More than a year ago, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation codifying the state’s Mount Laurel doctrine, the mandate that all cities and towns build their fair share of affordable housing. The new law streamlines the process, makes it easier to determine how much housing each town and city must build, and creates a new authority to handle disputes.
Over the past 50 years, and despite much litigation, the Mount Laurel doctrine has led to over 75,000 units of affordable housing being built in the Garden State. It’s also enabled the construction of more than 200,000 units of housing overall, according to the Fair Share Housing Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization that monitors compliance of the Mount Laurel doctrine.
New Jersey requires towns to submit housing plans every 10 years that detail how they are addressing their share of affordable housing, as determined by the state’s courts, using data about job growth, population, income, and developable land. Municipalities were required to resubmit plans this year, and most have, says Adam Gordon, the center’s executive director. A total of 424 of the state’s 564 municipalities have submitted new plans, which represents a 25 percent increase over the number of municipalities that participated in 2015. At that time, more than 200 municipalities sued the state, arguing that they did not have to build any affordable housing, according to the center.
Gordon says that, under the new law, the process is running much more smoothly than it has in the past.
“It’s not going to solve all of the state’s housing problems, but it’s really stronger than any other state’s affordable housing requirements,” he says. “It’s working much better than it ever has before in all these decades.”
While the process has been swifter and less contentious than a decade ago, the new law has still generated its share of pushback: More than 100 municipalities argued in their affordable housing plans that the state had overcalculated the number of affordable units they were legally required to build.
That, in turn, led the Builders Association, a trade lobby representing building workers, to sue those towns for trying to build less housing than their state obligation. (Under the Mount Laurel doctrine, builders are allowed to sue towns over delayed construction—as long as that housing could fulfill the municipality’s housing obligation.)
Meanwhile, 27 towns and cities banded together to file a lawsuit in federal court in an attempt to get the law overturned. The move came after courts in New Jersey rejected their challenges twice.
Gordon was unfazed by the cities trying to overturn the law, noting that the lawsuit has not progressed since last fall, when it was initially filed.
“They’re just kind of suing anything that moves . . . it’s jumped the shark a little bit,” he says. “They keep losing, and they file another lawsuit.”
What Does the 2024 Law Actually Change?
The Department of Community Affairs will continue to tell municipalities how much affordable housing they’re obligated to create. Last fall, the department estimated that the state is in need of more than 84,000 affordable housing units for low- and moderate- income renters, as well as more than 65,000 existing affordable homes that need to be rehabilitated. These estimates do not represent the state’s total housing needs, but the towns’ legal obligations under the state’s formula. According to The National Low Income Housing Coalition, the state is in need of over 200,000 affordable housing units for its lowest-income renters.
“While this number falls far short of the full housing needs in the state, the Mount Laurel doctrine has been held by courts to only address a portion of overall housing need,” according to a guide by Fair Share Housing Center.
While this number falls far short of the full housing needs in the state, the Mount Laurel doctrine has been held by courts to only address a portion of overall housing need.”
Fair Share Housing Center
Municipalities must still present plans to the state explaining where and how much housing they will build, called “Fair Share Plans.”
The new law does lay out a rubric for how each town can calculate its own obligations, based on a formula used in a previous court decision, and it also creates an Affordable Housing Dispute Resolution Program, which allows dedicated judges to decide on disputes about affordable housing need. The program is intended to reduce back and forth litigation, which has delayed housing plans in the past.
The Fair Share Housing Center has already utilized the new program to address complaints with over 68 municipalities’ Fair Share Plans. Those plans requested reductions in their affordable housing obligations. Through the mediation process, the center was able to settle on final numbers with all but seven towns and cities.
“That’s pretty incredible, because in the last round, you had litigation for years involving hundreds of towns,” Gordon says.
Many towns and cities still face prospective lawsuits from developers for not fulfilling their housing plans from 2015. The new law dangles immunity from these potential lawsuits as an incentive to get municipalities to submit plans this year and fulfill future obligations.
The law also incentivizes towns to convert disused offices and other underused commercial properties into homes, build affordably near public transit, and build affordable housing for extremely low-income renters by offering “credits” toward their affordable housing obligations, meaning they would not be required to build as many units.
According to Jag Davies, director of communications for Fair Share Housing Center, after factoring in towns’ challenges to obligations, bonus credits, and other adjustments for limited sewage infrastructure, “the total number of new units produced will be a good deal less” than the 84,000 that the state initially estimated, although the center could not provide an exact number.
However, the new law has opened up space for building affordable housing projects that include onsite support services, says Taiisa Kelly, executive director of Monarch Housing Associates, a nonprofit consulting firm that works with supportive housing providers.
“We have seen faster movement within the last year on some of those projects that were stalled and that we weren’t sure if there was going to be a pathway forward prior to the passage,” she says.
Local Political Shifts, With State Support
The passage of the law appears to have hastened the acceptance of affordable housing minimums as a political reality. Slowly but surely, more towns in New Jersey have accepted that affordable housing mandates are the law, after decades of litigation over one of the largest judicial decisions of the civil rights era.
The gradual transformation can be seen in Evesham Township, a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia. Mayor Jackie Veasy and Heather Cooper, a councilwoman in the township, co-wrote an op-ed in December arguing that the community—which was traditionally hostile to affordable housing—should embrace it.
“What we understand is that affordable housing isn’t lowering property value,” Cooper told Shelterforce and Next City. “It is a great value for a town … it promotes stability in neighborhoods. Quality of life for everyone.”
She says the public is typically understanding of some types of projects, including renovating office spaces, empty homes, and abandoned properties. When told of the need for senior housing and housing for people with disabilities, people understand, she says.
“That education dispels resistance,” she says.
Evesham’s council recently approved the demolition of an under-used office complex to build up to 325 units of housing, including 49 affordable units, half of which are for people with special needs. Some neighbors were unhappy with the plan, according to the news outlet 70 and 73, including a dentist whose office is in the complex. Cooper says that the redevelopment plan will require the developer to “partner with a specialized service provider to create an opportunity for supportive and special needs residents.”
Evesham recently completed a senior living center with 177 beds and 24 units at below-market rents. The town also approved a smaller project, two single-family homes to be built by Habitat for Humanity.
In Englewood Cliffs, a suburb of New York City, neighbors had in the past been so combative about building affordable housing that lawsuits dragged on for more than a decade. In 2015, developers sued the borough after it stalled the construction of 450 units of housing, 90 of which were below-market. The town argued that it had already met its affordable housing obligations.
The developer won, and the borough reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. But after a change of political leadership, lawmakers were so enraged about the previous settlement that the municipality sued the lawyers who agreed to it. In the end, the New Jersey Supreme Court imposed a $216,000 fine on the borough for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
The project is finally moving forward, and the developer revealed plans for the project earlier this year.
The politics of affordable housing have also changed at the state’s highest level: The law was signed by Murphy, who has given his full-throated support to the Mount Laurel doctrine and boosted the new law on recent media appearances. Murphy is also advocating for three bills that would reduce parking space minimums, allow for commercial to residential conversions and allow for split-level homes, all of which would allow more housing density. It is a far cry from the days when former Gov. Chris Christie lambasted the doctrine and used the bureaucratic levers of the Coalition on Affordable Housing (COAH) to grind Mount Laurel enforcement to a halt. The 2024 law abolishes COAH altogether.
“I’d say Gov. Murphy has been the strongest supporter of Mount Laurel as governor of any governor that we’ve had in the 50 years,” Gordon says.
What’s Still Missing
The new 2024 law has not fixed everything, and has its critics among proponents of affordable housing. Evesham’s Cooper says the newly laid out timelines that were approved in 2024 did not allow time to scout locations for new housing.
“Having more defined locations versus proposed or hopeful locations is what more time would give us,” she says.
Kelly at Monarch says the law does not do enough to speed up the bureaucratic process of getting housing approved. While the law makes it much harder to block housing, approvals must still go through zoning board and planning board votes. Kelly says the law could have streamlined these meetings.
“The law does not explicitly tell towns how to go through their local approval processes,” she says, noting that some projects still take a long time to get approved.
Kelly also said the law could have provided more funding. While New Jersey funds Mount Laurel projects through development taxes, its affordable housing trust fund (which was recently cut by $125 million), and through federal LIHTC credits, Kelly says it’s still not enough to meet the need, and that having so many different funding streams means more paperwork.
And the housing crisis is still persistent in New Jersey: homelessness has increased by 8 percent year over year, with street homelessness increasing by 14.9 percent, according to a Point in Time count conducted by Monarch.
Among the reasons that New Jersey still has affordability issues is that the state is handling an influx of newcomers from New York City, where attempts to speed up affordable housing construction have had mixed results. The de Blasio administration’s relatively ambitious housing plan still underbuilt for the lowest incomes and overbuilt for the highest incomes. An Adams administration plan to loosen zoning restrictions lacks an incentive mechanism for deeply affordable housing.
“The unaffordability of the New York market is a big economic driver,” Gordon says. “Now it’s completely unaffordable to live in Jersey City because of people from New York.”
The most pernicious aspect of the state’s housing crisis is racial segregation: While the initial Mount Laurel ruling was filed by a Black homeowner who wished to remain in her neighborhood as she was being forced out by racist zoning, the state’s residential neighborhoods remain divided. New Jersey is still fending off a lawsuit over the demographics of its public schools, which remain among the most segregated in the nation.
But for towns that were hesitant to create any affordable housing, the new law has signaled a slow shift toward building affordably. Rather than trying to block housing altogether, many towns are trying instead to negotiate on what that housing would look like.
“I believe that [the law] has helped towns understand that the need to create affordable housing is going to be there, and that their requirement to create affordable housing is going to be there,” Kelly says. “There’s no way around it. So I think that towns are starting to come to the table.”
This story was published through a collaboration between Shelterforce and Next City. Next City is a nonprofit news outlet that publishes solutions to the problems that oppress people in cities, inspiring social, economic, and environmental change through journalism and events around the world.
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Thanks for this article. I have been an architect dedicated to affordable housing for 40 of the 50 years described in this article. The most successful approach in my experience is to build on municipally owned land. The developer saves on land acquisition cost and the location is often buffered from NIMBY pushback. I was the project architect for “The Meadows at Oldwick”, a successful project in Tewksbury Township developed by United Cerebral Palsy. With 564 municipalities there must be many suitable locations, no?
More solutions for affordable housing (1) promote mobile home parks, and require the units be at least 12 feet apart (Note: housing advocates don’t want this because mobile home park residents vote Republican 60% of the time. So politics is more important than solving the problem). (2) the urban centers of NJ currently have zero obligation. Simply ridiculous. They should have an obligation for owner-occupied affordable housing. This would actually improve a lot of neighborhoods, which are mostly old houses that are rented out. (3) Allow “tiny houses” on any lot that already has a house, if the lot is at least 10,000 square feet, and the tiny house is at least 10 feet from property lines and the existing house. (4) Inclusionary zoning. Affordable units must be included in the building under construction, not build the affordable housing somewhere else. 10% clause. (5) a municipality should not be allowed to zone more than 1/3 of it’s housing stock as single-family. Remaining zones should allow an existing house to be divided into 2 units, with one as affordable. Or build a two-family house, with one unit as affordable. (Note: this will allow cities to preserve historic districts as single-family. And I support that. Historic districts will never be more than 1/3 of the housing stock)