KOZMA: New Brunswick redevelopment plans cannot exclude affordable housing

Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke about the "two Americas" — one "overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity" and the other with millions of people "perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Today, you could say that there are "two New Brunswicks." There is a stark contrast between the neighborhoods which have benefited from decades of redevelopment and those which have largely been left out.

Redevelopment is a wonderful tool when everyone benefits, but inequality in the 21st century has only gotten worse.

More than half of New Brunswick households make less than $50,000 a year, resulting in one of the lowest median incomes in the entire state, and approximately a third are making less than $25,000 a year, which is barely enough to survive.

The federal government measures housing as "affordable" if it costs a household no more than 30 percent of its income. By that measure, a median renter here could afford rent at approximately $1,100, while someone in the bottom third could afford a maximum of $625.

Instead, the actual median rent is $1,470. 

And, like poverty and homelessness, it keeps climbing.

There are so few truly affordable units in the city that the average resident applying for assistance must wait years to move into subsidized housing. If you unexpectedly lose your job or suffer a sudden income shock, you are basically out of luck.

It is not groundbreaking to say New Brunswick is expensive. Still, why are there so few affordable units despite the overall construction boom? 

In New Jersey, all municipalities have a constitutional obligation to ensure affordable housing, according to the state Supreme Court's Mount Laurel decision in 1975.

For most towns, especially wealthy suburbs with exclusionary zoning to keep out low-income residents, this involves an obligation to build a court-determined number of new affordable units. Since the 1980s, suburbs subject to these requirements have built at least 60,000 affordable homes.

But since New Brunswick is a poorer city with more low-quality housing or an Urban Aid Municipality in legalese, it is exempt from the obligation to construct new units of affordable housing. Its only obligation is to rehabilitate the existing low-income units, of which there are simply too few to accommodate New Brunswick's growing population.

In much of the state, the problem is simply that people have gone BANANAs — they want to "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone." Even trying to build a little duplex provokes hours of angry comments at the town's next public meeting.

New Brunswick thankfully does not have that problem, but we still must question who benefits from new development. The overwhelming majority of new housing built in the 21st century has been luxury apartments geared toward students and white-collar professionals.

The first steps toward redevelopment occurred in the 1970s after deindustrialization and suburbanization had hollowed out much of the city's economic base. And in that context, redevelopment has succeeded at making New Brunswick a more attractive place to visit, to live, to study and to work.

Luxury development is not a bad thing, but it cannot be the only thing, either.

The most recent Census data show approximately 2,000 units in the city with rent under $1,000 a month. That is the closest approximation possible to New Brunswick's median affordable rent since the Census only measures in increments of $500.

So, many families earning less than $44,400 who cannot afford $2,000 or $3,000 for a studio apartment at the Vue end up competing for very limited space.

It does not take a math genius to realize most of them will get screwed over, which is why two-thirds of renters end up paying more than 30 percent of their income.

No municipality should be able to escape their constitutional obligation to provide abundant and affordable housing for all. The exemption for Urban Aid Municipalities needs to go.

But even without state policy changes, New Brunswick should find ways to build more affordable housing.

For example, many cities across the country have inclusionary zoning (IZ) ordinances. These simply require developers to set aside a small percentage — usually between 10 and 20 percent — of the units they build to be affordable to low-income locals.

IZ can be a double-edged sword, because it may deter new construction altogether if developers find the restrictions too unprofitable. But a flexible ordinance with incentives for developers, such as allowing higher and denser construction than the zoning code would otherwise allow, can produce lots of good affordable homes without reducing market-rate development.

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a college town like New Brunswick with a similar population, an IZ ordinance produced 154 units in just two years. That may sound unimpressive, but in New Brunswick, that alone would increase the affordable housing stock by 15 percent!

We do not need to choose between growth and justice. When done right, redevelopment serves both ends.

Thomas Kozma is a Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy junior majoring in planning and public policy. His column, “With Liberty and Justice for All,” runs on alternate Tuesdays.

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