THE CHRISTIE ADMINISTRATION'S THIRD ROUND RUSE

Christie Administration's Latest Attempt to Exclude Lower-Income Families, Seniors, and People with Special Needs Last week, the Council on Affordable Housing proposed new rules with the number of homes needed in each town to implement the Mount Laurel decision and Fair Housing Act. To say the rules are unlawful and would create bad policy is an understatement. To the extent the rules can be understood - COAH's method of calculating needed homes is a black box that make little sense, with hidden and unexplained data, formulae, and calculations- the rules reflect the Christie Administration's hostility to the needs of lower-income families, seniors, and people with disabilities. They also reflect the administration's hostility to the rule of law because they fail to comply with three court orders from the Supreme Court and Appellate Division that directed the agency to propose and adopt rules that are similar to the approach that successfully created 60,000 affordable homes. The process by which the rules were proposed, also unsurprisingly, undermines the independence of COAH and aggregates power in the Governor's office. The members of the board were never consulted regarding the rules prior to them being drafted and had less than 24 hours to review hundreds of pages before being asked to vote on the rules. And all indications are that this effort is being run with high level members of the Attorney General's office working closely, and secretly, with Rutgers professor Robert Burchell, whose work in this area has previously been found inexplicable and unsupportable by the courts. The identity of Professor Burchell was kept secret, with the governor's office and COAH staff illegally denying Open Public Records Act requests that sought to unearth who had been hired by the state to work on the rules. Even today we have no idea how much money was spent on this process or how the State selected the very same individual whose work in this area has previously been rejected as illegal and incomprehensible. One board member, Timothy Doherty, with great integrity opposed the process, saying, "This certainly waters down the requirements and the need... [the rules] really don't accomplish anything." Yet the COAH Board, over Doherty's dissent, voted to propose rules they knew next to nothing about. Making any sense of the rules is difficult, but we have given it a try and here share our understanding of what has been proposed: The rules were required to be based on the Prior Round methodology that allocated fair share obligations for 1987-1999, but are not. The Appellate Division and Supreme Court ordered the agency to propose rules using that approach because, after 14 years of trying different approaches, the courts recognized that it was time to use what had worked in the past to avoid further delays. Instead, they have proposed yet another unworkable system that departs drastically from what the Court required. No one can credibly claim that COAH complied with that order. The proposed rules retroactively reduce obligations from 1987-1999 by over 18,000 homes in an inexplicable pattern - Woodbridge's obligation goes down by 40.5%, Livingston's by 29.4%, and Paramus' by 16.5%, while obligations actually increase in towns such as Princeton, Wall, and Linden. This pattern is based at least in part on giving towns such as Moorestown and Mount Laurel credit for poor families living in Camden and the Chathams and Summit credit for poor families in Newark - amazingly denying lower-income people homes today based on deteriorating homes built decades ago in New Jersey's inner cities, a convoluted system that recalls the now-illegal Regional Contribution Agreements where wealthy towns could pay poor towns to take their fair share. A prior court decision rejected such chicanery, agreeing that "COAH's explanation for recalculating prior round obligations defies comprehension." Despite that, and the fact that such manipulations violate the Supreme Court's most recent order to only use proven and accepted methodologies, COAH has included this gimmick again. Despite tremendous need for homes that are affordable, especially after Hurricane Sandy, the rules claim that just 40,000 additional homes are needed through 2024. As recently as 2008, the state recognized that New Jersey needed 116,000 additional homes - through only 2018 - but when more families are struggling than ever, the Christie Administration has manipulated numbers to reduce fair housing obligations by two-thirds. The proposed rules for the period 1999-2024 are based entirely on undeveloped land, despite the fact that a third of all development in New Jersey in the 2000s took place in "built out" communities and through redevelopment, according to a New Jersey Future analysis. A more recent New Jersey Future analysis actually suggests that the majority of population growth since 2008 has been in these communities. Any municipality with empty office parks and shuttered strip malls, exactly the places where we should encourage reuse, sees their fair share number reduced - and as such the rules actually doing less to encourage development near transit and job centers than previous rules from the 1980s and 1990s. This arcane process, for which COAH has failed to provide the data or maps, also violates the Court's order since it was not previously part of COAH's methodology. Also in violation of the Court's order, municipalities are permitted to impose housing obligations on developers at nearly any density, thus leading to greater sprawl instead of encouraging compact development that wisely uses land. In order to better understand the basis for the rules, we have filed Open Public Records Act requests with COAH and Rutgers. We anticipate a response by Wednesday and will share further information on this and other future developments related to the administration's attempt to again ignore the needs of working families, seniors, and people with disabilities. Fair Share Housing Center, founded in 1975 is based in Cherry Hill. It is the only public interest organization devoted entirely to defending the housing rights of New Jersey's poor through implementing the Mount Laurel doctrine, which requires that each municipality provides its fair share of housing affordable to low- and moderate-income people. Visit us on the web at www.fairsharehousing.org. To support our work with an online donation, please click here.