other committee members unanimously voted to rescind the agreement for the project. In response, the judge overseeing the lawsuit between the township and the developer threatened to sanction Saccomandi and other officials. After several contentious court hearings, Judge Cynthia Santomauro last July ordered township officials to adopt the original development plan.

But Millburn officials have only continued to resist in the six months since. Earlier this month, attorneys for the developer, RPM, asked the judge to issue another order requiring the township to proceed with a key financial component of the deal.

Saccomandi opened the meeting Thursday night by informing the participants that he and other officials would not discuss any ongoing litigation. The town has joined 26 other New Jersey municipalities in a lawsuit against the state to overturn the law that lays out each town’s affordable housing requirements over the next decade. They have so far failed multiple times to put the law on hold while the suit plays out in court.

Despite the ongoing legal battles, Millburn is among 431 New Jersey municipalities where elected representatives met a key deadline to commit to building new affordable housing. The township is also one of the more than 120 towns identified by Gothamist that have asked the state to reduce their obligation, due to what they said was a faulty process for calculating the amount of land available for development. Millburn officials want their obligation reduced from 555 to 522 new affordable homes.

Saccomandi said the township committee had been contacted by several developers interested in taking on projects that could help Millburn satisfy its obligations for the next round.

”We're all in this together and I think collectively as a town, we're all committed to providing affordable housing,” he said.

Millburn officials are slated to return to court next month in the case over the 100%-affordable development on Main Street.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Frank Saccomandi's title. He is a member of the township committee. The story was also updated to clarify his comments at Thursday's town committee meeting.