Hope and Housing
The NY Times Editorial September 17, 2006

Housing is one of those emotional terms, like terrorism and global warming that bring out a weird sort of anxious fatalism in places like New Jersey. Everyone knows that affordable housing is scarcer than ever; that entire counties have become practically off limits to young people, the elderly and the working class. The usual choices are passive acceptance or abject surrender: turning over half of one’s gross income to the mortgage or moving to the Dakotas.

But not everyone. A report in July by two nonprofit groups, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and the Regional Plan Association, offers a big-picture dissection of the housing crisis that can leave a reader feeling not overwhelmed, but hopeful. While acknowledging that the housing squeeze poses a serious threat to the region’s economy and quality of life, the report, “Balanced Housing for a Smart Region” (available at chpcny.org or rpa.org), is bursting with strategies and tactics for attacking the problem from multiple angles. It is also informed by sound principles, among them these:

Sprawl is not an option. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will need to create housing for an estimated three million to four million people in the next 25 years; New Jersey alone will need to accommodate an estimated one million newcomers.

But where to put them? Some parts of the region — Hunterdon, Sussex and Warren Counties in New Jersey, for instance — still have room left for traditional single-family homes on suburban-style lots. But the region’s commutes are already the longest in the country, and there is a limit to how far people can drive and how much bulldozing of open space they will tolerate. The age of build out seems nearly at hand.

The good news is that the region, not least New Jersey, is rich in poor cities, empty industrial sites, desolate shopping malls and other underused properties. The trick is to see them not as blight but as opportunities for redevelopment and repopulation.

‘High density’ is not a dirty word. And neither is ‘‘affordable housing.’’ Proposals for affordable multifamily housing often run afoul of the not-unreasonable fear that newcomers with children burden the schools and end up costing a community more than they pay in taxes.

The report concedes that, but argues that not every household has children, and that elderly people, divorced singles and young couples who make up a significant part of the housing market can generate large tax surpluses in a community. A proper mix of new housing, in other words, can help, not hurt, a community’s fiscal bottom line.

Smart is better than dumb. Properly conceived and executed, the philosophy of “smart growth” involves walkable communities, ready access to mass transit, and architecture that is dense and compact but attractively built.

 

New Jersey seems to be getting the message. High-density projects have been built or are underway adjacent to train stations in places like South Orange, Union Township and Cranford. This is a hopeful sign. If the region is ever going to break its addiction to the car and end the curse of low-density sprawl, communities arranged on smart-growth principles will lead the way.

Big government is not the problem. Little government is. Hundreds of local municipalities make decisions about land use, and their individual acts of resistance to housing solutions have left the whole region worse off. State and county governments cannot rely on the bully pulpit alone; they need broad strategies for planning and managing growth. The report describes New Jersey’s plan as one of the nation’s most comprehensive. The rest of the tristate region scores lower: Connecticut’s plan is purely advisory, and New York’s is nonexistent.

But despite growing sensitivity to the problem among state legislators, New Jersey still suffers from what the report calls the biggest barrier to creation of new multifamily and affordable housing — the destructive link between school financing and property taxes. Michigan replaced local property taxes with a grab bag of other revenue sources, including a statewide property tax and excise and real-estate transfer taxes, thereby eliminating one local rationale for opposing affordable housing.

State governments can take other steps to encourage affordable housing. New Jersey has already tried one tactic the report finds promising: inclusionary zoning requiring that a certain percentage of new housing be affordable, which was mandated by the Mount Laurel court rulings of the 70’s and 80’s. The results have been positive, but clouded by legal battles, leading the report’s authors to conclude that governments should not wait upon “distant and unpredictable court decisions.”

We’re all in this together. The report concludes by stressing that the region’s far-flung suburbs are all extremities of one social and economic organism. It’s an integrated body, and solutions in one area will help communities elsewhere. The region is large, sprawling and full of competing interests and rivalries, but affordable housing is the quandary that unites us all.