Christie fails to deliver housing bill that works

Published: Friday, January 28, 2011, 6:00 AM
By Star-Ledger Editorial Board

With his conditional veto, Gov. Chris Christie scuttled months of hard work by legislators attempting to craft a sensible affordable housing policy. Gov. Chris Christie has conditionally vetoed the affordable housing bill that legislators spent months piecing together. It was an imperfect bill that fell short of what’s needed, given the housing crisis New Jersey faces. But it was a big step forward.

The approach the governor prefers would take us backward. Again, he is ignoring the pressing needs of the state’s most vulnerable families.

The challenge is to replace the sluggish bureaucracy of the Council on Affordable Housing with something simpler and more efficient. Over the past year, Sen. Raymond Lesniak and Assemblyman Jerry Green, both Democrats from Union County, have struggled mightily to create a bill that took in the concerns of everyone: towns, advocates, environmentalists, developers and builders.

They produced a bill that kills COAH and replaces it with a few simple directives. Typically, towns that can show at least 10 percent of their housing is affordable would face no new obligations. Other towns, though, would have to create affordable housing and would have several options to do so. For example, they could buy existing units and place deed restrictions that ensure they are available to families of modest means. They can collect a small fee from housing developers and build affordable units themselves. They can partner with nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity to encourage more building.

Christie apparently thinks that’s too much. He would require only that new housing projects of more than 20 units set aside 10 percent as affordable. That would allow towns to block affordable housing projects by using zoning and other land-use regulations to restrict all new growth. And builders could escape even that modest requirement by paying a small fee, leaving the town with no new affordable units.

That weak approach would slow the creation of affordable housing and, in some areas, halt it completely. And that would violate the Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel rulings, which are aimed precisely at breaking that kind of effort to exclude families of modest means. The state Office of Legislative Services, a nonpartisan research agency, confirmed that last year. If Christie gets his way, lawsuits will surely follow.

The bill the governor vetoed has strong support from the business community — including the New Jersey Builders Association and the state Chamber of Commerce — housing advocates and a majority in both houses of the Legislature.

This is not a radical measure. It does not require towns to build high-rise projects for the very poor. Its definition of "affordable" is that a family earning up to 80 percent of the median income could live there — people such as schoolteachers, clerks and librarians. New Jersey can find a way to make room for them in every town.

Given that cowed Republicans in the Legislature dare not defy Christie, there is little chance his veto will be overriden. So we are stuck, for now, with a housing policy that no one likes.

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