Attorneys clashed over affordable housing in New Jersey during a virtual court hearing Friday, as Montvale and 25 other towns urged Mercer County Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy to pause implementation of a new law. The law requires municipalities to build or renovate 146,000 affordable units over the next decade, to meet the state’s current and growing housing needs.
“Irreparable harm” will be caused to the municipalities if the law is not put on hold “so we can get into court and discuss it,” argued Michael Collins, attorney for the towns. If towns miss the new law’s Jan. 31 deadline to adopt a housing obligations plan, they will be open to lawsuits by developers, said Collins, who noted the law exempts “urban aid” cities like Newark from having to build any new units. Collins also challenged state calculations of municipal affordable-unit requirements he said are imprecise and unfair.
New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Levi Klinger-Christiansen countered that towns can opt out of the program. “Plaintiffs are not injured — let alone, irreparably harmed — by the existence of a program that they are not required to participate in,” Klinger-Christiansen said. However, they would lose immunity from developers’ lawsuits.
“The public would undoubtedly be harmed by plaintiff’s request for an injunction, as it would necessarily delay the goal of providing a cost-efficient and cost-effective means of bringing the state’s municipalities into constitutional compliance,” Klinger-Christiansen said.
“You can’t stay the Constitution. I think, in practice at this point it would be chaos to stay the statute,” said Adam Gordon, executive director of the Fair Share Housing Center. “I think there’d be a lot of litigation that frankly would undercut the policy decisions of the Legislature and the executive, who wanted to avoid that town-by-town litigation over everything under the sun.”
Judge Lougy said he will decide by Jan. 1.
