NJ ‘rushed,’ miscalculated land estimates for affordable housing, mayor says

East Brunswick, New Jersey Mayor Brad Cohen says state officials made a huge error when they issued affordable housing quotas in October of last year.

State law requires towns across the state to deliver what New Jersey considers to be their "fair share" of affordable homes over the next 10 years based on a number of factors, including average income and availability of developable land.

For East Brunswick, that number was 314 homes based on an estimate that town officials had 175 acres of developable land at their disposal. But Cohen said the state included protected wetlands and farmland, land that was already being developed, and about 15 acres set aside as open space in one of the country's most densely populated states.

In an analysis filed to the state on Jan. 3, East Brunswick's township planner said the real number is actually 44 acres, a significantly smaller number. As a result, Cohen has asked the state to revise the township's affordable housing requirement down to 265 homes.

The acreage dispute points to a potentially larger problem for the state's affordable housing mandates as town officials face a Jan. 31 deadline to either accept the numbers they've been given or propose their own lower requirements. So far, more than a quarter of the municipalities that have filed resolutions on the mandates – 82 out of 315 cities and towns – have requested lower obligations based on what they say is a lack of developable land.

Lisa Ryan, a spokesperson for New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs, which oversaw the land-use estimates, said the agency could not comment specifically on Cohen’s complaints or his request to lower the township affordable housing requirements.

In a written statement, she said 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.

But the department did not provide an explanation for how it could have miscalculated the amount of developable land in East Brunswick, as the township has alleged. And Cohen told Gothamist that he feels the process of determining his township’s obligation was “rushed.”

“Nobody's actually come out and sat down and met with the township or looked at areas that they feel are buildable and they came up with that number,” he said. “We're not against doing our fair share. Do I think that every town has gotten a fair number? No.”

In an analysis submitted to the state, East Brunswick’s township planner highlights multiple plots of land that fit the criteria for lands that should have been left out of the developable land list. This includes several plots that are already being developed.

“Am I supposed to pull a plug on somebody that's doing something and tell them that, ‘Nope. It's now has to be for affordable housing?’” Cohen said.

Plots that are preserved as open space were given that designation roughly 30 years ago, Cohen added.

“It's a slap in the face to those people to now come in and say, 'Well, we don't really care what you did then and we're just going to slap a whole bunch of apartments up there because the state says to do it,'" he said.

Other towns that have raised similar objections include Millburn Township, an affluent suburb in Essex County. It filed a similar resolution this month “under protest,” arguing that the municipality's available land capacity for new development should be reduced from about 25 acres to 8 acres. Millburn officials asked that their affordable housing quota be reduced from 555 homes to 522.

Millburn and 26 other towns are currently suing to overturn the state’s affordable housing law.

Next month, a panel of retired state judges will begin a process of reviewing towns’ disputes. According to guidelines set out in the state’s affordable housing law, all matters must be brought to a close by March 31.

Cohen emphasized that he is not looking for the state to drop his township's obligation number to zero. Instead, he’s hopeful state officials will see this as a reasonable compromise when they review his planner’s analysis.

“That's all I'm really asking them to do is to consider that what they used as a basis is fallacious and because of that, we would like our number reduced to a more realistic number,” he said.