State Senate To Change Regulations For Affordable Housing

The New Jersey State Senate has passed legislation that will soon change affordable housing obligations for many municipalities across the state by changing zoning laws and officially doing away with the Council on Affordable Housing.

The state senate passed the Fair Housing Act in 1985 to create legislation that gave municipalities the constitutional obligation to provide affordable housing to low and moderate income families.  Now, 25 years later, the Senate Economic Growth Committee has introduced a substitution bill to revise many of the requirements set forth by the Fair Housing Act, and to do away with several conditions that some believe have come to hurt the state's economy.

Rumors have circulated that some municipalities will be exempt from creating more affordable housing in the future, but that is not the substitution's intention.  According to Sen. Raymond Lesniak's director of communications, the substitution will require all municipalities across the state to reassess their obligations to provide affordable housing. 

"All municipalities, regardless of their current housing stock, will have an affordable housing set-aside for all qualifying future developments," said Erin Caragher, in an e-mail explaining the bill.

According to the Senate Economic Growth Committee's statement, the substitution would also eliminate the state mandated calculations that are used to determine a municipality's need for affordable housing. Under the new law, a community will be deemed "inclusionary" if it has seven-and-a-half percent of its housing stock price restricted or if 33 percent of housing is multi-family or mobile homes.

"Those municipalities that are deemed to not have a reasonable amount of affordable housing will have to zone 20 percent of their developable land for workforce housing," Caragher said.

The substitution will also require that 10 percent of any residential development project that has 20 or more units to be set aside for low to moderate income housing.

Municipalities will also be able to give preference to families that already live and work in the town to apply for low income housing there, which was prohibited under the original law and a major bone of contention with many local officials.