Choosing to live in a house or apartment means choosing a specific neighborhood and, in fact, a quality of life. For both poor and wealthy residents, the meaning of this choice offers a context for understanding the place of affordable housing in New Jersey and the bill A-4/S-50 signed into law by Gov. Murphy on March 20, 2024.
The new law creates a permanent legislative-based system for assigning housing obligations to New Jersey municipalities and supervising their execution.
As suggested in the opening chapter of “Climbing Mount Laurel,” by Douglas S. Massey et al., a study of the Supreme Court decisions mandating affordable housing in New Jersey and their effects, when a family chooses a place to live, it also “chooses the crime rate to which it will be exposed; the police and fire protection it will receive; the taxes it will pay; the insurance costs it will incur; the quality of education its children will receive; the peer groups they will experience; the goods, services, and jobs to which the family will have access; and the relative likelihood a household will be able to build wealth through home appreciation; not to mention the status and prestige, or lack thereof, family members will derive from living in the neighborhood.”
Little wonder that it has taken 50 years to enshrine into law the affordable housing obligations mandated initially by the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel decisions, or that it has required fighting Nimbyism all along the way to ensure the building of that housing.
“The defining issue of housing today is impermanence,” said Adam Gordon, executive director of the Fair Share Housing Center, at a Jewish Center gathering during the harvest festival of Sukkot. High housing costs and limited availability of affordable housing continue to have profound effects on individuals and families who are perpetually unsure whether they will be able to afford next year’s rent, he explains. He asks New Jerseyans to imagine “what it means as a family for kids to move every year from school to school or whether you will be able to stay in a community or be housed at all.”
Gordon will be part of a panel addressing the new statute and how it will work in municipalities throughout the state on Wednesday, November 13, from 6 to 7:30 p.m., at the Jewish Center, 435 Nassau Street, Princeton (as well as online). The event is cosponsored by The Jewish Center, Congregation Beth Chaim in Princeton Junction, and Har Sinai Temple in Pennington. For information or to register contact Linda Oppenheim at linda.oppenheim@gmail.com.
The Honorable Troy Singleton, the bill’s Senate cosponsor and Senate majority whip, will lead off the event with a statewide perspective. Continuing the discussion will be Gordon, along with Valerie Haynes, former president and long-time board member of Princeton Community Housing, guided by moderator the Honorable Peter Buchsbaum, former Superior Court judge who, as a judge, court master, and attorney, has worked on resolving disputes between developers and municipalities on issues concerning affordable housing.
New Jersey’s recently signed affordable housing law encourages towns to engage in the process and create their own housing plans that realistically zone for their fair share of affordable housing. Municipalities can choose from a range of options, from 100 percent affordable, to mixed income, to special needs or age-restricted affordable housing. They may also preserve existing affordable homes that otherwise would not be affordable or use accessory dwelling units that a property owner can place on their property.
“Towns only lose their ability to be in control of the process when they refuse to find any place to create their fair share of affordable housing. And most towns do, indeed, cooperate with the process — and get to be in the driver’s seat in deciding on the housing plan that works best for their communities,” Gordon writes in an email responding to questions from U.S. 1.
Towns in New Jersey are required by law to follow certain rules that safeguard access to affordable housing for low-income families. For example, 50 percent of all units must be available to families, 25 percent must be rentals, and only 30 percent can be age restricted. Towns must also follow strict income restrictions: at least 50 percent of homes must be affordable to low-income residents (below 50 percent of area median income) and at least 13 percent of homes must be set aside for very-low-income residents (below 30 percent of area median income). The remainder must be affordable to moderate-income residents (50 to 80 percent of area median income).
The history leading up to the new law begins in 1969, when black families — many of whom had lived for generations in Mount Laurel since Quakers had made the area a sanctuary for fugitive slaves — were being priced out of housing due to white flight and consequent gentrification. Led by former teacher Ethel Lawrence, they formed the Springville Community Action Committee and proposed a plan to build 36 affordable garden apartments for poor, mostly black families. But the town denied approval for a zoning change to accommodate the development, and then-mayor Bill Haines told the committee, “If you people can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.”
Eventually they took the town to court, and the families won. However, before the apartments could be built, it took two New Jersey Supreme Court decisions — one in 1975, which outlawed exclusionary zoning and required all New Jersey municipalities to provide their “fair share” of their region’s affordable housing, and another in 1983, which created new avenues to ensure compliance. The apartments were only completed in 2000, six years after Lawrence had died.
But even with the court decisions, the path has been rocky. Gordon observes that “ever since the Mount Laurel Doctrine has been around, a small group of wealthy towns have attempted to perpetuate racial and economic segregation by undermining it. Wealthy, predominantly white communities often engage in what I call the ‘bureaucracy of obstruction.’ They create never-ending processes, revisiting every decision, and questioning agreements that have already been made. This is a tactic to maintain the status quo and keep certain groups out.”
Gordon continues, “When residents say, ‘We don’t have space for those people in our town,’ what they are often implying is that children from Black and Latino families do not belong there. This practice effectively upholds housing segregation and keeps New Jersey among the most segregated states in the nation.”
People’s fears about what affordable housing might mean for their wealthy suburban communities — lowering the value of houses, changing the feel of neighborhoods, bringing in crime — are likely what has prompted lawsuits. But, writes Gordon, “the seminal ‘Climbing Mount Laurel’ study found that residents in neighborhoods surrounding affordable housing developments in Mount Laurel have continued to experience stable taxes, low crime rates, and high property values.”
The study also compared the applicants who did and did not receive housing in Mount Laurel, finding that those in affordable housing decreased by 67 percent their reliance on welfare and improved their mental health by 25 percent. Gordon says these findings are consistent with broader national studies have found that accessing housing in an area with lower poverty significantly increases children’s likelihood of going to college and raises their earnings as adults.
So why are so many people in this country in need of affordable housing? Gordon explains that “the cost of housing is worse than it’s ever been, and New Jersey has a shortage of over 200,000 affordable housing units for extremely low-income renters.” For each vacant apartment, there are 14 prospective renters.
The problem is in fact a national one. He writes, “The U.S. is suffering from two interconnected crises that have brought it to an inflection point: unprecedented levels of income inequality and a worsening housing crisis.”
Another aspect of our current housing crisis, he adds, “is our nation’s staggering racial wealth gap. The inability of black families to gain wealth through real estate purchases,” Gordon writes, “grows out of the exclusionary zoning practices that limit housing opportunities across most of the country’s large metropolitan areas.” Limiting housing supply through zoning also results in higher housing prices.
For years exclusionary zoning practices have replaced the explicit racial zoning laws that were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, writes Gordon. “Segregationists have utilized land use zoning to accomplish similar aims. By limiting the size and type of buildings that can be built in a particular locality, exclusionary zoning limits the ability of lower-income people and people of color to reside in certain communities. This is nothing short of racial segregation by proxy.”
In Mount Laurel, for example, according to “Climbing Mount Laurel,” township officials maintained that “the proposed development of clustered town houses for low-income minority families … would violate Mount Laurel’s zoning policies and land-use regulations, which as in many suburban communities, favored large single-family dwellings set back from the street on large lots.”
Gordon explains, “This creates a vicious cycle where these populations are forced to live in more segregated areas with limited access to quality education, healthcare, and other services. Generations of exclusionary policies have exacerbated the national housing affordability crisis by limiting the supply of housing and thereby driving up housing prices in suburban communities.”
Princeton is one example of a wealthy town that has fought its Mount Laurel obligations. “These lawsuits are nothing new — they’re a smokescreen to undermine and delay affordable housing development,” Gordon writes.
But after 30 years of building practically no affordable housing and spending taxpayer money on a 41-day trial to fight their obligations, Princeton is finally seeing a lot of affordable housing development.
“Princeton’s emerging mixed-use development in places like the Shopping Center is a great example for other towns of how they can utilize the redevelopment process to improve environmental resilience, transit infrastructure, and access for pedestrians and cyclists,” Gordon writes. He also cites positively the town’s partnership with “the great local non-profit Princeton Community Housing on both building and preserving affordable housing.”
Gordon says he has always been interested in housing. His first exposure to affordable housing resulting from Mount Laurel was in South Brunswick, where he grew up. “It made the town much more racially and economically diverse, which was a very positive experience for me growing up.”
His parents, Gil and Ellen Gordon, he writes, “provided me with a strong commitment to social justice, and caring about kids and families.” His father, who died in 2021, was a pioneer in helping companies implement work-from-home policies well before it became mainstream. He was also “involved in a staggering array of volunteer work in and around Princeton.” His mother is a retired teacher who helped kids struggling to learn how to read.
In high school Gordon was involved in fighting the Turnpike Authority’s attempts to build an extension through South Brunswick, which in fact never happened.
At Yale University, where he graduated in 2000, Gordon studied in an interdisciplinary program called Ethics, Politics, and Economics, with a focus on urban planning, and, he adds, “I actually wrote my senior thesis about the Mount Laurel Doctrine.” In college he was involved with Habitat for Humanity and biked across the country to raise money for them. He also helped support the unions at Yale when the university attempted to replace workers with contractors.
Between college and law school, Gordon worked for three years as a community organizer in Baltimore. He was also a cofounder of “Next City,” a publication (now online) about the future of cities, which he started with two college friends in 2002. He was its initial editor then board chair, stepping down in 2011.
Since his graduation from Yale Law School in 2006, Gordon has worked for the Fair Share Housing Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization that uses legal, policy, and community-building strategies to dismantle decades of racial and economic discrimination in New Jersey that excludes people from the opportunity to live in safe, healthy, and affordable housing.
Gordon’s spouse, Kari Hexem, is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, working on the intersection of dentistry and public health, and they have “two wonderful kids who are 9 and 4.”
Although New Jersey residents already have a strong framework for affordable housing, the Mount Laurel Doctrine, which, Gordon writes, “has grown into a sensible system protecting the rights of New Jerseyans to live in safe, affordable homes,” he adds that “we can’t take it for granted. The success of this framework is predicated on strong enforcement by the courts and state government.”
“Here’s the thing to remember,” he writes. “Affordable housing doesn’t just improve the lives of its residents — it improves the lives of all New Jerseyans. Families with affordable housing have better health outcomes, better educational outcomes, and ultimately better economic outcomes. Meanwhile, shortages of affordable housing hurt the state’s overall economy — teachers and nurses and all the people who keep our towns functioning need to live somewhere.”
Adam Gordon of the Fair Share Housing Center is part of a panel addressing new affordable housing rules in New Jersey on Wednesday, November 13, at the Jewish Center of Princeton.,
