One day in the fall of 1970, Mount Laurel's mayor spoke
16 words that would long cast a shadow on his township.
"If you people can't afford to live in our
town," Bill Haines told 60 black congregants of Jacob's Chapel A.M.E.
Church, "then you'll just have to leave."
Stunned, but soon galvanized, the residents filed a
lawsuit. Five years later, in its earthquake Mount Laurel I decision, New
Jersey's Supreme Court declared the township's exclusionary zoning practices
unconstitutional.
Every municipality must shoulder a "fair share"
of its region's housing supply for low- and middle-income households, the high court
decreed, a principle enshrined as the "Mount Laurel Doctrine."
This week, the township that lent its name to that
doctrine formally adopted its own 20-year "Mount Laurel"
affordable-housing plan.
The township is part of a coalition that is challenging
some potential housing obligations in court. But, officials said, it will keep
to the plan - the result of a deal with the Fair Share Housing Center advocacy
group - regardless of the outcome of that appeal.
"This opens a new chapter in the township's
commitment to fair housing" since the Supreme Court overhauled the process
last year, said Anthony Campisi, spokesman for Fair Share.
Tyler Prime, the township's attorney, said "there's
still some resentment that we have to build so much" to meet a quota.
"But many people recognize that some good comes from this," and the
township stepped up "because our experience [with affordable housing] has
taught us that it's not going away."
Were poor inner-city neighborhoods erased by Mount Laurel
I? Did young schoolteachers and fast-food cashiers soon find an abundance of
affordable apartments near their workplaces? They did not.
Nearly all of New Jersey's 565 municipalities defied the
ruling, and nowhere was early resistance more fierce than in this Burlington
County farm community then trying to remake itself into an upscale suburb.
"They basically gave the finger to the court,"
Peter O'Connor, a lawyer and affordable-housing advocate who helped litigate
Mount Laurel I, recalled recently.
But the wall between New Jersey's affluent and poor
neighborhoods may at last be crumbling.
Statewide, 85 cities and townships have settled with Fair
Share to zone for nearly 30,000 units over the next two decades, with Mount
Laurel the latest.
Monday evening, by unanimous vote of its mayor and
council, with no discussion, the township of 42,000 people committed itself to
zoning for 1,074 new low- and middle-income housing units over the next two
decades - at least on paper.
With bonus credits, Prime explained last week, "our
actual units for the settlement is 879," to be achieved in two phases
ending in the year 2035.
Such is the sometimes bewildering maze of "Mount
Laurel" zoning, where 1,000-unit caps sometimes apply, and townships can
get fractional, double, or even triple bonus points for accommodating
special-needs housing or rental units.
Both 1,074 and 879 are far below what Kevin Walsh,
executive director of the Fair Share Housing Center, which negotiates and
litigates with municipalities over their affordable-housing plans, had hoped to
see in Mount Laurel.
"We figured Mount Laurel's obligation at about
2,410, before all the caps and credits," Walsh said in an interview in his
Cherry Hill office. "So there's much you can fight about. Or you can come
to an agreement . . . if it gets shovels in the ground."
Despite all the compromises Fair Share made with Mount
Laurel, theirs "is still an aggressive plan," said Walsh, who
succeeded O'Connor as the group's executive director two years ago. The
township has identified seven to 10 parcels where the new units might be built.
Among the largest other settlements in South Jersey so
far are Cherry Hill at 1,000 units, Winslow at 794, Harrison at 546, Maple
Shade at 311, Medford at 483, Jackson at 1,250, and Toms River at 1,285.
The explosion comes not so much from a change of heart,
but rather a change to the legal landscape.
For 15 years the state agency created to help
municipalities meet their affordable-housing obligations could not determine
what the obligations were.
In March 2015 - on a complaint by Fair Share - the
Supreme Court dissolved what it called the "dysfunctional" Council on
Affordable Housing (COAH) and ordered every municipality to draft new plans.
The court heard arguments on that "gap period" last week.
Just how many of these agreed-to units will ever sprout
into real homes remains a question mark.
Mount Laurel-type affordable-housing developments mostly
are market-driven enterprises, financed by private developers, who typically
set aside 15 to 20 percent of the units for lower-income households.
Municipalities don't build the new units, but rather zone for them. "Their
job," explained Walsh, "is to simply get out of the way."
Fair Share estimates that New Jersey has created 80,000
affordable housing units since passage of its Fair Housing Act in 1985, but
that "tens of thousands" went unbuilt in the 15 years that the state
agency was dysfunctional.
Fair Share calculates that municipalities statewide must
zone for 200,000 more units in the decade ahead - a number that makes municipal
leaders shudder. About 300 towns - including Mount Laurel - have joined forces
to convince the courts that those numbers should be closer to 40,000.
Prime said, however, that the township decided to settle
its obligation before the court decides and that its settlement numbers will be
in force no matter the outcome.
In Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties, where the
median household income is $81,500, a family of four is "low income"
if it earns less than $40,750, and "very low" if it earns less than
$24,450.
"The rent's a squeak sometimes," admitted
47-year-old Rafael Chamberlain. He; his wife, Deitra; and their four children
have lived at the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel for 14 years.
A bus aide for Mount Laurel school district, he declined
to say what he earns or pays in subsidized rent. "But compared to what a
place like this would be in another development, maybe $1,800 a month, it's a
bargain," he said.
Tenants pay no more than 30 percent of income on rent and
utilities.
"For me it was all about getting them into the Mount
Laurel schools," said Deitra, indicating sons D'Andre and Raphael, ages 14
and 15, and 10-year-old Racquel seated alongside her on their oversize
living-room sofa. Son Donte, 23, was attending classes at Rutgers University's
Camden campus.
The late Ethel R. Lawrence, a day-care teacher and mother
of nine for whom this development is named, was among the 60 residents in the
pews of Jacobs Chapel A.M.E. the fateful day when Mayor Haines told them they
would "just have to leave."
As the township began condemning their homes in the late
1960s, Lawrence rebelled. She organized residents and petitioned in 1969 to
permit a nonprofit to create 36 garden apartments for the displaced families.
The township refused. Six months later, the NAACP of
Southern Burlington County sued the township on their behalf. Their case made
its way to the state's highest court and into history.
Lawrence never lived to see the 140 handsome, clapboard
townhouses on 62 landscaped acres that today bear her name. She died in 1994.
The homes represent just a portion of what Mount Laurel has done to meet its
obligations, Prime notes. Since 1985, he said, it has accommodated the creation
of 653 units.
For the next round, through 2035, Mount Laurel has agreed
that 13 percent of all its affordable housing units will be available to
"very low income" households, and that at least half will go to
"low" and "very low income" households.
Source: Philly.com
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