SOUTH BRUNSWICK — A Superior Court judge has rejected the arguments of a group of municipalities seeking to evade their constitutional obligation to provide housing opportunities to tens of thousands of working families who formed over a 16-year period when the state’s fair housing laws were not being enforced.
Issued on Oct. 5, the ruling by Judge Douglas K. Wolfson in South Brunswick’s fair housing case comes after the New Jersey Supreme Court stayed an Appellate Division ruling on the so-called gap period last month, pending a review by the high court in November, according to a statement prepared by the Fair Share Housing Center. This stay is allowing fair housing cases to continue in the lower courts.
In a 54-page decision, Wolfson rejected the conclusions of a study produced by Philadelphia-based Econsult Solutions Inc. on behalf of a group of towns opposing fair housing opportunities for New Jersey residents. He found that Econsult departed multiple times from the state’s fair housing laws, including regulations established by the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH), in an attempt to artificially lower municipal obligations, according to the statement.
“As part of a calculated effort to reduce statewide and municipal affordable housing needs, Dr. Angelides impermissibly deviated from established COAH practices in his assessment of affordable housing need generated during the gap period,” Wolfson wrote in his decision.
By contrast, Wolfson ruled that the housing study published by the Fair Share Housing Center was credible, “grounded in reliable data and consistent with COAH’s prior round methodology,” according to the statement.
As a result, Wolfson entirely accepted Fair Share’s gap period methodology and affirmed Fair Share’s housing study, which found a statewide need of more than 200,000 units to meet the pent-up demand for housing among New Jersey families.
“This decision demonstrates that towns can’t use gimmicks to exclude tens of thousands of working families, seniors and people with disabilities from safe neighborhoods and access to good schools and employment,” said Fair Share Housing Center Executive Director Kevin Walsh. “These families have waited 16 years for New Jersey’s housing laws to provide them the opportunities promised by our Constitution. It’s time to reject these extreme arguments so that we can get to work building homes for New Jersey families.”
Wolfson said that Econsult relied on outdated and unreliable data that deviated significantly from federal and state standards and that its approach was “contrary to the core principles of the Mount Laurel doctrine,” according to the statement.
While noting the Supreme Court’s stay, Wolfson also rejected municipalities’ arguments that the Appellate Division’s gap period decision permitted them to ignore the fair housing need that accumulated during the 16-year gap period beginning in 1999 — a period that included the Great Recession, superstorm Sandy, a wave of casino foreclosures and an ongoing foreclosure crisis.
Wolfson noted that decades of New Jersey law — as well as COAH’s approach to prior gap periods — rejected these municipalities’ approaches.
“The affordable housing need that accrued during the 16-year gap period must be included as a component part of South Brunswick’s fair share obligation,” Wolfson said. “This conclusion is consistent with both COAH’s prior treatment of the unmet need that arose during the 1993 and 1995 mini-gap period and the Supreme Court’s admonition that prior (pre-2015) round obligations were ‘preserved’ and were not to be ‘ignored or eradicated,’ but rather should be used as the ‘starting point’ in calculating a municipality’s fair share responsibility.”
