NJ towns suing to overturn state’s affordable housing rules ask court to put rules on hold

Twenty-two New Jersey towns suing to overturn the state’s affordable housing law are asking the state courts to put the law’s requirements on hold while their lawsuit plays out.

Earlier this month, 13 New Jersey towns joined an original coalition of nine in a lawsuit to invalidate the state’s law passed by the Legislature this year, which laid out guidelines for calculating how much affordable housing each town must create over the next decade. The towns claim the law unfairly requires them to build more and more housing without accounting for how much development they can truly support.

Now, just weeks after their amended complaint was filed, the towns are seeking a stay of the law by the courts so that they can argue this case. They now say the law is unconstitutional because it exempts more than 60 urban towns from the same affordable housing requirements mandated for suburban towns.

If the motion is approved, it could throw a wrench into New Jersey’s ambitious plan to try to tackle what officials claim is a 200,000-unit deficit in low-priced housing for the state’s most rent-burdened residents. Last week, New Jersey officials released the target numbers for the state's next 10-year round of affordable housing development, which seeks to develop more than 84,000 affordable homes in the state's suburbs by 2035. About 500 towns have until the end of January to either accept the state’s 10-year target — on average about 150 affordable homes per town — or get their own numbers approved by the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.

In their request to put the law on hold, the towns that are suing claim this timeline is unrealistic.

Montvale Mayor Mike Ghassali, who is leading the coalition involved in the lawsuit, said the affordable housing rules exempting urban communities are outdated.

“Especially when some of these [urban] towns, they are building [affordable] units already, and they could be counted toward the overall state requirement,” he said.

After joining the lawsuit, Christine Serrano Glassner, mayor of Mendham Borough, told Gothamist the towns that are suing believe the law is biased against the suburbs.

“That the constitution has to be applied to only certain towns but not to other towns makes absolutely no sense,” she said.

Sixty-two New Jersey municipalities are exempt from state requirements to build new affordable housing. These municipalities qualify as what are known as “urban aid municipalities” and include places like Jersey City, Hoboken, Paterson and Newark.

They are given this designation based on characteristics such as their unemployment rates, which are higher than the state average; their lower than average per-capita incomes; or their population density. Many of these towns are also already home to public housing developments and income-restricted units.

The exemptions have been in place for more than 40 years under the state’s Mount Laurel Doctrine, a 1975 state Supreme Court decision mandating that towns contribute their fair share of affordable housing.

Adam Gordon, executive director of the Fair Share Housing Center, a New Jersey nonprofit that negotiates affordable housing plans with towns around the state, said the towns seeking to put the law on hold are ignoring that urban communities do in fact have an affordable housing obligation under the law.

Gordon noted the state’s target numbers released last week are asking urban aid municipalities to create more than 40,000 homes by rehabilitating existing affordable housing.

“[The towns suing] somehow forgot to mention that,” he said. “It just shows that they're really just not presenting a real picture of what's going on here.”

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, who has been named as a defendant in the lawsuit, is expected to file a response to the towns’ motion in coming weeks. The court has given Platkin until mid-November to respond, after the attorney general's office said it was too busy due to the general election next week.