N.J. Assembly committee advances bill abolishing Council on Affordable Housing

[Dan Mulligan]

TRENTON — A controversial bill that would abolish the Council on Affordable Housing advanced through an Assembly committee today, though its prospects of becoming law became bleak after Gov. Chris Christie pledged to veto it last week.
The bill requires that towns make 10 percent of new development affordable — with some notable exceptions — instead of relying on a system Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Lori Grifa described as “rigid, arcane and virtually unintelligible.”

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[Guest]

This article shows the particularly bad spot Cranbury is in. We have finally gotten to the point where everyone wants to get rid of COAH. That is positive. However, we are back to the original problem posed by the Mt Laurel ruling. Who will pay for it. They state has always ducked any responsibility to pay for affordable housing. This leaves only two places to find any money, developers and municipalities.

While I agree with Christie that a surcharge on developers would curtail development, the alternative is higher municipal taxes. I would argue the governor should take a drive through Millstone, Freehold and Marlboro and look at the overbuilt unsold McMansions. In New Jersey we had the opposite problem developers overbuilt. We don't need to build more, we need the developers to sell the inventory they have already built.

One significant part of our incredibly high municipal tax rates in the state, is large scale development overwhelming what had been primarily rural infrastructure and school systems. If developers paid the true economic costs of there development(Upgraded roads, sewer systems and the like) we would not have had the massive overdevelopment we have seen in the last 10 years.

At any rate, the reasoning behind Christie's veto is not good for local tax rates.