Republican Jack Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill are competing in November to succeed Gov. Phil Murphy. (Photos by Dana DiFilippo and Amanda Brown)
The front-runners to become New Jersey’s next governor are sharply divided on how the Garden State should boost construction of affordable housing
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) supports the state’s existing system for affordable housing production but wants the state and its municipalities to move faster to stand up housing, and she has pledged to boost assistance for first-time homebuyers.
Former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R) wants broader changes, including a rewrite of a state constitutional doctrine that demands every municipality create realistic opportunities for the creation of affordable housing. Ciattarelli also wants to largely contain such units in New Jersey’s urban centers and developed suburbs.
This comes as the state needs more than 200,000 affordable housing units for its poorest renters, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“The main difference in the candidates’ housing agendas boils down to Jack Ciattarelli’s opposition to the state’s affordable housing law, while Mikie Sherrill wants to make it work,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. “Both candidates want to focus new housing units around mass transit, but Ciattarelli goes a step further with his goal to push affordable housing into our cities.”
New Jersey municipalities have a constitutional duty to zone in a way that creates realistic opportunities for the creation of low- and moderate-income housing. That duty stems from a series of court cases dating back a half-century that found some New Jersey municipalities had zoned to exclude housing for low-income residents.
The Mount Laurel doctrine, named after the municipality at the center of the state’s seminal exclusionary zoning case, has remained a target of some local officials and Republicans who charge successive courts have erred in their decisions and worry over the impact of mandated development in communities that do not want it, regardless of need.
Affordable housing production under the state’s previous 10-year rounds of production regularly stumbled before gaining some footing under a court-run system, and lawmakers last year codified a version of that system that sought to maintain the framework established by the courts.
Under the new law, virtually every New Jersey municipality is responsible for creating affordable housing, and the current 10-year round calls for towns and cities to create tens of thousands of new units over the next decade.
Ciattarelli and Sherrill, who are seeking on Nov. 4 to succeed term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy, differ on how and where that housing should be built.
Ciattarelli disfavors the approach under existing state law, preferring a system that limits development mandates and allows towns to pay other municipalities to take on their affordable housing duties through regional contribution agreements barred under current law. He touted his plans recently at an appearance in Cranbury, a Middlesex County town that was the center of a recently settled court fight over where to place affordable housing.
“Everyone should have a skin in the game for making housing affordable, but that doesn’t mean we should be putting it in communities such as this,” Ciattarelli said.
Towns that trade away their affordable housing obligations could still contribute to housing production by paying into the state’s affordable housing trust fund, he said.
The Republican argued affordable housing development should be concentrated in urban centers and developed suburbs that can bear the strain new residents impose on sewer systems and roadways, and that have economies strong enough to support them or need residents to support their economies.
“100 years ago, the population of Atlantic City was 55,000. Today it’s 35,000,” he said. “What would 20,000 more people mean for the local economy, the mom-and-pop shops?”
Sherrill’s proposals would keep the state’s existing affordable housing framework intact. Her campaign said she would seek to speed state permitting for housing projects and extend additional state support to reduce permitting delays at the local level.
She has pledged to bolster New Jersey’s aid programs for first-time and first-generation homebuyers. Down payment assistance programs combined with awards for first-generation homebuyers can provide residents with between $22,000 and $17,000.
“Mikie is committed to cutting through red tape and business-as-usual policies to reduce housing costs for families while protecting New Jersey’s open spaces,” said Sherrill campaign spokeswoman Sam Chan.
The Democrat has pledged to end diversions from the state’s affordable housing trust fund, which was drained to near empty this year after the state budget allocated more than $130 million in trust fund dollars to programs not directly related to affordable housing production. The Department of Community Affairs later moved to restore some trust fund dollars.
Stricter enforcement against collusion among landlords would also be a priority of Sherrill’s administration if she’s elected. The state in April sued 10 of New Jersey’s largest landlords and the property management software company RealPage, alleging they used RealPage’s pricing algorithm to inflate and align rents to skirt market competition.
Sherrill has also called for financing to help municipalities turn commercial buildings increasingly disused following rises in remote work following the pandemic into housing.
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