New Jersey

In the suburb whose exclusive zoning led to New Jersey’s fair share affordable housing law, new research explores what the affordable housing finally built there has meant to the town, and to the people who have gotten to move there.

In 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie introduced legislation to abolish the Council on Affordable Housing, the enforcement body for New Jersey’s fair share affordable housing rules, which grew out […]

How do community developers whose goals include neighborhood revitalization identify which businesses or other non-residential tenants (library, healthcare center) are likely to create the most positive momentum in a given area? It’s certainly more art than science. We asked a few long-time community developers for their thoughts.

All across the country, local governments, CDCs, community groups, and housing counselors are coming together to address the foreclosure crisis.

Pressure has been building for a long time against the red tape and inflexibility of the agency that implements New Jersey’s landmark fair share housing policy. Can the spirit of Mount Laurel survive the backlash against the details?

New Jersey’s Paterson is among the nation’s oldest planned industrial cities, but it has fallen on hard times since the once-booming silk industry there declined in the latter half of the 20th century. Much of the industry in this city of 150,000 has since left, but now a geological attraction once envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as something that could be harnessed for industrial might, is fully protected, and could be channeled, this time, for its community-building potential.

PATERSON, New Jersey — It’s early February and the air temperature hovers in the low teens — never mind the windchill that could only be tolerable to a Midwesterner. But […]

Urban Essex County, New Jersey, one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the ongoing foreclosure crisis, could be the laboratory for an ostensible reinvention of community development, as a local CDC there announced today the successful acquisition of 47 mortgages on troubled properties with an eye toward stabilizing neighborhoods in some of the oldest suburban communities in New Jersey.

As New Jersey’s Council on Affordable Housing, or COAH, continues to defend its plan to use a growth-share model to encourage towns to build working class and affordable housing, we’re […]

Youth violence scars lives, turning America’s streets into war zones. How do we transform killing fields into training grounds for stronger communities?

It’s an old joke, but in the development sense, the term “smart growth” is an oxymoron in many cases. There’s a reason we celebrate things like adaptive reuse, transit villages, […]

So where does the money come from for all these grandiose plans and their implementation? In a number of major U.S. cities, such as Seattle, Minneapolis, and Rochester, New York, […]