PlanSmart NJ’s Testimony on Regional Contribution Agreements
A-500
June 5, 2008
Thank you. My name is Dianne Brake. I am a founding member of the NJ Regional Coalition and I am one of many who are here representing the Coalition today.
Before I proceed, I must offer my sincere congratulations to the Speaker and the other sponsors of this bill for your tenacity in the face of powerful opposition to your efforts to abolish the abhorrent practice of Regional Contribution Agreements (RCAs).
In spite of what you have been up against, I know it was easy for you – as it is for us – to stand firm. It was easy because it is so clear that to allow wealthy communities, which have accepted thousands of new jobs, to pay a poor community to handle their housing obligation, is simply wrong. And that is what RCAs do. In spite of the fact that receiving communities have made good use of the money, the source of the money is wrong. It is wrong from a moral standpoint, it is wrong from a Constitutional standpoint, and it is wrong from a planning standpoint.
We of the New Jersey Coalition helped you get this far. Our coalition of faith-based and other community groups have helped you to take this argument out of politics-as-usual because we stand for doing the right thing for its own sake. And we are going to stick with you until we get that ball over the goal post!
I have been asked by the Coalition to comment specifically on the validity of two points that have been raised against abolishing the abhorrent practice of RCAs:
1. The first is the myth that affordable housing projects in the suburbs are responsible for sprawl.
2. The second is the myth that directing affordable housing away from the suburbs and into urban areas is smart growth.
My qualifications include being in my job for 23 years, at PlanSmart NJ, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. For all these years we have been promoting sound land use and regional planning. I have sat on the Council of Affordable Housing and I have sat on the State Planning Commission. I know what sprawl is and why it is harmful to New Jersey and I know what smart growth is supposed to be and why we need it.
Let me start with a little recent history of development patterns in New Jersey:
The 1975 Mt. Laurel decision stated that municipalities that use the police power of zoning cannot use it to exclude poor people – it must be used to promote the general welfare.
After several years, so little affordable housing was being built that advocates brought a second suit, resulting in the 1983 Mt Laurel II decision. Then the 1985 Fair Housing Act and the 1986 State Planning Act were put into place because sprawl was already acknowledged as a dysfunctional land use pattern that needed to be addressed.
About 80% of all the office development that has ever taken place in New Jersey took place between 1980 and 1990. This boom transformed the state. In that decade, we became the fifth largest office market in the country. And, with few exceptions, office growth took place almost entirely in the suburbs.
It is this office development boom that could be seen as responsible for sprawl, at least in recent years, not housing policy. And locating commercial development where it has never been before creates pressure for housing where it has never been before in great numbers. This can be seen as the great wheel of sprawl – the jobs, the housing, congestion, demand driving the price up, housing moving out, jobs following, etc. etc.
If affordable housing were to blame for sprawl we would have a lot more of it. If you were to view the amount of affordable housing that has been built since 1975, you would see what a tiny portion it is of all the development that has taken place in the suburbs – 5.7% of all housing. The 2000 census told us that only 27 towns had more than 10% affordable housing – less than 5% of all 566 towns – that is more like the concentration of poverty, not the distribution of sprawl.
Saying that affordable housing in the suburbs creates sprawl is like saying that the flea creates the dog. It would be far more appropriate to consider the culprit to be local zoning that could have been amended to create compact hamlets and villages that incorporate affordable housing as has been clearly mandated since 1975 as their constitutional responsibility.
Looking further back, this pattern of development that we call sprawl was created by decades and decades of national, state, county and local policies and programs, including the pattern that is dictated by local zoning. This is what creates sprawl. Efforts to get affordable housing close to jobs and in safe neighborhoods and good schools, is not.
Now the topic of smart growth. Since the State Planning Act was signed in 1986, New Jersey’s efforts to rationalize the existing pattern of development have evolved into what we now call smart growth programs.
Smart growth is not simply about location, it is about performance. We want growth to perform, to improve conditions on the ground. Growth, if it is to be considered “smart,” is expected to promote economic prosperity, redress inequities, restore and protect environmental quality and, by rationalizing problems with existing land use patterns, promote a better quality of life for all.
New Jersey is a state full of disparities, crying out for repair. We are one of the wealthiest states in the nation. But we are also the fifth most segregated state, with one of the most segregated school systems and some poorest cities in the country.
I know that abolishing RCAs is just one step in addressing the persistent problems of sprawl and correcting the enormous disparities among communities in New Jersey.
Many more steps must be taken: we must change laws, plans, regulations, and infrastructure investments that have, over the years, encouraged these problems.
I know that even taking this step is hard. But abolishing RCAs today signals a comprehensive change in direction, away from backsliding, and toward putting New Jersey back on the path of progress and national leadership on housing and planning issues.
Smart growth is planning for the jobs and housing that we need, and arranging those new jobs and new houses on the landscape in such a way that the new land use pattern will improve three conditions:
1. Increase public transportation and reduce auto-dependence;
2. Improve the protection of water and critical habitat ; and
3. Improve the levels of racial and economic integration in communities across the state.
That is why Regional Contribution Agreements are wrong and are going to be abolished when you approve this legislation.
This inequity requires that NJ take a multi-pronged approach to realize the promise of smart growth over the course of the next twenty years or more. Such an approach would require us to:
1) Grow more jobs and market rate housing in urban areas and downtowns;
2) Provide money for rehabilitating housing and improving conditions in urban areas and downtowns;
3) Ensure that growth in suburban and rural areas includes meeting their fair share of the region’s affordable housing;
4) Promote land use and transportation planning that improves the functionality of the public transportation system, creating a well-connected system of major arteries to minor capillaries in order to rationalize the existing land use pattern, and;
5) Reform the tax structure to ensure that it encourages, rather than obstructs, urban revitalization and the construction of needed housing in general and affordable housing in particular.
All of these initiatives are much larger than what is on the table today. But abolishing RCAs now could be a small first step toward these reforms and a giant step toward regional equity.
1. The glossary of the adopted State Development and Redevelopment Plan, defines sprawl as “a pattern of development characterized by inefficient access between land uses and to public facilities or services and a lack of functional open space. Sprawl is typically an automobile-dependent, single-use, resource-consuming, discontinuous, low-density development pattern.” Building affordable housing in the suburbs need not be in this dysfunctional pattern.