Housing reform: Tweaks won't do

June 21, 2010
www.app.com

The state Assembly last week recognized what the state Senate didn't: that the much-ballyhooed bill that would abolish the Council on Affordable Housing needed more than just tweaking or smoothing out some rough edges.

The Legislature needs to start from scratch to ensure that the very idea of affordable housing is preserved in the Garden State, even as COAH undergoes needed reform. Any proposal should ensure that each municipality be required to provide its fair share, as well as having a mechanism in place to ensure compliance. The plan also must be clear about funding sources and address regional as well as municipal needs. S-1 fails to acomplish this in every material way.
Assembly Housing Chairman Jerry Green, D-Union, did the right thing at his committee hearing last week when, instead of posting a companion bill to the Senate's S-1, he invited testimony from the dozens of groups and individuals who mostly opposed the legislation — something that the Senate, in its hellbent-for-leather approach to S-1, refused to do.

Central to the Senate version of the bill was transferring authority for affordable housing to the State Planning Commission and allowing towns to determine for themselves, through their master plans and zoning, whether they were meeting their constitutional obligation to provide housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income residents.

Establishing such an amorphous "honor system" to provide judicially mandated affordable housing is no way to proceed.

The criticism of the Senate bill has come from every corner — builders, housing advocates and environmental groups, who believe it would wreak havoc in the state's rural areas.

Among critics' concerns are formulas by which towns may calculate their housing obligations and fees developers can pay to avoid including affordable units in new projects. By one standard under S-1, a town could be considered "inclusionary" — or accessible to poor or disabled people — if a third of its existing residences were multifamily units or mobile homes. Price would not be a consideration, so tony townhouses and condominiums could count toward affordable housing stock.

Proponents of S-1 can't even agree on whether its passage would result in more or fewer affordable housing units. There already is a huge deficit of affordable housing in this state. And since the provision of affordable housing is part of the state constitution, reform should not result in some sort of guessing game about whether the mandate is being met.

Last week, state Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Lori Grifa urged the Assembly Housing Committee to move on legislation to abolish COAH. Failure to pass a bill before the summer recess could lead to court rulings that would force lawmakers to start from scratch, Grifa warned.

"My job is to get the bill right," Green said. Exactly. No bill, he added, is better than a bad bill. The Assembly has its work cut out for it, to be sure. But at least it is listening.


Source: www.app.com