I wrote this piece about four years ago, though it did not appear in print or online. Much has happened in the intervening years -- most recently a unanimous New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that towns had to account for the last 16 years when setting affordable housing rules -- but the basic arguments made by the folks I interviewed remain pertinent.
THE MOUNT LAUREL STORY: AN EXPERIMENT IN SOCIAL MOBILITY
Affordable housing advocates have long maintained that New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine could be an effective means of addressing the persistence of economic inequality in the state – if only municipalities would fully buy-in to the program.
A new study appears to back up their argument.
The book, Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb, looks at the impact that the Ethel Lawrence Homes have had in Mount Laurel over the complex’s first decade of existence. The findings, according to the book, could serve as a model as the state continues to debate the shape its affordable housing program should take in the future.
“(A)n affordable housing project for low and moderate income minority residents can indeed be developed within an affluent white suburb without imposing significant costs on the surrounding community or its residents,” they say in the book’s conclusion. “On the benefit side of the equation, we found that moving in too the Ethel Lawrence Homes brought about a very clear improvement in the lives of project residents and their children.”
Douglas S. Massey, the Princeton University professor who co-authored the study, said in an interview earlier this year that the experience in Mount Laurel demonstrates that affordable housing, when done properly, can have a positive impact on both the existing community and its new residents.
“It is possible to build a development with 100 percent affordable housing and fill it 100 percent with low-income residents with no negative externalities to the suburb and to provide huge benefits to the people in the project,” he said.
That is the thrust behind the original Mount Laurel doctrine, affordable housing advocates say. The doctrine, which is based on two state Supreme Court rulings in 1975 and 1983, requires municipalities in New Jersey to provide access to housing that is affordable to low- and moderate-income residents and bans towns from using their zoning powers to price people out of the local housing market.
The rulings were designed both to create new housing opportunities and to end a pattern of residential segregation in the state that was affecting the ability of African Americans to rise up the economic ladder.
Critics – including Gov. Chris Christie – have always maintained that the Mount Laurel program, which was codified by the state Fair Housing Act in 1985, robbed local governments of their decision-making capacities and has resulted in suburban sprawl. That is why Christie, during his first few months in office attempted to dismantle the Council on Affordable Housing and pass responsibilities for providing housing for low- and moderate-income residents back to local governments.
History
What has come to be known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine is the result of two state Supreme Court decisions – in 1975 and 1983 – that made illegal the notion of exclusionary zoning and out in place a set of rules designed to force suburban towns to allow for construction of housing for the poor.
As described in Climbing Mount Laurel and Our Town: Race, Housing and the Soul of Suburbia, by David L. Kirp, John P. Dwyer and Larry A. Rosenthal, the fight began in 1967 when local attempts to build affordable housing were stymied by Mount Laurel township. The former farming town was experiencing massive growth at the time, with four large residential communities being planned, which targeted white homebuyers fleeing the decaying city of Camden eight miles away. Mount Laurel’s longtime black population, primarily tenant farmers, was being pushed from the community, left to live in “deteriorating housing that spurred abandonment and condemnation by township authorities leading to displacement,” the authors of Climbing Mount Laurel write.
A group of black residents formed a non-profit, the Springville Community Action Committee, secured funding from the state and proposed a 36-unit garden apartment complex on a 32-acre parcel. The township, however, denied their application, with then-Mayor Bill Haines breaking the news in a crowded church.
“After talking about all of the changes that were fast coming to Mount Laurel,” according to Our Town, “the new prosperity that this once sleepy farm town was enjoying, he came to the punch line. ‘If you people’ – you poor and black people, that is – ‘can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.’ (Italics in original)”
The Southern Burlington County NAACP sued two years later, saying the township’s “exclusionary zoning” violated the state’s constitution and amounted to a policy of racial and economic segregation. The state Supreme Court agreed, as recounted by a summary at the New Jersey Digital Legal Library, ruling that “low and moderate income families were unlawfully excluded from the municipality.” The court found that “zoning ordinances which make it physically and economically impossible to provide low and moderate income housing were unconstitutional” and that towns had a responsibility to provide housing opportunities.
The initial guidelines, however, were unclear and few towns followed them. The 1983 Mount Laurel II ruling – a single ruling on six separate lawsuits – “put teeth in the original doctrine by creating a fair share formula to measure each municipality's obligation to provide affordable housing, and by fashioning a ‘builder's remedy’ to force municipalities to fulfill that obligation,” the Legal Library summary said. The formula and guidelines were codified by the Fair Housing Act in 1985, which created the Council on Affordable Housing, the agency tasked with administering affordable housing requirements.
COAH issued its first fair-share obligation – the number of units each community is responsible for providing – in 1987 and updated it in 1993. A third-round number was expected in 1999, but was delayed five years. COAH’s new “growth share” approach, issued in 2004, asked municipalities to calculate their own obligation based on a formula that included the amount of existing and expected commercial and residential development. Housing advocates challenged the approach and the court initially ruled that growth-share underestimated housing need. Updated guidelines were released, resulting in litigation by housing advocates and municipalities.
Two other cases also have been filed, one over Christie’s 2010 executive order disbanding COAH, which has been overturned by a lower court, and another over the governor’s seizure of local housing trust funds. The trust funds were created by a 2008 law revising the Fair Housing Act, which also abolished “regional contribution agreements” (which allowed towns to pay other towns to take up to half of their obligation). The law required that trust funds be spent within four years or the state could claim the money.
Much of the money has not been spent and Gov. Chris Christie attempted to seize the cash last year. An appellate panel issued an injunction against the action last year and again in April.
Overall, about 65,000 unites of affordable housing have been built since the 1983 ruling, but advocates say that another 110,000 units are required to meet current needs.
Ethel Lawrence Homes Get Built
The first phase of the Ethel Lawrence Homes opened in November 2000. The first tenants, according to Climbing Mount Laurel, mostly “were single mothers who worked in medical offices, real-estate and insurance firms, and other small businesses.”
“By 2010,” the authors write, “the Ethel Lawrence Homes had become an established feature of life in the Mount Laurel community and the controversy (over its construction) had died down, though it never disappeared entirely and resurged from time to time in response to periodic threats to local order that usually had little to do with the project itself.”
Massey said he and his fellow authors undertook their research to provide a systematic way of looking at the impact that the Ethel Lawrence Homes has had on Mount Laurel and on the residents who have moved into the new apartments.
“It was designed as a proof of a concept,” he said. “Is it possible to build a 100 percent affordable housing complex and fill it with 100 percent low-income people with no negative externalities to the suburb and provide huge benefits to people in the project?”
The answer, he said, is yes.
“This is showing one way to promote racial and class integration, which especially in New Jersey could have a lot of traction,” he said.
The Climbing Mount Laurel study “show(s) that an affordable, predominantly minority housing project can be developed within an affluent white suburb to further the goals of racial and class integration without negatively affecting property values, crime rates, or tax burdens in the surrounding community.” Just as importantly, it says, residents of the Ethel Lawrence Homes saw an improvement in their circumstances.
“(L)iving in Mount Laurel enabled project residents to lower their exposure to neighborhood disorder and violence and to experience fewer negative life events,” they write. “In their new neighborhood, project residents evinced better mental health and achieved higher rates of employment, more abundant earnings, and greater economic independence that they would otherwise have achieved. It also gave residents more time and energy to devote to the education of their children, and enabled their children to attend much higher quality and safer schools while earning grades that were as good or better than what they would have earned in their old schools.”
The results, they write, show that projects like the Ethel Lawrence Homes can serve “as a model for promoting greater integration and a pathway out of poverty for disadvantaged minority families throughout the United States.”
The researchers looked at a variety of statistics – including current and historical crime rates, property values, taxes and school achievement – and conducted interviews with Mount Laurel residents and most of the families who have lived in the Ethel Lawrence Homes.
The researchers found that crime rates in Mount Laurel differed very little after the opening of the Lawrence Homes and were consistent with those of neighboring towns in Burlington and Camden counties. This, the researchers say, contradicts the expectations that some in the community had about the construction of a low-income housing project. The same trend was found when comparing property values and tax rates, where the researchers found “no statistical evidence of a discontinuity” in either housing prices or taxes.
The authors attribute these findings to “specific design features of the project’s architecture, the managerial policies of ELH staff, and the social practices of ELH residents.” These included stringent applicant screening that makes them “less likely than poor people in general to have the proclivity, knowledge, and ability to engage in criminal or delinquent activities, the researchers said. Management policies are equally tough, they write, characterized by residents as “intrusive but ultimately positive for the complex and its inhabitants.” This is buttressed by an active community watch program, regular community meetings, interaction with police and active participation from residents.
“All these factors help to account for the lack of significant effects on the surrounding community,” the study says, “and appear to produce emergent values among project residents that are congruent with those expressed by people in surrounding suburban neighborhoods.”
Residents of Ethel Lawrence Homes, on the other hand, reported improved personal circumstances, according to the study. While many had witnessed violence before moving to Mount Laurel, their exposure to violence since relocating is relatively small and they view the complex as a safe place. The move “significantly improved the residential environment experienced by project residents, dramatically reducing their exposure to social disorder and violence within neighborhoods and consequently reducing the number of negative life events they experience.”
There has been a loss of social support as residents of the Lawrence Homes leave behind family, a sense of isolation caused by the project’s location and some concern about living in an overwhelmingly white community, the study says. But “the balance of pros and cons was decidedly positive for all residents and they were more than willing to put up with uncomfortable racial and class undercurrents in return for access to a high quality home in a safe and secure neighborhood that, despite its pastoral location, nonetheless provided access to resources for their daily needs and enabled social interactions with friends and relatives.”
The result, the authors say, is improvement in social mobility, thanks to improvements in mental health, economic stability and educational attainment.
“(M)oving into the Ethel Lawrence Homes not only enabled project residents to improve their neighborhood circumstances, but to reorient their lives toward greater mental health and more economic independence than would otherwise have been possible,” the authors write.
These changes, in turn, allowed parents to be more “educationally supportive,” meaning they could spend more time helping their children with their homework, while the new housing offered access to quiet places to study and better schools.
“Moving into ELH allowed the children of residents to attend better, less violent schools and to find quiet places to study, which in turn led to improved grades,” they wrote. “Although attending more competitive schools did negatively affect resident children’s GPA’s, this direct effect was counterbalanced by the foregoing indirect effects so that, overall, their grades did not suffer. The children received better educations while earning the same grades as before, putting them in a better position to attend college given the superior reputation of Mount Laurel’s schools compared with those in Camden and other low income communities around the state.”
Lessons for the State
Affordable housing can have positive outcomes, Massey said, and not just for low- and moderate-income residents. But it has to be done properly.
“It is not a panacea for all of the social problems that all the people suffer from,” he said. In Ethel Lawrence, you have “motivated working class people and poor people who want to improve their lot in life. There are a lot of people in the category of being trapped in lousy neighborhoods who want to get out but don’t have knowledge of how to get out.”
These are the people, Massey said, that the Climbing Mount Laurel study was meant to address, and it is why New Jersey must remain committed to providing affordable housing. Unfortunately, the goals of the Mount Laurel suits remain largely unmet, he said. It has been 30 years since the court’s second Mount Laurel ruling, and the state remains fairly segregated.
“Nationally, it is one of the more segregated places, both in terms of race and class,” he said. “Take the short drive from Trenton to Princeton and you can see the difference, or between Newark and South Orange or Paterson and Franklin Lakes.”
Paul Jargowsky, director of the Center for Urban Research and Urban Education at Rutgers University-Camden, said New Jersey’s persistent segregation means that a small number of communities end up bearing the burden of poverty and its associated costs, such as crime and failing schools.
“It becomes a vicious circle that produces more overall costs and imposes costs on limited numbers of communities,” he said. “It produces a downward spiral. Camden is the end of the spiral with 40 percent poverty.”
The Mount Laurel decisions -- and the general concept behind providing a fair share of affordable housing – are about sharing the costs, advocates say.
Kevin Walsh, director of the Fair Share Housing Center in Cherry Hill, said the state’s reliance on local property taxes causes municipalities to do what they can to avoid building housing because housing means school children and school children are viewed as costing more money than the houses they live in generate in taxes.
“So much of New Jersey is about the ratables chase,” he said. “The only thing that is worse that a school child is a lower income school child.
“So much of land-use decisions are based on fiscal decisions, which are supposed to be prohibited, but it is so common place that developments are approved and not approved for those reasons.”
The Mount Laurel decisions, he said, accept the economic arguments, but recast them as a question of economic segregation. They acknowledge that towns will view planning decisions through an economic prism, but also establish that towns “can’t use the powers of the state to segregate people from the standpoint of income.”
Requiring municipalities with the greatest growth, both residentially and commercially, required to provide the most affordable housing helps balance these incentives.
“Jobs centers like a Cherry Hill or Bridgewater, places with a lot of jobs have bigger obligations,” Walsh said. “The ratable chase in New Jersey is fundamentally about getting zoning in place that gets jobs – malls, warehouses, office parks – and reducing, wherever possible, the number of school children.”
Tim Evans, director of research at NJ Future, a planning group, said towns practice exclusionary zoning because “they don’t want land uses that generate costs,” with schools being the biggest one. Warehouses, on the other hand, generate property tax revenue and are “great fiscal assets,” but they can be built in only a small number of locations. That gives those towns a fiscal advantage that the Mount Laurel decisions were designed to address.
“Why should the few towns where it makes sense for the warehousing industry to locate, why do they get to win?” he asked. “These places have an advantage. (The Mount Laurel decision) says ‘let’s make sure that everyone has an opportunity to benefit.”
Evans said that also is what drives the decision to only build housing on larger lots and to focus on housing for seniors.
“To me, it comes back to the incentive system that encourages this, the taxation system that makes municipalities want to discourage residential development,” he said.
Jargowsky agrees that system pits town against town as elected officials “try to maximize its own good for its own citizens.”
“We are working in a system where it pays to exclude low-income people because it expands the tax base and has fewer social needs,” he said. “All of these suburban communities are battling to be in that place.”
Critics, however, see the Mount Laurel as intruding on the prerogatives of local governments. Gov. Christie, for instance, issued a plan in May 2010 that would have removed the state from the affordable housing process. His plan, unveiled at a Trenton press conference, called for a 10 percent affordable housing set aside in developments with more than 10 units and payment into a municipal trust fund for smaller projects. His plan failed to win legislative support.
"Affordable housing is a responsibility that must be naturally considered as part of normal development and local decision making,” he said, according to a press release. “With strictly limited state involvement in the process, we are finally allowing for flexibility and customization that acknowledges our state's unique economic, community and housing needs."
The governor’s plan was modeled, partly, on a report from his own Housing Opportunity Task Force, which in March 2010 recommended changes to the state’s affordable housing rules, many of which were contained in the governor’s plan.
The report was supported by the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, which has long been critical of COAH and the rules set by the Fair Housing Act, though League officials say they are committed to proving affordable housing as the court has required. The issue, according Michael Cerra, senior legislative analyst for the League, is that “implementation of the law has been problematic.” In particular, he said mechanisms like the builders’ remedy, which granted builders who successfully challenged local zoning as exclusionary density increases if up to 20 percent of their proposed development was set aside as affordable housing.
“The focus is supposed to be on providing housing for low- and moderate-income families, however, many of the compliance tools provided to municipalities have relied on market-rate housing as much as affordable housing,” Cerra said earlier this year.
Cerra said the League endorses some of the more recent efforts, such as the development fee and trust fund, which could be used to purchase and deed-restrict existing housing, rehabilitate houses in exchange for deed restricting them or build new projects in 100 percent of the units are affordable. It has joined with the Fair Share Housing Center in challenging the governor’s attempted seizure of local trust-fund money.
“There has been an imbalance in policy toward the program as it was created, which has focused more on market-rate units,” Cerra said. “If a more balanced approach focused on options, there would have been a more balanced approach state wide.”
Walsh, however, remains critical of any effort to eliminate the state mandate or undercut the rules set out by the Mount Laurel decisions.
“What Mount Laurel recognizes is that when municipalities are given the choice, they will not put housing for lower-income folks at the top of their agenda,” he said.
That is where the fair-share notion comes in, Jargowsky said.
“What if every community had to provide its share by building that affordable housing? What if lower-income kids could go to better schools?” he asked. “Maybe, in the long run, those kids would have greater economic mobility. That is the idea of having this fair share of affordable housing in every community.”
Massey agrees.
“Segregation has been a major barrier for social mobility for a very long time, “ Massey said. The Mount Laurel doctrine “is a way to give social mobility and to integrate society.”
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.